I
posted last year about the minor Hellgate: London drama that stemmed from Flagship Studio's accidental leak of the name of the third character class. It's a long post and it wanders around (fasten your seatbelts), but the gist of it was that Flagship leaked the name accidentally, every fansite posted about it, and then several days later Flagship's PR woke up to the fact and sort of indirectly hinted that they'd like the info removed because they had a full reveal scheduled for an upcoming issue of a major gaming print magazine. Flagship's PR never actually told or asked anyone to remove the hunter name leak, but the mere suggestion was enough for most of the other HGL fansite admins to scramble to do their bidding. And I mean scramble; not only did the other guys delete their news posts, but they voluntarily scoured their forums for mentions of "demon hunter" and deleted threads and banned people for asking what was going on... even though all of the approximately 500 people on earth who were following the game at that point already knew about it.
I thought it was amusing at the time, more for the fevered reactions of the other HGL webmasters than anything do to with the actual (meaningless) info leak. The drama came not from Flagship, who were hardly involved, but from the kids running other HGL sites who were embarrassingly starstruck by their vague proximity to Flagship's community manager, and who took it upon themselves not only to police their own forums, but to troll mine posting outraged notes about how I wasn't doing what they thought I should do and how I was hurting the company and I had journalistic pretensions and such. (The fact that maybe I had a bit more perspective on things, having been the admin of a very busy fansite for 6 years, and that I personally knew all 9 founders of Flagship Studios, was disregarded by overexcited teens with the vast knowledge they'd accumulated through their weeks of fansite admin experience.) I kind of understood; as I admit in the aforementioned post, back in the late 1990s when I was admining a Diablo II fansite and interacting with Blizzard North employees I was pretty impressed by it all. I was talking to the actual designers, not just the PR wing, and I like to think I might have shown a bit of journalistic "my readers have the right to know the truth" backbone, but I can't honestly swear to that, 8 years later.
At any rate, that little episode passed without evident impact. The funniest part was that I was invited to visit Flagship Studios just a few weeks later; the first fansite admin to do so. I will admit to savoring some schadenfreude (at the time) when I thought about how the other fansite fanboys must have taken that news. They were already showing every sign of terror/jealously at the existence of my HGL site, so you know they'd gotten their little peckers up fantasizing that Flux would get blackballed for teh infor leakorz! And then 3 weeks later I'm getting hands on with HGL and an office tour.
Anyway, nothing more of dramatic interest has transpired since then. We had to ban Krazy Kaution, one of the volunteer admins from that other site when he wouldn't stop trolling our forums, and then sent obscene and sexually-explicit messages to Elly when she told him to STFU and follow the forum rules, but that's kind of par for the course in this amateur-infested field. I'm sure I could find things to be dramatic about, as most of the other HGL sites do all they can to not link to the exclusive content I produce, but I've long since grown to expect that. The funny part, to me at least, is how transparent they are, when they think they've being sneaky. It's all new and exciting to them, while it's just Diablo II all over again to me, and when I remember how the other fansites reacted then I can see the exact same stuff happening now. Even the personalities are the same. There are the serious, hardcore info types (usually European), the chatty social network types who don't really care about HGL and are just involved since it's a way to meet people online (almost exclusively younger Americans), the overly-competitive, tooth-gnashing fanboys, etc.
Another weird aspect is the loyalty issue. Early adopting fans tend to become very clannish, and whatever site they first get attached to, they adopt and become possessive of. This is especially true of younger fans, so there are these angry posses of 13 y/os whose actual knowledge of human behavior and motivations is inversely proportional to the amount they believe they possess, who decide they are part of some fansite, and that other fansites must therefore be the enemy. On top of that, the admins of the main other English language site, HGG (Hellgate Guru), are pretty clearly obsessed with my site and how I run it, since they do all they can to avoid posting any links to the content I put up, regularly troll forum threads on my site to advertise themselves, and constantly talk about my site in their forum posts. (In contrast, I have never seen their site mentioned by anyone for any reason in forum threads on my site, except when the thread itself points to magazine scans some HGG reader posted in their forums -- and none of their flock of admins have ever been mentioned by name.) The main admin on HGG has something like 80 posts in my site's forums; I have 5 there; 2 of which were made long before I started my own HGL site, and 2 others were made in the thread I quote below.
