Not a WoW blog

If you look at the top of this page, you will find the title of this blog "Tobold's MMORPG blog". This title is supposed to tell you in the shortest possible form what this blog is about. It has the name of the author, me, Tobold. It has an possessive apostrophe showing that this is mine, a personal thing. It describes the subject matter as being MMORPG. And it says that this is a blog, and not a fansite, or news site, or portal. Note that "World of Warcraft" or "WoW" are suspiciously absent from this title. Because this is not a WoW blog. So please stop complaining every time I write about LotRO or other games.

Yeah, I know I have over 3,000 visitors a day now, and writing about WoW played a significant role in me getting so many people here. But I'm not getting any revenue from these visitors, and if writing about another game decreases that number, so be it. This blog is as much a personal diary of what I'm playing as it is a public service. And right now I'm playing Lord of the Rings Online, and not so much World of Warcraft. Just because I wrote a lot about WoW, and you found this blog due to my WoW posts, doesn't mean I have any obligation to continue writing about that game.

World of Warcraft is a very good game, and I still would recommend it to anyone who wants to try out a MMORPG for the first time. I played WoW since the September 2004 beta, more than 3,000 hours, longer than any other game I ever played, and the game is great fun and has enough content to occupy a player for many, many months. But it doesn not have enough content and variety to entertain me forever. Blizzard has many laudable qualities, but speed isn't one of them. For my kind of player, the "middle-class" between hardcore and casual, the people that play a lot, without being focused on raids, Blizzard isn't adding content as fast as we consume it. There is a huge initial pool of content, but if you constantly draw more from that pool than Blizzard adds to it, at one point you hit rock bottom and there is nothing left. That this process took me over 3,000 hours shows how great a game World of Warcraft is. But if Blizzard insists to focus on adding raid content that doesn't interest me, I'm taking my time, my money, and my blog elsewhere, at least until the pool of content replenishes with content patches and expansions.

Lord of the Rings Online isn't any better than World of Warcraft. And I have a strong suspicion that the initial pool of content is smaller than WoW's. But as I am new to LotRO, the pool is still full for me, and will take at least a couple of months to empty it. And for all the weak spots that Turbine has as a MMORPG developer, the speed at which they add new content has been one of their strong points since Asheron's Call, back in the last millenium. Although I took a lifetime subscription, I don't foresee to play LotRO forever. This isn't going to become a LotRO blog either. I might look into Age of Conan later this year, and I'll certainly try Warhammer Online in 2008. And who knows what other games that catch my eye in between.

It is very likely that I will play MMORPGs for many, many years to come, and I plan to always blog about the game that I am playing at that moment in time. Plus you get posts about MMORPG-related subjects, comments on major news on different games, on computers, non-MMORPG games I tried, and even the odd not game-related post. I like to post about game design, especially game economics. And all that from the perspective of a player, not a developer. And that is all that I can offer. I totally understand that you prefer to read about the game that you are currently playing, but as both you and me might change game any time, I can't guarantee you to write always about the game you are interested in. And I'm very aware that this is just one of many blogs, so if you want to read about a game I'm not writing about (or not writing about any more), it should be easy to find another blog to read. Believe me, it's better I post my happy thoughts about LotRO than negative posts about a game that isn't so much fun to me any more.