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Life in 140 characters or less: My first eight years on Twitter
"I am sick of cell phones." I posted that on Twitter on November 16th, 2006, during a time in my life when I made a living writing phone reviews. It was a one-off rant during a particularly busy week, and I didn't expect anyone to read it. Little did I know that Twitter would grow into the social media titan that it is today, and that particular missive would live on as my first-ever "tweet." I confess, I didn't particularly like the term "tweet," even if it was unofficially adopted by the community early on. Even Twitter itself didn't acknowledge the word until the company trademarked it in 2009.
The Daily Grind: What was your first time like?
Having just become a Contributing Editor this month, I found out there are a lot of things I didn't know about MMOs, not to mention some things I didn't know about reporting for an MMO website. This experience has been exciting for me because I like to learn new things. You have to admit, there is a bit of a thrill each time you run into something new for the first time, right? One of the first MMOs for many of the old-school gamers was Ultima Online. Thirteen years ago, Richard Garriott busted this innovation in gaming onto the scene. The idea of being online while mutually experiencing game content was an extremely invigorating prospect for many players, especially in a graphical world. Soon after, we saw hits like EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, Guild Wars, and, of course, World of Warcraft. With each of the MMOs that followed, there was always that sense of trying to capture that feeling of stepping into a virtual world for the first time. What was it like the first time you stepped into an MMO? Do you remember that feeling? What was it about that experience that made you want to come back for more? And with the slew of MMOs coming out soon, do you have hopes for any of those games to capture that feeling again? Or is that even possible? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The (lack of) reality in the Caverns of Time
I've always considered the Caverns of Time to be like the theme park of Azeroth -- as we've discussed before, there aren't really any reasons to go to some of those instances in the first place, and the whole thing seems just so ludicrous. If we wipe, or we don't go in there, and Thrall isn't able to escape Durnholde or Arthas isn't able to murder Stratholme or any of the other premises they have set up, then wouldn't the world as we know it change? It seems like fan service -- Blizzard wants us to visit these great parts of lore, and it just seems to me like they've cooked up a weak story around getting us there.Which is why I was surprised to read this post over on Mystic Chicanery. They argue that the Caverns of Time are actually the most "real" of all the instances in the game. If we go into Utgarde Pinnacle, for example, and murder King Ymiron, there's no reason why he should be in there again the next time we head in. And yet he is -- we can go in and murder him time and time again, doing the same thing, and getting loot every single time. But in CoT, there's a logical explanation for why the instances are always the same: to the people we're encountering in the instances, it's the first time we've met them. From the outside world, the CoT instances may seem strange (the first time I was in Durnholde, we wiped with Thrall, and I jokingly checked with my guild to see if Thrall was still standing in Orgrimmar, alive and well -- he was), but inside the continuity of those instances, they work.Of course, we do still get different loot from it every time, as the MC post notices. But it is quite a thought: even though the Caverns of Time instances are the ones in the game that seem to least need us messing around in there, they also might just be the most logical.