Honestly, this is pretty smart of them; by constantly posting in my forum they advertise themselves (by their signature or site logo icon, if not direct links), while I can't be bothered to read their forums and thus don't promote my site at their expense. The funny part is that HGG has busier forums than my site, but that's really all they have on the site. Their image gallery has a handful of unorganized and uncaptioned screenshots, (I have over 2000 with military organization) their wiki is skeletal with like 65 pages, 2/3 of which they cut(ted) and paste(d) straight from the official site (which hasn't been updated since last summer), they don't maintain archives of interviews or features, they don't have a files gallery, they don't monitor Flagship employee forum posts and put them into their news, they don't add any info or context to the news they post, etc. And yes, it annoys me that their forums are still busier (primarily since they were online like 2 years before my site was started) when the rest of their site is such crap.
What makes it really silly is that we're fighting over crumbs. A really busy day on the HGG forums means maybe 45 registered users. They're usually around 35 when I check once or twice a week. My site is usually around 25 during the day, though we've been over 70 when we had some exclusive content we required people to register to read. In contrast, the
forums for the D2 site I earned my dubious fame on has 207 registered users and 1104 guests viewing it right now, in the middle of the night on a Thursday. And that's for a game that was released in June 2001. The
forums for the World of Warcraft site that my co-admins run has 143 users and 1700 guests right now, and when I check it in the day it's usually up around 400 registered users. So yeah, compared to that HGL traffic is entirely incidental, and as
I discussed in a previous blog entry, it's quite likely my HGL site will get more traffic the first week of the public beta test than it has totaled during its first 16 months.
Endless preamble aside, here's the recent amusement. Some months ago a few videos of Hellgate:London were leaked from some public event in Korea. They showed all the skill trees in the game, which had not been publicly released in any form, and lots of the basic skill information. The leak was plugged up, but the admins of several HGL fansites got a look at the shots. Flagship asked everyone not to post them or mention them, and no one did, until after the recent community day event, when we were all invited to their offices in downtown San Francisco and got to watch a demo and play the game and eat a catered lunch.
Since we saw the whole game then, including all the skill trees, and since lots of fansite admins filmed the screen during the presentation early in the day, the info was due to burst loose. Flagship understood that, and asked us not to put up any shots of the screens, but said the info was okay to release. (At dinner after the day's festivities I sat between company founder the CVO Dave Brevik and Flagship's PR director Tricia Gray, and we talked for about an hour about media issues, information releases and priorities, fansites vs. major gaming sites, etc. So trust me, I have a pretty good idea what Flagship's priorities are and where their focus is and how they feel about fansites posting news and game information.) My main community day coverage was in the form of a massively-detailed 24k word report that I got fact checked/approved by Flagship and posted a week after the event. I was then in San Diego on vacation for a week, but when I got back I updated all the report info into the wiki, and added lots more info on specific skill details on the appropriate pages. The other HGL fansites all linked to my updates (without me asking), though unsurprisingly, HGG did not. Nor did they update their own info, other than typing in some obviously-transcribed skill info in very bare bones form. (
See for yourself; it's just names and basic info, without any context or description, since that would require actual writing... but more on that later.)
Something like six weeks after community day, they finally did some work, putting together a javascript sort of skill menu that showed some of the skill trees and their layouts, but with the bizarre addition of
MS Paint-quality icons. That was actually sort of Flagship's request, since they didn't want us posting photos of the game screens, but were fine with representations of them... which looked far, far worse. Why Flagship preferred that is a question I can not answer, and a topic for another entirely too long blog entry.
In any event, the fact that the HGG guys had actually created some content worth viewing was enough of a surprise that I wound up viewing
the forum thread about it, and to my non-surprise, I wasn't halfway down the thread before one of their admins was bitching about my site and insulting me. The main mouth goes by Krazy Kaution, henceforth abbreviated to KK. All the following is quoted from that forum thread; the purple are comments by other people; the black are my replies. We'll start with KK's comment from early in the thread, apropos of nothing, which earned my first reply.
