Profile: StinkyPest
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What exactly is hype? What is wrong with all this hype for various games? What's more harmful for gamers; hype from gamers themselves, or hype from the publisher and developer? These will be my main topics in today's blog.

HYPE hype HYPE... Ok so we all know what hype is. The act of publicizing something to an extreme degree. MMOs since as far as I can remember have been extremely over hyped. You hear "WoW Killer AMIRITE?!" and "AoC is going to rule every game ever created". Well we all know how that turned out. AoC and Funcom have had their named tarnished forever. Vanguard has had it's name tarnished so badly that it's possible that several of the remaining 4 servers may be shut down.

The fact is the word of mouth from gamers is a very powerful thing. Gamers in certain forums such as MMORPG.com can successfully ruin or heighten a games reputation EVEN if it has not proven to exist yet (see Darkfall). Because of all this word of mouth going on "trolls" and "fanbois" and everything in-between has been created. So many distorted views on a product that they may or may not have even played. One good example is the SWG vets that burn down any SoE game, even if they have never played it. Another is WoW haters when they haven't played WoW. Now I'm not saying that some of this is un-marketed, but for the most part people who have NOT EVEN PLAYED the various games should NOT comment like they have been playing for years, when all they are doing is recycling what they've heard or seen from videos/reviews.

All we're hurting is our community. The only ones suffering is gamers. Video games publishers know for a fact that they'll rarely lose money from a game (larger companies) if they release it with a little hype. They may not get the profit they wanted, but they'll at least break even. There are so many people stressed out about this or that games updates, or this or that game being released. I thought a long time ago a game was for fun. What happened to that? You don't see a bigwig committing suicide (as has happened with several gamers) when their character dies or loses his corpse in a video game (not that most bigwigs even know how to play it). No, when they're stressed they just relax. Games are not made to be played as 24/7, argued about 24/7. They are meant to be entertainment.

The flavor of the month today is WAR. So Ill add some stuff about that. We are constantly being bombarded on nearly every forum in MMORPG.com about how WAR is going to kil XXX game, or how people aren't going to leave because WAR is going to be the worst thing since Funcom got into MMOs. The fact of the matter is how do you know? Even the beta testers were given a very limited amount of time in this game. They did not get to see all the content... heck maybe they did and were just told that there was more. Now we have apparently bored nerds making charts about how they think projection sales for WAR will effect WoW and what not. Do NOT fall for these scams, as it's pure Fanboi/Troll's blowing up your bum.

I have spent several years between betas as many of you have. I have been a volunteer employee of a company, I have even been contracted to do some lackey work. I have worked with bigwigs, and even worked with some very large names in the industry. (I'm not talking about your BS.. well I got into beta early crap, I'm talking about working with the developers themselves with ideas and implementation of features, bug sorting/fixes, and whatnot.)The thing is they all know, all you need to do is mesmerize a couple children, even maybe some loony adults who will spread the word as their game being the second coming of the lord, and their game will sell even better.

All everyone is doing by arguing about this game vrs the other game is raising the money in their pockets. How about we band together and discuss what really matters? How about we talk about issues that need to be fixed, or games that need to be avoided. Why do we need to constantly be at the throats of our fellow gamers?