Loading... Meet the "Press"

Welcome to the 930th Edition of Loading...

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Daily Column

Loading... in the MMOG website family, we wear the pants.

First, at Ten Ton Hammer, you vote on your favorite games with what you view. We report the results to you with something we call The Pulse. Stargate Worlds made an appearance in the Top 10 with its closed beta date announcement and screenshots, surprisingly pushing EVE Online out of the top ten. I have a feeling it'll be back soon.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we also show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

1. Warhammer Online - 200 BPM
2. World of Warcraft - 183 BPM
3. Age of Conan - 60 BPM
4. Lord of the Rings Online - 34 BPM
5. Stargate Worlds - 18 BPM
6.
Atlantica - 17 BPM
7. Tabula Rasa - 17 BPM
8. Dungeon Runners - 10 BPM

9. Runes of Magic- 14 BPM
10. Mabinogi - 13 BPM

I hope you had a nice weekend. For me, it was the glorious and grandiose start of the NHL season, so between hockey and football I'm in sports nirvana. Speaking of which, a number of NHL teams played their premier games in Europe this year in cities like Prague and Stockholm. Though watching these games and hearing (or not hearing) the sold-out yet politely quiet and attentive crowds they drew ellicited painful memories of NFL Europe (thanks Berlin, it was fun!), it seems like every segment of the entertainment industry is getting progressively more global. Hundreds of thousands play EVE Online and Age of Conan, two games developed entirely in Europe, and Warhammer Online is enjoying a great deal of targeted success among Warhammer fans in the old world.

Where games go, the press follows, but the idea of "games journalism" or even "entertainment media" makes my skin crawl. Don't get me wrong, we at Ten Ton Hammer take our jobs and influence very seriously, but none of us are what you'd call serious journalists. We like our games too much, so we pass on what we think is good and let the other guys - flame-fest forums and muckraking "mainstream" sites - do what they do best, make their traffic throwing the weak and infirm under the bus.

If a developer presses us to review or otherwise comment on their game or its otherwise convenient to play and give our honest opinion (and we have space in our content schedule), we will. But you don't want to waste your precious game time on crappy games and neither do we. We're dealing with MMORPGs here - where the golden standard is 20 hours of gameplay time before we can write a review or even express our first impressions - not console or casual games you can play in the morning and review in the afternoon.

But since some game developers insist we pretend to be games journalists before they'll give us their time, we get lumped into the turdpile. Joystick Division posted this article (though its a bit circuitous, you'd do better with Medeor's fine synopsis here) uncovering PR heavyweight TriplePoint's relationship with the games press site GameCyte. GameCyte as a site isn't worth mentioning; Loading... alone does more than 65k uniques in its first 5 minutes the first weekday of the month and its layout screams "I (heart) WordPress blogging."

But a number of folks in our space are double agents, parceling their time between promoting games and writing "objective" pieces about those same games. The problem is: they have more access to the developers as publicists than we can get as independent writers. For our part, despite these advantages, we see this as a serious conflict of interest and don't employ or publish contributions authored by those who have a connection to games marketing. Enjoy your shill-free viewing experience!

The Loading... forum is available 24/7 for your thoughts. You're always welcome to email me directly if you'd rather not post.

Ten Ton Hammer Epic Thread of the Day

Sometimes they're funny; sometimes they're foolish; sometimes they're flaming;
sometimes they're cool. Whatever this one happens to be, it's
our Epic Thread of the Day.

====================
From our Tavern of the Ten Ton Hammer Forum

What was the first MMO you played?

What's the first MMOG you played? Members wax nostalgic in this epic thread in our general MMOG discussion form, the Tavern of the Ten Ton Hammer. Whether you started in MUDs or you've only been playing since Warhammer Online launched, we'd like to hear from you!

Awesome Quote from the Epic Thread:

"First game was Everquest for about 4-5 years. Damn guild I was in is still going strong."
- Eizor
====================

Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let us know!

19 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 67 in October! 2563 in 2008!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]

Images/Video

Interviews

Age of Conan: Game Designer Craig 'Silirrion' Morrison

Previews

Op/Eds

World of Warcraft: Is WotLK Content in Patch 3.0 a Good Thing?

Community

Guides

Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to:

Real World News

German artist plans to smoke ashes of Kurt Cobain

The cigarette is expected to smell like... oh, Nevermind.
The #1 Movie in America: Beverly Hills Chihuahua

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seen readying their mounts
Top court to rule on whether inflatable rat has rights

Lawyers to argue that he has as much sentience and intelligence as the union workers they're representing, so where's the problem?

Thanks as always for visiting TenTonHammer.com.

- Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer Team

To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our EVE Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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