A couple of links

Sorry for bunching this all together, but I thought it might be better than having several one-liner posts. I had a couple of mails this week from people asking me to link to their sites, and after kicking out the one guy who offered me $7.53 per referral to his gold selling site, and the other guy who wanted me to promote some fishy (or was that phishy?) looking flash game site, I'm still left with several links to nice sites. Nothing I could write a long article about, but good enough to link to.

Thallian was asking me on advise how he could improve his MMORPG blog. One word of advice: paragraphs. Your longer articles are a wall of text that is hard to read. I encourage people to go out and start their own blog, but you do need some writing skills if you want to attract any readers.

Much better looking and interesting are the detailed guild achievement stats on the French server of Drek'Thar, as compiled by Gehenne. It shows that from all the guilds on his server only 2 Alliance and 1 Horde guild have ever beaten a boss in Mount Hyjal or the Black Temple. Use your own estimates of how many raiders there are in those 3 guilds and how many players are on one WoW server to calculate the percentage. Any number I say will only be hotly debated, so I limit myself to calling the number "very small".

On Friday, February 15 at 5pm PST there will be a public stress test of the first game on the Metaplace platform, and they are looking for a large number of participants. The game will be a simple puzzle game, the test is more to test the platform, including chat.

MyGameMug.com is a social networking site for both PC and console gamers (including MMOs). What can I say about it except mention that there are dozens of sites like that who want to become the next MySpace or Facebook for gamers. The idea is basically good, but the value of a social networking site increases exponentially with its number of users, and it isn't clear yet which site will win in the end. Maybe its this one, maybe not. You can take a tour of MyGameMug to see for yourself.

MMO Gamers is another new MMO blog, this one with paragraphs, and a pretty layout. I hadn't heard about Freeblogit yet, but the owner of this particular site asked me whether he should stay on the free plan or move to the paid service. Paid service? On a site called "Freeblogit"? Sounds like a trap to me. I'm using Blogger, and they don't even offer a paid service plan any more, everything is free since they got bought by Google. So if you aren't afraid of the next evil empire, Google, I'd recommend switching to Blogger. That also increases the chance of Google search finding your posts, and thus your readership. Other people in the MMO blogosphere have mentioned the advantages of Wordpress. Just like I said about social networking sites, it is advisable to host your blog on one of the big blog services instead of some unknown one.