KK: Unlike Flux, we bring you good content and not old shit lol. So I'm going to be creating a new post all about surges.
I seldom view their forums (because of this sort of thing and since the misinformation would drive me mad) and post there almost never (I had 3 posts in 2 years prior to this thread.) but I couldn't let this one slide. So I made a reply, starting off quoting one of their fanboy posse (who like all of them, gets the game info from my site and then returns to HGG to discuss it).
Re: BLADEMASTER SKILL TREEHe would have to give credit to HGG if it ain't altered enough, which snakefuckerer anonymous dosen't want too (I don't mind him i guess just like that name )
I've posted links and news about every interview HGG has posted. They never link to incgamers. Besides not pointing to the 25k word write up I did about com day that every other hgl fansite linked to, I've posted an original interview with a FSS employee the last 3 Fridays, none of which have been mentioned in the HGG news. Who doesn't credit, again?
As for this skill menu, I agreed with what KK said. I didn't see any point in making a skill calculator when we don't know more than slvl 1 about the skills, and we know nothing about how they'll scale with the clvl up, which will likely be more important than the slvl changes, which will not increase damage in most cases. Come beta NDA ending, real skill calculators will appear and those will be worth the time to program and play with.
KK's photos of the game screens (I have shots of every skill menu in the game too, but I haven't posted them or created representations of them since I signed an NDA at com day.) had a few more/different stats than I posted when I did the char updates weeks ago, but 1) all the values will change before launch, and 2) I concentrated more on info than numbers since I thought it more valuable to post info on how skills will be used, what they work like, etc, rather than numbers that are meaningless out of context.
Also, I don't read these forums much since it would drive me crazy to not (advertise) by posting links to current info and screenshots, but I can't let this one pass. HGG's wiki has 67 content pages and 990 edits since launch. The hellgatewiki.com has 387 content pages and 4440 edits since launch. There's just no comparison in size, quality, depth, currentness, etc. Furthermore, none of the hellgatewiki pages are cut and paste from hgl.com, as what, maybe 40 of the hgg db pages (all the items, all the monsters, all the levels, etc) are? And that's not even mentioning that HGG has no image gallery, or movie hosting, or archive listing of hgl interviews and features and magazine scans, etc.
You guys can prefer different sites for the forums or chat or admins or whatever you like, but at least be honest about the quality and amount of relative info.
Sp3tSnAz, one of their many mods, replied.
A number of your credits though don't only say the original site's name and not the actual address of the site, and if I ever news that, I say it was found on your website. However whenever we find something on another site we always provide a link to it, but rather than saying you saw it on guru thanks to another site, you just link the site. A lot of the stuff you news you put into your image gallery, which means that we leave that to your site's credit as you do not point to original links of those so we can't news them as well....
The first oh... 70 or so pages on the hellgate wiki were transferred over from original html versions of the pages when we set up the wiki last year, and that killed all of the links and formatting. Formatting wasn't hard to redo, but no, I didn't bother to google around and find all of the original sources of the bill roper and max schaefer and other quotes. I think the vast majority of those have been replaced by more current info by now anyway. I do always credit a source on original writing, (since that's someone's content and opinion and may be wrong) but when it's a quote by bill roper or whoever, I'm less concerned. There's a pretty high churn rate on wiki quotes getting replaced during game development, and honestly, do you think any fan gives a damn if the original interview was conducted by gamespot, or gamespy, or inhellgate, etc? Of course not.
Given how much you guys complained about me clinging to some misguided journalistic principles back when I was reporting on publicly available HGL info that you decided your readers didn't deserve to know, I find it pretty ironic how you perpetually return to beating this one dead horse.
As for screenshots, I credit where I find new screenshots in the news post, but not so much on the shot captions. I've written something like 2000 of them by this point, so even if I'd started doing it, I'd probably have gotten lazy by now anyway. You'll look long and hard to find a fansite with an image gallery that's got source credits for all of the shots. None of the german hgl sites, the korean ones, SuE's czech site, etc have source credit for all of their shots. I notice the few shots you've added have zero info about where they came from, aside from the ones of Brennan's templar, which lack any source links.
