This is nothing too serious but it also doesn’t seem all that normal to me. I’m speaking of the whole WoW’s expansion leak, the coverage I gave it on this site and the bland support I received.
Despite I think I did a very good work, from my point of view, I also didn’t create anything myself. I just spent a lot of time to hunt and gather the news, making a clear distinction between what is fake and what isn’t. At least that was my purpose. I believe that who visits this site expects from me (in this specific situation) that type of dedication that you hardly find somewhere else. So I just did a good work trying to investigate and gather the news to repropose them in a more concise, clear and complete form. What I offered was simply a centralized presentation of all that was going on around this topic. Along the hours I gave the “event” a full and consistent coverage that is unmatched if compared to the other sites. You just cannot find another one, big or small, where the news were presented in the same precise and complete way.
In particular, the most important news (the first list of features, the screenshots from the press kit and the translation of the leaked preview on the italian magazine) had their origin HERE and in all the other forums (Q23, Corpnews, F13, FoH and the italian one) where I was restlessly tracking the whole thing in real time, trying to keep everyone updated with the latest happenings and fighting against all the false rumors that were making everything confused and uncertain.
What I find odd is that, despite something interesting was happening, noone cared to underline it. Noone noticed anything beyond the first leak of the cover of the magazine. Despite what came next was thousands times more juicy and interesting than a single quote claiming the level cap raised to 70. The coverage of this whole thing has been bland at best and completely missing if we exclude the fansites of the game. Even when all the major sites write down news about WoW for every stupid little thing they hear. In this case there was a complete silence or, worst, an active pursue of disinformation.
This is also nothing really new. My site surely hasn’t a good reputation and Slashdot deliberately avoided to link me a couple of times (for example about the infamous warrior protest) even when I was writing down more complete reports than what Zonk decided it was worth linking. If there was a news and 5-6 forums and blogs gave it some coverage you can be sure that the one missing was mine. Now I don’t find this surprising, nor it’s something I’d rant about. I wouldn’t link myself and I can absolutely understand why Zonk prefers to wait for other sources and avoid this little corner, down in the filth, half hidden. But this time it was different. The news weren’t covered or commented here. They STARTED here. There are a bunch of sites out there that cut and pasted my own words without remotely referencing me and everything I was presenting here has been systematically erased from the source and represented.
And again there is nothing to rant about. I don’t care for trackbacks, I don’t care if my words are cut, decontestualized and reproposed by someone else. I don’t care because that’s the essence of what I do. I don’t care if Slashdot links me and I don’t care if this site is more or less popular. This is just my “laboratory” and I use it strictly for personal reasons that I hope can be useful for someone else. In this case what I cared about was about sharing and spread the news. This is why I was out on the forums, this is why I worked franctically to put an evident line between a few fake jokes and what was, instead, REAL. And interesting. I tried to remove the confusion and gather all I could about that topic. I just was trying something simple: to inform.
So why I rant? Because more than one day later I saw this entry on Joystiq spreading news like I was trying to do. But the WRONG news. This is why I mailed them to explain what was real, what wasn’t and what they should report. Well, hours later this is the result. See, that page that Joystiq linked had the same list of screenshots that firstly appeared on this site and it was posted hours after I sent them the mail explaining what was going on, that I had a lot more details on the whole issue unavailable everywhere else (till that moment) and, in particular, explaining that their previous news was just about a FAKE. What did they do? They posted a news linking the same screenshots I had and linking back to themselves and the FAKE NEWS to create even more confusion. Wonderful work.
But it’s not over because even Slashdot and VodooExtreme finally join the bandwagon. These big sites arrive DAYS after the news. Still they carefully avoid to link this place where the news were more complete and attendible as it always happened in the past over similar issues. And they decide to hand out very partial and imprecise news. VoodooExtreme has a poor recap of the main features that vaguely resembles mine and a link to a translation that arrived two days later the whole thing while Slashdot links that Joystiq with the FAKE news. What a wonderful coverage.
“I was waiting for more news on it before posting” No. He was waiting another source to avoid to link me.
See, it’s not that I believe I’m the center of the internet and that noone is allowed ignore me. But I mailed Joystiq with the news and explanations. And Zonk (the writer on Slashdot who gave that awful coverage) definitely reads those forums where I wrote down the news in real time, contemporary to what I was writing on my site. The writer of Kotaku reads Q23. And so on. I’m sorry but I don’t believe that they were unaware of what was going on and, instead, I believe that this is the result of a deliberate choice.
Which brings to the last point. The other fake notes that started to circulate were linked just EVERYWHERE and they spread *way faster* than the legitimate news. They appeared only many hours after I started to post the real leaks and hand out a precise feature list, also explaining the sources and the reason why they were confirmed. These notes in fact arrived a few hours after Vivendi called me at home to ask to remove the screenshots. My suspect is that those notes started to circulate *because* of Blizzard. They may have been pushed out to create confusion once they saw that all their precious announces and exclusives sold to the magazines were being leaked a week ahead of time. And the echo that those fake notes received everywhere and in particular on the bigger sites may confirm this suspect and the will from Blizzard to create a total chaos so that noone could understand what was real and what wasn’t in order to still retain some expectance for the BlizzCon scheduled for the next week.
The real point, in fact, is that everyone with half a brain could have noticed at a first glance how those notes were absolutely RIDICULOUS. Once again, I did all I could to spread the truth against all the false news. Despite this, all the bigger news sites preferred to ignore what was actually going on to make everything even more confused.
Now, I definitely *do not regret* that noone linked me (but I find odd that this thing went completely ignored even in our circle of blogs). In one day this site burned 34 GIGABYTES OF BANDWIDTH (and thanks again to Dreamhost who kept the site running smooth as silk). It scared me more than the phone call from Vivendi. In three days I’m above 55 Gb and only thanks to the screeshots that were up only for a few hours. This site was risking a closure in less than five days and if even Slashdot tried to link here you would have seen a black page, right now, instead of these words. So “thank you” again to have avoided to link this corner of the internet that still managed to do a WAY better work than EVERYONE ELSE out there and also confirming as true and attendible the rumors on which I bet five months ago. Only in a very few cases I’ve been wrong and I think I can be satisfied of the little service I’ve offered. Despite I’m the only one to congratulate with myself and the only one to note I’ve done a good work.
On the other side I have the consciousness of the horrible work that the “bigger players” have offered. Still today there’s a whole lot of confusion and what is sure is that VodooExtreme, Joystiq and Slashdot actively contributed to this disinformation and offered an overall poor and unprofessional service.
(link)
This is a concern faced by all the “major”, “respectable” sites. Stratics, for one, has shown some editorial spine in the past lambasting Origin for among other things abandoning any pretense of a plot line in UO. Most gaming “news” sites, however, MMORPG related or otherwise, do exhibit an unsurprising lack of willingness to bite the hand that feeds them.
The bottom line is that this is an opinion/gossip/unprofessional rantings site, not a news site. And if you disagree with my choice of news stories, the Internet has about 9 trillion other pages more worthy of your attention.