In some ways it is grimly amusing how many of us bloggers can take something as fun as gaming and turn it into a source of negativity. I both produce irrelevant negativity, and consume it. I’ve been trying to stop, on both counts.

From the posting side of things, I’ve been trying to focus on the joy that comes from this wonderful hobby of ours. I will still say negative things about a game I’m playing, but only in the context of a “review-like” post that is meant to help you decide whether you want to buy or avoid. I’m trying to stay far away from “Game X [which I am not playing] sucks because of Y” and staying even farther away from negative comments about other gamers and their choices.

From a consumption point of view, I’ve been thinning down the list of sites and blogs in my RSS reader. If a blogger or site writes the kinds of posts that are full of negativity, I’m removing that site. I understand how cathartic venting in text can be; I’m not judging anyone! But I just don’t want to read that kind of post any more.

Since trying on this new attitude, I’ve found I’ve been enjoying gaming a lot more. I have more time to play (fewer sites to read = more free time). And I’ve felt better emotionally, and this feeling extends beyond gaming.

I just too easily slip into the Quixotic desire to debate/debunk posts that I feel are unfairly negative towards a product or service. And those can become real tar baby issues for me, leading towards frustration and wasted energy. They quickly become toxic.

Anyway, that’s my Monday morning rambling for this week. Please call me on it if you see me slipping back into writing pointlessly negative posts. Gaming (to me at least) is supposed to be about discovering new worlds and having fun. I’m going to try to keep my focus there.

Last night being Halloween, we spent it all watching the Ghost Hunters Live Event. Seven straight hours of Ghost Hunters doesn’t leave any room for gaming. But can I just say, Amanda Tapping as a guest investigator = epic win. I now have a huge nerd crush on her.

Anyway since I didn’t do any gaming yesterday I don’t have any news to relate. Instead, I want to talk about mean people. Specifically, mean gaming bloggers. And no, I’m not going to include any links: no need to improve mean people’s google page ranks!

Right now it seems like there’s a wave of gaming bloggers leaving Warhammer Online. For the most part these are people who were in the beta, loved the game, got caught up in the hype and the excitement, threw down their money, and found a game very different (and less fun) from what they’d been playing in beta. So they’re disappointed and either a little sad or a little angry, and they’re quitting.

I find this sad. Granted these are just games, but still, to see a person going from excited about an event to disappointed…I have enough humanity in me to see this as unfortunate. But for some bloggers, this is an opportunity to laugh and jeer and enjoy the misfortune of others. That’s just mean and frankly, it says a lot about you as a person.

Even though “gaming” is becoming more mainstream, as “Gamers” (and particularly as “MMO Gamers” we’re still the object of much puzzlement and faint scorn in the greater public. When we go back to work after a few days off and someone asks “Did you do anything fun on your vacation?” most of us won’t say “Hell yeah, I hit level cap with my Priest!” because if we say that, we’re going to be labeled as some kind of anti-social loser, and honestly in a lot of companies this kind of label can negatively impact opportunities for advancement. Instead we say “Ah, I just kind of hung-out at home and relaxed, y’know? Rested up, read some books, watched some movies.” and then the person we’re talking to will smile knowingly and say “Yes, sometimes the best vacation is just to stay home and enjoy the family.” and all is well.

Which is a wild tangent, but my point is I still think we gamers need to stick together and cut each other some slack. The fact that you love World of Middle Earth and I love Warcraft Online is a teeny, tiny, trivial difference compared to the fact that we both love staying home and playing an MMO vs the people who choose to go to the movies/bar/opera/crack den/sports arena/hiking/ballet as their preferred way of spending leisure time.

Tearing each other down just makes our community weaker. How about we all (myself included, I’m certainly not infallible in this respect) try to be a bit more supportive of each other. We’re all gamers, after all. We’ve got plenty of common ground to cover.

Cleaned up the blogroll some more.

I re-ordered links in reverse alphabetical order. Why? Well I wanted to organize them in some kind of objective fashion, and since almost everyone goes with alphabetical, I figured I’d give the late-alphabet folks some love by moving them to the top for once.

The blogroll is a perpetual work-in-progress. If you want to be on it, or know a blog I should be reading, feel free to leave a comment. Here’s a repost on my criteria for linking to you, reprinted from my last post on the subject:
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If you’re not on there and want to be, drop a comment. My criteria for inclusion on my blogroll are pretty hazy but generally: 1) if you have Dragonchasers on your blog roll, I’ll almost certainly include you unless your blog is actively offensive to me (not very likely). 2) If I read you regularly, I’ll include you as a “public service” for other Dragonchasers readers because I think you rock. 3) If you’re a frequent commenter, I’ll include you as an indication of what great taste in blogs you have. Plus I probably read you as well…I often follow links from commenters to check out your blogs.