Besides spez's (civilized, intelligent) reply, KK had leapt on my first short reply as well, and as befits his status, his reply was entertainingly insane, and rather a barrel of sitting duck fish, to boot. I certainly had no trouble (and some pleasure) Fisking it to bits.
KK: Sorry Flux, you can attack us saying we don't "credit" but you fail to see what Credit actually implies.
Actually, I was just making a point about how you'd rather not share info with your readers than have to credit another site for creating/breaking it.KK: You talk about your wiki as if it had good information on it. Well here, ill give you a little insight as to how "good" it is.
Looking at the skills list for the Blademaster you have these skills listed in your wiki:
Fire Aura
Aura of Holy Wind
Grand Aura
Slam
Path of Righteousness
Now, let's see here... nope not on the list of skills I've seen the blademaster use. I could be wrong, but the images of the skills trees that I'm looking at has none of these on them... maybe Flagship Studios fucked up and forgot to put them in Alpha!
I haven't posted any info from the alpha, other than linking to those welcome message pages that are publicly accessible. Are you implying that your info comes from the NDA'ed alpha?
Furthermore, your argument is that you have 1 page, in your entire wiki, that you updated yesterday, that's more current than a comparable page in my wiki, which I updated with community day info a month ago? Wow, congrats. You might want to look into your items and monsters and general info and flagship sections, when you take a break from congratulating yourself over this great blademaster success.
As for the older skills on my blademaster page, you'll note that 1) I list lots of changes that have been made during development, since readers like to know where the game was as well as where it is now, and 2) that I put in more info than just the skill hover, and that those older skills say things like, "This sounds more like a Guardian aura than a Blademaster one, so we won't be surprised if it doesn't make the final cut." on them, as a disclaimer.KK: You can't possibly think that your Wiki is the best source of information when it clearly contains crap that is either months old, or never were. I think you have some work to do, you know, all that verifying of information on your wiki that you are oh so proud to have "made".
I know you're proud that it only took you 6 weeks to get around to transcribing (now outdated) skill hover info from community day, but you do realize that like 75% of the hgg wiki is still direct cut and paste from hgl.com, circa August 2006, right? A saying about glass houses and stone throwing register in your memory anywhere?KK: Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason you initially weren't invited to Community Day? Perhaps, just maybe, you aren't a very good site admin and you have done things in the past to piss off Flagship Studios. If you are wondering what I'm talking about, maybe you should check your e-mail history, there should be something in there regarding leaked Hunter.
Which explains why I was invited to FSS 3 weeks later, the first fansite admin to visit? Also, I'm also kind of amazed how happy you are to admit, publicly, that you'll gladly withhold information from your readers for an imagined friendship with flagship CMs. That's not something I'd be real proud of, personally, but I guess you've got your own priorities.KK: I loved the part where you were a month late on posting news that the alpha actually started, that was cute.
Like everyone else, I posted about the imminent alpha when bill roper talked about it at the Asian launch event in late May. And I posted about the official Alpha page June 1st, when I was first tipped off to its existence. I note the first hgg post about the alpha page was made on... June 1st.
I think you made 5 assertions in this post, and 4 of them are demonstrably incorrect. You're really not very bright, are you, KK? No wonder Scapes and your other coworkers are so often embarrassed by your antics.
I've not returned to the thread since last week, so I don't know if apoplexy ensued, or they just deleted it and banned me, or what. I have not seen any of their admins in my forum during the past week, so perhaps it at least served some purpose...
As I said in the beginning, the dynamics of this whole thing are basically identical to how they were in the early D2 days. There were other sites that were about as busy as Diabloii.net, but they had almost no content, and their chat rooms were largely comprised of fanboys, and their admins were largely there for the social interaction and since they enjoyed feeling like someone. They withered up and died come beta time, since they had no ability to turn game goodies into website content, and there were no tools at the time to automate the process.
The HGG forums are not entirely comprised of fanboys, but almost all of the fanboys are on the HGG forums, if you see the distinction. The first part of that puzzles me, since it means that most of their threads have a weird dichotomy. There are intelligent, insightful arguments and discussions about some new news item, and then every other or third post is someone with a lot of l33t in their forum name, babbling about "roxor grphaics" and "lol hedshots!" I guess the adults there just learn to tune out the babble, since I don't believe their forums have tools to allow muting of individuals.
