Monday Mutterings: About a Site
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-12-15

It's time for the Monday Mutterings again! Let me kick this one off by explaining how this weekly editorial piece actually came into existence. I had never written editorial pieces like these before, but when Ekim went off to the Phillipines for a couple of weeks, I thought I'd try and fill in his Friday editorial. The week after that, Dialogue took over, and turned out we both kind of liked to talk about stuff. From the top of my head in my case, and about game mechanics for Dialogue. Meanwhile, I also wanted a place to be able to talk about the industry and MMORPGDot in general, just somewhere to keep our readers updated on what we're doing and somewhere to blow off some steam.

Mission acquired!

It's been a bit quiet lately here on MMORPGDot. In the last couple of weeks we had a couple of great features. Overall, I was really happy with some of them. Things have slowed down a bit lately because of the Holidays and the end of the year, but I've got confidence that this will change again soon. In any case, I sometimes start wondering about the purpose of a site like ours. What additional value do we have to make sure that we're not just wasting our free-time on keeping this site updated? There are tons and tons of mmorpg-sites out there, why is it that we think we can compete with them; even though some have million-dollar companies backing them? I think there are a few good reasons, or we wouldn't be working our butts off for this site. One of those is the simple lack of unbiased sites covering mmorpg's. By biased sites I mean sites that are being run and managed by fans... yes, fansites. The Vault, Stratics and Warcry sites are great examples of those.

Usually they offer lots of content, and once the particular game they're covering is released they are a primary resource site for its players. But would you go to a fansite to read a review of a game? I also tend not to trust a paper magazine that appointed an editor to reviewing a mmorpg, as usually he's totally unfamiliar with the genre and only managed to spend a couple of hours in-game before the feared deadline caught up with him. I think that is one of the strong points of a site like MMORPGDot: while we're not running a fansite here all of our editors are experienced with and dedicated to the genre they're writing about. Apart from that, having one broad site covering everything mmorpg-related should also give us the advantage of providing a better overview of what exists in the genre and what is happening. And finally, there's the fact that network sites generally overlook smaller mmorpg-effort because the audience would probably be too small to set up a complete hosted fansite of the game.

Discussion & Feedback

Honestly, I do think we have some valid reasons for trying to keep this website up and running. Some reasons why we keep working on this, constantly contacting people, seeing if we can get some interesting information and goodies to show our readers. Sometimes it gets frustrating of course... it turned out quickly that some content is beyond our reach - actually beyond everyone's reach who doesn't have a shiny network name and million-dollar company backing him up - and that sometimes things don't turn out to be the way you expected. In the entertainment and online business more than in any other, it remains hard to predict what customers think and want. For developers of course, but also for us. Will our readers even be interested in reading a long article like this; whill they appreciate our efforts? Sometimes you also get the idea that the community of online gaming websites is so focused on itself that it rarely thinks of its readers anymore. When a new project is announced, you see interviews everywhere... take for instance the recent opening of Bill Roper's Flagship Studios. Everywhere interviews with people asking the same questions. Is there anyone out there who reads all that? We linked to all of those interviews in our MMORPGDot news section... would it really be necessary to add yet another Q&A to the already impressive list? On the other hand, should we leave all the asking of questions to the same people over and over again?

Another discussion related to this is about the games we should cover. There are quite a number of interesting mmorpg projects out there, often made by smaller companies, that offer some intriguing concepts. Most of these games, such as Freeworld and Planeshift are often being overlooked by the large gaming sites... and why? Because they know that most readers won't be interested in the games because they don't offer the same quality of graphics that the latest generation of mmorpg's do. Should we go with the flow and stick to the coverage of the mainstream popular mmog's, or should we stubbornly try to stress the RPG-part in MMORPG's? Pleasing everyone is impossible, that's for sure.

There's room for improvement here at MMORPGDot. Lots of room, I think. And for that, I'd like to ask your help, reader. Because we'd like to know what it is in this site that you like, what it is that you don't like and what we could do to become an even better site in your eyes? Do you want us to provide more interviews, and if so, are we doing a good job with the current interviews? Or do you want us to get you some more review material... and if so, are you also interested in reading reviews of old mmorpg's and even MUD's? Or should we bring you more previews? Then there are also the features we don't have that we could work on, if it would be of interest to you: developer chats, developer roundtables, a screenshot of the week feature... Basically we want your input on what features we should work on in the future. Please let us know by dropping us a mail.