If you’re reading this via RSS, please come to the site and check out the new theme that WebSiteTaylor created for me. I think she did an absolutely fantastic job and I couldn’t be happier!!

It’s possible some rough spots slipped through, and if so please let us know via a comment. Thanks!

Last night I played Rock Band 2 until my hands were cramping, my back was aching (I was playing slouched back on the couch, coffee-house style!) and my eyes could focus on nothing other than note charts. It was a blast! But…not much to say about it other than… IT WAS A BLAST!!!

Anyway…

I’m making some changes to the blogroll here at Dragonchasers. “War Bloggers” is now “Gamer Blogs” since I’ve found so many quality blogs that aren’t really war-oriented and I want to start including them. Plus the reality is that so few of us dedicate our blogs to one game. This way I can link to places like Construed and have it “fit.”

If you’re not on there and want to be, drop a comment. My criteria for inclusion on my blogroll are pretty hazy but generally: 1) if you have Dragonchasers on your blog roll, I’ll almost certainly include you unless your blog is actively offensive to me (not very likely). 2) If I read you regularly, I’ll include you as a “public service” for other Dragonchasers readers because I think you rock. 3) If you’re a frequent commenter, I’ll include you as an indication of what great taste in blogs you have. Plus I probably read you as well…I often follow links from commenters to check out your blogs.

I do want to keep the length of the list manageable, so I’ll be going through and cleaning things out every so often. But if you’re linking to me, I won’t remove you. We must all appease the Google.

A week ago, the gaming blog-o-sphere was rife with posts talking about how much fun Warhammer Online is. Everyone (I’m speaking figuratively here) was RvRing and questing and PQing and having a grand old time. Now, not so much. Blogger after blogger are putting up posts expressing concern with the leveling rate or the leveling style or the lack of depth in the game.

These are people who have played the game for a few weeks and are basing their posts on real and significant experience, so I’m not going to disagree with them one bit; we all come at these games with our own expectations and desires. A lot of people seem to be just killing time for the new WoW Expansion as much as anything, and there’s much doom and gloom about how Warhammer will be a ghost town when Lich King launches.

I can’t deny this makes me sad, because they may be right.

I also have to admit I was feeling a wee bit of burnout/excess grindiness earlier this week, after I spent Monday and Tuesday nights playing all evening (and having fun, I might add). My personal poison is PQ Grinding. Like everyone else, I’m finding it harder and harder to find groups to do PQs with; and I don’t feel comfortable skipping them since my character is so dependent on the gear we get as Influence Rewards. Killing Easy rated mobs over and over for 100 Influence each gets kind of dull. And as soon as you finish one, you literally are directed to the next one and have to start all over again. It feels endless.

I’m bored with Scenarios as well, but those I can safely ignore since I can get Renown via open world RvR (which is wicked fun); the only way to get influence rewards is to do PQs.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the weekend. I barely played at all Wednesday, and Thursday I didn’t log in until after 10. Not having a lot of time before bed, I figured I’d just grind some Influence and hit the hay. It felt good to step back into the shoes of my Witch Hunter, and I just started running around, knocking the dust off my gear and making sure I hadn’t forgotten any skills or anything. And instead of grinding Influence, I got caught up in a quest to find a stolen chest. This ended up being the first step of a “treasure map” kind of quest. Each step gave a clue as to where to find the next step. And it was a lot of fun.

I had to log soon after, but now I find myself counting down the minutes until I can get out of here and start the weekend. I don’t know how long this will last…I might be starting to feel the burnout again by the end of the night. I can never predict these things. It was just weird to almost grudgingly log in last night, and then end up being really happy to be in-game.

Some small part of me *wants* to get burned out on Warhammer, to be honest. There’re a bunch of single player games incoming that I really want to play, and there’s the Mines of Moria expansion for LOTRO set to arrive on Nov. 18th. Will I contribute to the ghost town-ification of Warhammer Online?

I just don’t know. I’m going to play while I’m having fun, and stop playing when I’m not. These are games, after all. If they aren’t fun, there’s no point in playing them.

To the bloggers who’re leaving, I sincerely hope you find a game that you find enjoyable, and thanks for helping to make Warhammer enjoyable during the time you were in-world with the rest of us.