One unusual aspect of the site is that of their 7 or 8 admins, KK is one of the only ones who actually does any work. It's not very good work, and he's never written an original word of content that I've seen, but he did transcribe the skill info from screenshots to that javascript skill menu with the MS Paint icons, and trust me, finding someone to volunteer to work on your fansite who will even do that much is a minor miracle. We went through hundreds of volunteers during the heyday of Diabloii.net, and 99% of them did maybe half a page of whatever they'd agreed to work on before they vanished. People like the idea of being part of a popular website, but what they really want is to chat/mod the forums and bask in the glory of having "mod" or "admin" for their forum title. They might post some news once in a while if someone sends them a link, but that's about it. Actually writing up something original or editing or organizing screenshots is completely out of the question. If they wanted to do that they'd be running their own fansite.
So KK is kind of an oddity, in that he's a slobbering fanboy, who actually does content. Occasionally. In any normal circumstance I think the guys who actually run/own HGG would have cut him loose months ago. (I've spoken with some of the other HGG admins in private and they've apologized for KK's troll actions in my forum and said they think he reflects really poorly on their website.) But since he's about the only one doing any content there, how can they? They're stuck with a guy who starts website feuds, gets banned from other HGL sites for being a foul-mouthed troll, curses anyone who disagrees with him on their forums, brags incessantly, and has, at best, a tenuous connection to reality.
I mean that literally, by the way. It's not an insult, it's a description. I wasn't exaggerating for the sake of the argument in my forum reply; almost their entire wiki is 11 months out of date, and most of it is directly copied from the original site. At the time of the forum post, their entire website literaly had 1 page, updated that day, that had slightly more info than my page on the same subject. (A situation that was swiftly rectified, of course.) Even then though, my wiki has comprehensive information, with a history of skill development, information about how the skills work, links to screenshots of them, and so forth. I would never consider simply transcribing a bunch of skill hovers and posting that without context, since it's not very useful information to the vast majority of readers who have never yet had a chance to play the game.
KK had no such reservations, and not only did he transcribe some screenshot info and post it without an original word of analysis or insight or image added, he was immensely proud of his effort, to the point that he started bragging, completely without provocation, about how they didn't have "old shit lol" like Flux did. And this was despite the fact that my wiki had something like 4x more pages than theirs, that almost every other content page on his site was nearly a year out of date. Did he really think no one would call him on it? That none of his readers were aware of the overall quality of his wiki vs. mine?
I find it quite amusing, in a "Christ at the state of kids these days" sort of way, and it's almost refreshing. I work on a gaming site for an audience comprised primarily (as is all pop culture) of vulgarians, and I'm pretty vulgar myself at times. Plus I'm eagerly awaiting the same game as all of my readers. That being admitted, I do try to use my mind in other areas; I read a lot of intelligent political and science blogs, I've been reading a lot of philosophy and intellectual nonfiction for the past year, and while I don't socialize much (or want to), when I do hang out the people I hang with are bright, educated adults. Malaya's got a PhD, our friends are well-educated and authors or scientists or lawyers, etc. I'm far from a sophisticate, but at the same time it's kind of refreshing to descend to a level where an antagonist thinks that calling me "snakefucker" is the height of rhetorical wit.
Speaking of, I'm mildly curious to see how this plays out. KK is clearly a bit off. Not right in the head, as a friend of mine often says, and leaving aside the isuse of just what's wrong with him, the kid is clearly a ticking time bomb. In lo these many years, I've seen dozens of fanboys like him come and go, and it's always just a matter of time. A very, very few of them mature and mellow. Far more frequently they implode and vanish, or explode and get banned. They exist by manufacturing a constant state of conflict with outside targets, but eventually that unstable center can not hold. They turn some minor tiff with a coworker into a war, or get criticized by their readers and throw a shit sandwich into the buffet of their forum banquet with indiscriminate bannings or flaming private messages, or they get angry about something the company or its representatives do and turn on their former idols. It's always ugly and dramatic, for hell hath no fury like a fanboy spurned, and eventually they self destruct and the grown ups, if there are any, have to step in and try to restore order.
