I posted a few times about the various bullshit involved with the HGL fansite, and "competing" with other fansites for attention and news and such. I don't make a habit of talking about that sort of thing, since it's dirty laundry that my various website associates prefer not to air in public. But I just saw this one tonight, and it made me laugh, so here it goes.
Diablo 3 was announced at Blizzard's World Wide Invitational 2 weeks ago, on June 28th. That same day, an ex-Blizzard North employee named Mike Huang posted an entry on his blog about D3 and his thoughts on it. It was an interesting post since he compared the design direction Blizzard Irvine is taking to the original project they began at Bliz North, and he's one of the few insiders to have talked about that sort of thing.
I saw his post a few days later, but didn't post news about it on diii.net since I was trying to get Mike to do the full seven-question interview I got
Ben Boos to do, and didn't want to scoop myself. Mike didn't seem interested, so I finally gave up on that on Friday, and
posted news about his blog post. (Ironically, I heard from him later that day via email, and the interview might happen anyway.)
What makes this funny is that tonight I couldn't find any D3 news worth posting, and wound up taking one of my rare looks at the competition, diablofans.com. Lo and behold, they've got
brand new news! It seems that ex-Bliz Norther Mike Huang made a blog post with his thoughts about D3, and here comes the news masters at diablofans.com to bring their readers that breaking story. Two weeks after Mike posted it. A day after it was main page news on diii.net.
What a coincidence! They must have been running google searches and got lucky, since there's certainly no way they could have seen the news on the only other major English language Diablo 3 site, shamelessly ripped it off, and made up a name like "Lyquid" to attribute the tip to. No, that could
never happen. Not in a friendly, tight-knit fan community like we have around Diablo 3.
You'll be equally shocked to hear that diablofans never posted any news about the Ben Boos interview I conducted last week, in which he gave his thoughts on D3 from the perspective of a D2 designer. Even though that news item got
wide circulation on general gaming sites. They probably never saw it. Or if they did, they must have decided it wasn't relevant to their fans. They wouldn't deprive their readers of interesting D3 content just because the source of the content was another fansite. After all, it wasn't like my interview with Ben was exactly the same thing as the Mike Huang news post, but 5x longer and more detailed. Oh wait...
And yes, we've still got like, 2 years before D3 is going to be released. Oh the fun we'll have! It's almost as if this sort of behavior
reminds me of something... hmm... nah. It's all very, very different, now.
Labels: diablo iii, fansites