So yesterday’s debacle got me to thinking…

Recap. I got into a debate over one aspect of someone’s comment on another site. The debate was going nowhere, so I gave my last word over there. I came here, to my personal blog, and wrote a post about whether or not discussion in comments have value, not realizing that Wordpress was set to automatically send trackbacks to the other blog since I linked to it. Because the trackback appeared in the comments over there, the person I was debating with came here and continued the debate. In all honesty, this was warranted because I had mentioned some of his data on the other blog was flawed. We went back and forth, pointlessly, for a while, then I asked that we put an end to the debate. He posted again, continuing the debate. So I deleted the whole exchange, and edited the original post to remove references to his arguments.

Over on his blog, he continued the discussion I’d started, and made sport of the fact that I’d deleted the thread here.

So finally, my thoughts.

[NOTE: Contents of this post have been edited heavily to focus more on the topic at hand, and less on the topic that spawned my consideration of the issues. Also derailing comments have been deleted.]

So this morning I was reading at post over a Pumping Irony where Scott was talking about LOTRO Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel’s interview of a couple days ago. I thought Scott made some good points (which I won’t re-iterate here, but I encourage you to go read the post) so I left a kind of an ‘atta boy!’ comment.

But being a dumbass, I couldn’t stop there, and questioned some of what another commenter had posted. Which began a back and forth of us each spinning our wheels and getting nowhere. Now don’t get me wrong, it was a civil discussion, but ultimately pointless and a waste of both our times. He wasn’t convincing me and I wasn’t convincing him.

It’s not worth regurgitating the whole debate, which spilled over to this blog and devolved even further. There’s no structure in blog comments, no ‘rules of engagement’ and meanings of common terms are often not clearly defined. To take the time to define them is cumbersome when you don’t even know for sure the other party is coming back.

It was a frustrating discussion for me; it was like the other party was from a totally different culture and we had no common ground to base the discussion on. Some of his points made as much sense to me as someone saying “We have corn flakes when moon dust wallows green penguins irately. ” First he would say one thing then he’d say completely the opposite, or so it seemed to me. It got to the point where I could only surmise he was debating for the sake of debating, not worrying about reasoning or consistency, but just trying to be an irritant. Perhaps he felt the same way about me.

Anyway, my point about this, beyond just needing to vent my frustration, is to ask this question:

Are comments on blogs really of any value, or are they just a place to fritter away time talking to each other, but not listening to each other? I don’t mean to vilify this dude, because the fact is I was certain of myself too, and he wasn’t going to budge my opinion either.

So what’s the point? Have you ever been swayed by a discussion in blog comments? Or are they all just a waste of bandwidth? Should we all turn them off and save ourselves the hassle of combating the spammers?

OK, I’ve added all the listed Casualties of War blogs to the blog roll here. Also a couple of Dairy-Free (ie, non-CoW) blogs that I had in the blogroll.

The first category is simply the blogs of people in Casualties of War, without any real regard for topic. The second category is blogs devoted primarily to Warhammer Online.

If I missed your blog, feel free to leave a comment and let me know if you’re in Category 1 or Category 2.

And sorry that I moderate all comments. This blog has been in place since 2002 and every comment spammer on the planet seems to know about it.

Are you ready for the litany of excuses for why I haven’t been posting? Here goes. First, the Casualties of War forums have been going crazy and I’ve been trying my best to keep up with it and get to know some of the folks I’ll be waging WAR with (ancillary excuse: through those forums I’ve found out about bunches of great WAR blogs that I now must read). Plus I’ve been trying to be an *active* Warhammer Online beta-tester again. Plus I joined a guild in LOTRO and have been playing that more than I probably have since launch. Plus there’s that work thing that’s been slopping over into my off hours.

Anyway it isn’t just here. I haven’t been Plurking or Tweeting and I’m way behind on my news feeds. I need a vacation to catch up on my leisure time!

Hopefully the Warhammer NDA will drop this week. I’m thinking about the game an awful lot but I’m really hesitant to post about it and accidentally reveal something that breaks the NDA. Been thinking a lot about what class to play (first, I’m an alt-aholic for sure) and was leaning towards White Lion but now not as much, but I don’t feel like I can say *why* I’m changing my mind without breaking NDA.

Thank goodness Mythic is going the “x characters per account” route that Age of Conan did. From everything I’ve read, we can have a full roster on every server if we want to, as long as we don’t mix Destruction and Order on any single server. That means lots of alts and experimental characters, which is half the fun of MMOs for me.

Open Beta ought to start next week some time and I’m sure NDA will lifted by then. Thanks for not removing me from your RSS feeds. The posts should pick up in frequency soon!