Comments on: Not a Review

By: brent

brent — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 23:05:59 +0000

I don’t mean to stir the pot or anything, but even calling it a ‘preview’ is a stretch in my book. If someone handed this article to me and said, this needs a title and categorization:

Category: Blog post
Title: “The millionth reason to take another look at EQ2″

Why is it a blog post, and not a review or preview?

- It includes the phrase “My brother and I…”
- It starts half of the sentences with conjunctions.
- No actual game play occurred. I saw a trailer for the Agency back in March of this year. Should I write a review/preview of the Agency? I don’t think so.
- As a rule no MMO content should be ‘reviewed’ with less than 40 hours of time at the wheel (100 would be better). What about the beta? My answer is: it depends on the beta. Some are faithful representations of the launch product and the community. Others are not.

Those points aside, it’s a nice blog post. I’m reading along thinking “nothing extraordinary here but it’s a nice summary of what is releasing” and then I saw the score… a score? WTF?

I should note that TTH is not without peer in the misclassification area. Have you read any of Dana Massey’s (huge air quotes) INTERVIEWS on Warcry? Oh my don’t even get me started.

Yes it is a slip up. We should bear in mind that TTH puts out more MMO content than any other site I can think of. Occasionally things will be mislabeled or miscategorized. There’s no need to argue the validity. Call it what it is. Change the name or don’t change it. Next week we’ll be on to other things anyway.

By: The Common Sense Gamer Â» Weak in the knee

The Common Sense Gamer Â» Weak in the knee — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:36:08 +0000

[...] some did not like the review or thought it wasn’t a review at all. Me, I’m handing everyone a cookie because this piece was not written for [...]

By: Cuppycake

Cuppycake — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:24:50 +0000

@Cyan – “Was this post a review of a review?”

No, it was a review of a PREVIEW. ;)

By: Kendricke

Kendricke — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:10:37 +0000

It very well could have been just a tour or a preview of the review. Then again, if this was a review of the review, at least this review of the review had hands-on, actual experiences which were communicated to the readers.

By the way, I give this review of the review 5.3 out of 7 clockworks. ;)

By: Cyanbane

Cyanbane — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:59:35 +0000

Was this post a review of a review?

By: Tipa

Tipa — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:01:21 +0000

I’m going to have to agree with Michael. I would have liked to have seen an overview of the dungeons, the raid mobs, maybe a look into which instances would be best for groups, which levels might have problems grouping where, if the stats of the new spells are good upgrades from the previous tier, if the whole grouping dynamic has changed… There’s a LOT of information I would have liked to have heard about the expansion before I could decide if it was a good expansion or not.

There are problems in RoK, but I didn’t hear anything about them in the review. In fact, I didn’t even hear about them in *beta*, though they were certainly there — people just weren’t doing the same things they would do in groups. KC was always empty in beta, but was absolutely crowded when RoK went live. Soon it will be empty again. Certainly a comprehensive review would have pointed out the problems that kept people from that zone in beta?

And in beta, they did a lot of raid testing. I would have liked to have a comparison of the raids vs those in previous expansions.

The real review of RoK is yet to be written. Of course it is possible to review the game from beta; I want to read THAT review.

By: Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Him. « Clockwork Gamer

Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt Him. « Clockwork Gamer — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:39:55 +0000

[...] Posted by Kendricke in Gaming Sites, Insiders, Rise of Kunark. trackback Over at MMOG Nation, Michael Zenke took some shots at a review of Rise of Kunark posted by Karen “Shayalyn” Hertzberg over at Ten Ton [...]