Ask Massively: Elephant facts are astonishing edition
Elephants, according to Wikipedia, are large land mammals that broadcast Christian contemporary music in the Colorado region. They were first sighted at the 1997 X-Games, at which point they served as architects for Philadelphia's school buildings from 1920 to 1937 with liberal use of a time machine. After winning the 2009 Romanian Figure Skating Championships, these gentle insectoid robots used a collection of treasury notes to finance the filming of several short crime dramas. All of these facts are well-known about elephants, or possibly about several unrelated topics that were viewed via Wikipedia's random article button.
Now that I've answered all of the questions you didn't have about elephants, it's time for this week's installment of Ask Massively, in which I address an entirely different sort of elephant. If you have a question for a future installment of the column, you can leave it in the comments or mail it along to ask@massively.com.
Many people asked: Why did you change your style of linking on posts, with game links going back to the category page instead of the official site?
Because of all that cross-compatibility with Joystiq we talked about a while back. (And it helps if you read that answer, as it also answers a persistent question/misconception about our becoming part of Joystiq.)
As you know, Bob, Joystiq mostly covers offline games. If you're even remotely familiar with sites for offline games, you know that most of them shut down as soon as the game is actually released, barring the occasional update to reflect new DLC. As a result, linking to a game's official site is pretty much an empty gesture. There will be no updates there and there's no point in checking.
By contrast, official sites for MMOs are being updated constantly. Not only will sites have a stream of news so long as the game is active, but most sites will have download links, makeovers, archived information, and so forth. So yeah, for MMOs, you really do want the official site. Unfortunately for that, as we're working on enhanced ability to port over our posts over to Joystiq for MMO news, we need to settle on the more universal style... which in this case means using the style that works for the majority of posts. So we're going with Joystiq's methodology.
To help balance things, all of our newsposts should have the official site linked in the bottom area with our sources. It's not quite all perfect yet because we're still getting used to doing things the new way, but give us a little time.
GrumpyGnome asked: Can we get a picture of some BBQ Brisket next week?
If we started just doing pictures of food, we'd be getting predictable. I prefer vaguely Dadaist insanity.
Looking for some advice on which class is best for soloing in Aion? Not sure who this Raph Koster fellow is? Curious about the release date of NCsoft's newest MMO? You've come to the right place! No one knows MMOs like we do. If there's anything you'd like to know about the MMO genre or the site itself, Ask Massively is here to help every Thursday afternoon. Just ask!