I'm making no predictions about KK's fate, since I've had only very limited interactions with him, but trust me on one thing; this little contretemps, if it can even be called that, will be a mere footnote in his biography by the end of the year. Fanboys like him never lack for feuds, and while he's in way over his head this time, I'm just bemused by the whole thing. Sooner or later (sooner) he'll sink his fangs into someone just like him, and then it'll get ugly as poo is flung in both directions. At this point he's got no one else to fight with, since there really aren't any other active, English-language, full-service HGL fansites (others are niche, or news aggregators). When a bunch more sprout up during the beta, as happens with every game, and they're at least partly staffed by fanboy trolls of KK's ilk, and start showing him what stealing content and not crediting really means, the fireworks will begin.
My strategy is to enjoy the show, while keeping busy providing the best content and news and trying to maintain a mature tone in my forums, and enough content to sticky the eyeballs of the surge of new readers the beta and ensuing game release will bring. The younger-skewing, content-lite sites can roshambo each other for the fanboy forum traffic all they want, since I know those kids are ravenous for game info, and will eventually end up reading every word I post, even if they retain their primary loyalty to some other site's forum. Only time will tell how successful this approach will be, but as much as D2's early fansite history is repeating itself, the odds seem good.
That aside, what I find most interesting about the forum drama quoted above is the psychological aspect of it. Why are they so hung up on the issue of giving credit? You know it's not something they ever care or think about in real life, and if any of the objectors are in college yet, sites like
TurnItIn.com are their personal garlic and holy water. So why do they bring it up every chance they get (it's come up in numerous minor arguments on my site's forums as well)?
They say, time and again, that I didn't/don't fully credit the sites I got the quotes from that I sprinkled into my early site content. That's not actually true; I did link to everything at first; what I didn't do was type out the full URL on every citation. So I'd quote Bill Roper or some other Flagship guy, from an interview conducted somewhere, and my credit would say, "Bill Roper Interview" with that text linked to the actual source. I sometimes said, "fansite interview" when it originated from a fansite, but I always put in the actual link, and I usually specified the site, ala "gamespot interview." I debated about that at the time, and really wanted to change it when we converted the site content into a wiki, but I was lazy and didn't bother. As you know if you ever read the actual wikipedia.org, they never put full links into page entries. It's editorially-frowned upon. Instead they strongly encourage summarizing and encapsulating rather than quoting, and their style guide utilizes footnote type citations, with in-text links to the bottom of the page, where the full links can (usually) be found. If I'd done my wiki in tha fashion (as I should have), there would have been about 95% fewer quotes, and
none of the links would have been in the text. Imagine the complaining about that, if the source citations were found only in the footnotes, which everyone knows no one ever scrolls down to?
They do have one point worth complaining about though, and that's what I said in the forum post. I did the original site content in HTML, and when we changed layouts around and introduced a wiki, we did an automated conversion of all the pages from HTML to wiki format. There were something like 80 pages of content and that point, and all of the links and formatting got partially/largely destroyed during the conversion. This rendered lots of those early quotes into something like, "fansite interview" without a link to where it came from. Which is poor journalism, but at that point in mid-2006 I was busy adding dozens of new pages and updating all of the existing pages, and I knew there would be a heavy churn rate of continuing updates. Besides, as I said in the forum post... no one cares. No reader gives any flavor of flaming damn whether the interview was conducted by some anonymous reporter at gamespot, or gamespy, or flagshipfanatic.com, or Flux's private interview session, etc. Readers just want the info. The only ones who care are... the webmasters of the fansites, and even amongst them the only real concern comes from those who are new to this.
It's probably a bad sign of the regard with which I hold human nature, but I've been doing this for years, and at this point I don't even seriously consider the possibility that everything original I post won't be ripped off and stolen as quickly as I put it online. The fact that it's not happening constantly with HGL speaks far more about the low quality of the content on other HGL sites (at least the English language ones) than it does about some inspirational upsweep of integrity on the part of fansite administrators.
