Less than a year ago, I fervently wanted to work for 1up and Ziff Davis. Writing for a team that included folks like James “Milky” Mielke, Ryan Scott, Jeff Green, Shawn Elliot … right around the time I was thinking about leaving Slashdot, that would have been the bees knees. I even sat down with Sam Kennedy during GDC last year to talk to him about possibilities in the SFO area.

This is the part where I say I’m ultimately glad I didn’t get hired.

While Ziff-Davis CEO Jason Young’s message to his company — including current 1UP Network staff — today, along with coordinated press releases regarding 1UP’s sale to UGO, painted a picture of strength in (and growth of) the 1UP brand, we’ve begun to hear reports quite to the contrary. Several key members of the 1UP staff have announced their termination via Twitter messages and posts to the NeoGAF forums.

As Joystiq has pointed out, pretty much everybody that made 1up what it was has been let go as part of the UGO brand acquisition. They even fired Milky. How can you fucking fire Milky? Seriously? One of the only high level writers left on the games journo beat that “gets” MMOs, and you can him? What-ever.

My best hopes and well wishes go out to everyone I’ve had the chance to talk to over there, everyone who will now be denied the opportunity for freelance for a reputable name in games journalism, and all of us out here who now won’t get to enjoy the fruits of their game-loving labours. This sucks, and I hate it.

Thanks for all the good times, EGM. RIP 1up.

Additional: I want to add an extra good luck to the 1up staffers that are staying on to man the Marie Celeste, including Jeremy Parish, Sharky, and Sam.

I really enjoyed the lookaheads that some of my fellow MMO blogfolk threw down in the last few weeks:

• Lum dropped his first, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say. I particularly like his personal viewpoint on the newly-independent developers and whta they’re likely to sink their teeth into.
• MMOment of Zen has some similarly well seen offerings. I think it’s interesting the different views of Aion everyone has.
• Hardcore Casual is a bit looser, I think, but he’s got a few good ones. I think his tone about RMT isn’t very useful, that said. Cracks like “one major MMO will make a legitimate push into full-on RMT, giving us the NGE of 2009″ make me grumpy.
• Brent makes a lot of really awesome callouts in his lengthy list of upcoming events. In fact, I’ll be honest: I feel like a big tool because he was willing to say a lot of the stuff I wasn’t willing to. Good on ya, mate. I think he goes a little far on some of those bullet points, but for the most part that’s some awesome work.

Earlier this month I mentioned that I’d gotten my photos from my Mythic Entertainment visit tagged up; downtime this week let me square away a few more Flickr sets I thought I’d share:

• Photos from Gen Con 2008. A few of the EVE and Champions Booths, and a fun picture of Cryptic’s unique advertising off the Con floor.
• These photos are from my blogging-focused trip to E3!
• And these photos hail from AGDC 2008, just a few short months ago.

This past weekend I sat with John (TAGN), Darren, and Karen for the fourtieth episode of Shut Up We’re Talking. It highlighted – again – for me how much I enjoy these chats amongst friends and cohorts. I definitely think we had a good conversation, and I invite you to check out what we had to say in a summation/end of year show.

From John’s writeup:

• Introductions – As if you did not know
• What We’re Playing – You can probably predict most of the answers
• The Ghosts of Predictions Past – Darren, Karen, Michael and myself talk about our predictions for 2008 and how far off we were.  Darren and I scored ourselves in posts already, but you can look back at and see how well we did.
• The Ghosts of MMOs Present – We take up the Massively categories and pick our “bests” for the 2008 MMORPG scene.
• The Ghosts of Predictions Future – We each make one prediction about what will happen with MMORPGs in 2009.
• Blog of the Week – There was NO blog of the week.  But Darren has an angle to this.
• Out Takes – What could beat Mr. Zenke’s Bartle rant during the show?  How about Darren’s wife?

Paul poked me to be sure I watched the follow-up to the video I was critical of the other day.

Message recieved, guys! Glad to see it was all in good fun. My original statment of “awesome that you’re admitting when there are problems” and Mark’s subsequent statement about making sure issues are taken care of before tackling the expansion ring very very true to me. Well done!

I’ll add my own “Sorry Colin” – and add one for Paul – if my own reaction was overly knee-jerky.

My personal site (formerly known as Random Dialogue) has been languishing for quite some time, because … well … I have  a hard enough time saying something cogent about the industry my full-time job touches on here. Turning around and writing a thousand word post about my boring ass is really hard to do on top of that.

So, I’ve gone micro-bloggery and re-directed everything over to my Tumblr blog whoisdialogue.com. I’ve had it running for some time so it’s full of a month or two’s worth of twitters and del.icio.us links. Now I’m actually going to use it for blogging / quote posting / picture uploading. I know it’s not super-functional at the moment, but if there’s one RSS feed I’d encourage you to follow, it’d be that one.

It’s incredibly encouraging to see Mythic take the bull by the horns, addressing the Open RVR issues that Warhammer seems to be having:

oRvR should be a major focus for leveling, item gain, etc. in WAR.  Some of the systems are already in place and in Tier 4, oRvR is alive and well.  On other Tiers, however, oRvR is not being engaged in as often as we had hoped when we launched WAR.  Our goal is to ensure that oRvR is the place where players can level the fastest, get the best items and overall, have a great time while doing it.  It is supposed to be riskier, more challenging but ultimately, more rewarding than any other place within WAR.

What is outlined in this letter are some of the ways we plan on making this happen over the next few months and beyond.

As always, we thank you for your patronage and support.  We won’t let you down.

Mark Jacobs, for all the things you can ding him about, really knows how to bring it home with statements like that. MMO gamers are customers, first and foremost. I don’t think that you should have the same expectations with MMOs as with other products, but this kind of forward thinking active response to real issues speaks volumes about Mythic’s commitment to the game.

So: industry cheerleading yay! Go Mythic Go!