So yes, as evidenced by the previous post, I have returned from my vacation with the folks down in San Diego. It went pretty good, lots of relaxation involving fine dining, wine tasting, tennis, swimming, and the best part of visiting the parents... not paying for any of it. The only real surprise on the vacation was how quickly it went. I got there the 25th and returned the evening of the 30th, and it felt like I'd been there for about a day and a half, come dinner on Wednesday night.
Sadly, that's about it for my summertime fun. I'm scheduling about 12 hours a day of work for myself with the fantasy novel to finish editing, agents to query and woo, the HGL site to ramp up towards the impending Beta test, and a couple of RL work/projects I need to spend at least a couple of hours a day on, but can't talk about on the blog just yet. I'm busy enough that I'm trying to block out my time, like a real person. X hours for this, X+2 hours for that, etc. I didn't get off to a very good start yesterday, my first day back, but today (Friday) was more productive. Unfortunately it was productivity in just one area, as I caught up on a bunch of Hellgate: London stuff -- I posted
like 10 news items, lots of new screenshots, Alpha test news someone mailed in out of the blue, and worked on updating the wiki with all the new info that's come out lately. I've barely scratched the surface of the necessary wiki updates, but it's got to be done as I try to position the site to be
the news & info resource come beta time and the 100x increase in HGL interest that'll bring.
Thankfully, I'll be awake for another 8 or 10 hours today and can spend a few more of those on hellgatewiki.com, before transitioning to novel work. The work on the HGL site (and the approaching Beta/release date) is starting to pay off in increased traffic, but with increasing popularity comes a drawback -- decreased visitor intelligence.
To this point most of the readers/posters on my HGL site have been pretty smart and savvy about things, but as the site gets more popular more random people show up, and some of them are, inevitably, dumb as a box of rocks. I don't blame anyone for not knowing about the game; everyone has to learn at some point and I want them to learn on my site. That's why I spent hours on the content, after all. The people who pain me are the (usually) young ones, who are AOLese-fluent dolts. For example, here's a PM (private message) I received to my forum account from a new user just a few days ago.
hey flux were are all the HG:L conventions and little places were they show up if u know message me back k thnx :)
I didn't reply since well...what do you say? "Yes, I know about lots of upcoming conventions and "little places" where HGL developers will show up, but I post absolutely everything about HGL
but this because I'm insane. I will happily take the time to personally tell you all about it, however, since you never know -- Bill Roper might magically appear close enough to your home town that you can pester your mom into driving you there."
As always, it's the combination of ignorance, AOLese, and undeserved entitlement that annoys me. And while this is the first bad enough to motivate a blog entry and a new tag, it most definitely won't be the last. Years and years of
Painful D2 Emails (only a very small fraction of which I blogged about here) taught me that much. I'll try to console myself with the thought that even the worst emailers generate ad loads as they blunder their way cluelessly through the site, but since I've been working on the HGL site since early 2006 and my efforts have thus far yielded several no-expense paid trips to E3 in LA and downtown SF, and a few free t-shirts and comic books I'm saving for prizes in future site contests that will cost me postage to send out, that's not exactly the most powerful motivation imaginable.
Labels: Hellgate: London, painful HGL email, vacation