In any event, the fact that the HGG guys are always bitching about every possible time I didn't fully credit the source of something means they must always do it when they get the chance. Right? *snort*
The vast majority of their news is just posted as news; without any source where they saw it, unless one of their readers posted a link to it in the forum first. Needless to say, they've never credited my site, or any other English language HGL site, for a news source, and I know for an absolute fact that I've posted dozens of news items before they did, since I often check their site after I find news and post it, since I know they'll do as they did in this thread, and say I stole it from them. With a time machine, evidently. Furthermore, I wasn't exaggerating in my post. Their wiki really is at least 2/3 direct cut and paste from hellgatelondon.com, and I don't mean 2/3 of each page. I mean 2/3 of the pages are 100% identical to the versions on the official site, which were posted last August and have not been updated since. (For example. Locations:
HGG vs.
HGL.com. Mods:
HGG vs.
HGL.com. And so on.)
The bulk of HGG's content, to this day, is literally a wiki-fied version of the official site, right down to the formatting, the exact same thumbnail images (which is good for a laugh, since they don't link to anything on the HGG pages since changing the URLs or copying over the full size screenshots would have been actual work), etc. And no, of course there's never a mention that all the pages are direct cut and paste from someone else's work. Giving credit is only important when other people don't do it as they think it should be done, I guess.
What most interests me about this is the pop psych angle... why do they care? Why bring up the credit/not-credit thing every time? I guess they think it's a winning argument, though that one seems a stretch to me. "We don't have shit for content and we're slow on news, but some tiny amount of the quotes on Flux's vastly-superior site don't say exactly where they were quoted from!" Well, they've got me there. Guilty as charged. Why do they bring it up, though? It seems self-evidently self-defeating, since they can't really believe their readers give a shit. This isn't exactly a journalism ethics course; we're fansites about a computer game, and even if my site, or some other site, stole every word, never gave credit, etc, the vast majority of interested surfers would still bookmark it, since they want the info and don't give a shit where it originated.
I'd say the constant references to me stealing are a sign of desperation, but I don't think that's it either. Not yet, at least. Their forums are busy still, even on the very micro scale of this pre-game HGL interest. Is it sloth? It's certainly easier to accuse someone else of stealing and then dismissing them from your beautiful mind than it is to spend the hours it takes to upgrade your own content, and insulting others always takes a person's attention away from their own problems. I know it gets me through the day when I read politics or blogs by other (successful) authors.
Maybe it's the ability to summarize and encapsulate? I think nothing of that; it's just what I do in blog posts for fun, but a lot of people can't write very well, and don't have much reading comprehension, and it's very difficult for them to turn information they read into information they write. Especially if they have to reformat it, or condense it, or combine it with existing page info. I do that sort of thing automatically, and I don't mean to brag, since I don't think it's really a skill. It's just what I do naturally, since I usually (and not always correctly) think I can express a point or make an argument better than the other guy did in his original version of it. To people who can't write and who have a great deal of trouble turning a new gamespot feature into four paragraphs explaining how
Ranged Combat works in Hellgate: London, it must seem almost like a magic trick. Like cheating, since all they can do is quote, or link, or plagiarize, while the writer can effortlessly consume the information and regurgitate it in a more useful form.
I think it's some of all those points, but mostly it's just a difference in outlook. I don't really pay any mind to being ripped off since I know it'll happen and I am used to it by now, but also because I know I'll create a ton of more content in the future and replace/upgrade all that was just stolen. For people who can't write and don't create content, anything that is created seems supremely important, since it's so rare and special to them. It's like the first time a little kid makes his own sandwich, or takes a successful dump. Things adults don't notice after decades of doing them are new and fascinating to a child.
Anyway, this went absurdly long, but I only blog once a week lately, so you can read a paragraph a day and derive weeks of entertainment! Besides, I needed something to keep me awake for an hour longer, since I keep waking up after 5 hours of sleep, then lying motionless while I worry about nearly certain doom courtesy of my impending future. So maybe this'll help me sleep through the
night morning.
This post is 6200 words, if you were curious.
Labels: Hellgate: London
