Do You Have Info?

There have been two stories that WoW.com has broke under my name in the past week:

• Patch 3.2 Going Live
• Cataclysm races leaked

Each story relied on anonymous sources (well, anonymous to you) that had information pertaining to the facts which were being reported on.  Each story was cited as such, with the words crafted in a way to express the source’s validity.

But yet here we are, the evening of the big Cataclysm leak, and the crying over WoW.com not revealing its sources has reached the worst levels I’ve ever seen.  People seem to think they’re entitled to the same trust that individuals place in myself and fellow editors at our site, and feel that without their personal seal of approval we have nothing more than unsubstantiated rumors.

Well, okay then.  I’m fine with people questioning or holding up a skeptical eye to our news, especially with something like this.  But when people shut their brains off and just start yelling, it tends to get to me. (Same with the “town halls” going on right now).  And while most of those people who are yelling are getting banned from our site over the next few hours (there’s so many of them), there are some facts I think are appropriate to put out there:

First, we would never stake our reputation on posting news like this if we were not supremely confident in our sources.

Second, the sources are not just one person saying something.  There’s a lot of stuff we’ve got with only one person saying it.  We have no idea if it’s true. It could be false.  But like a good journalist, when more than one person says the exact same thing, and are in a position where they’d know the facts at hand, it becomes valid enough to write about and bring to the public.

Third, no one will reveal their sources.  This is a founding principal of modern journalism.  Anonymous sources stay anonymous.

If I were to reveal the sources, I would likely be fired from my job at WoW.com.  I would be untrustworthy and show a clear lack of decision making capability.  I would be a person who cannot handle confidential information, and thus would be someone who could jeopardizes the welfare of the site on a daily basis.

If I were to reveal the sources I would likely not be able to get another job with responsibilities and tasks which I enjoy spending my life doing, and would be forced to be a burger expert at McDonalds.  And I’d be lucky to even be able to land that job in this economy.

I’m not going to reveal the sources under any circumstance.  If I did, I would be ruining the lives of people who put their trust in me.  That is something I will not, cannot do.  It goes against every ethical fiber of my being.

If you’re reading this site then you know what I do for a living; I write and edit posts at WoW.com. Some of these are true blog posts, others are news articles, and still others are encyclopedic features that take months of work. I want to ramble for a minute about diversification in blog posts.

Here’s a bold statement for you all: talking just about World of Warcraft is very boring. One of the great things about the game is that it lets you combine many other aspects of your life into it. Have a bunch of friends that play it? You’re probably going to spend the majority of your time talking about non-Wow related stuff while you’re in game. This isn’t a bad thing, indeed it’s a great thing. The inclusion and ability for non-game related material in game will, and might have already, extended the lifetime of the game many times over.

That same diversification should be taken into account in blog posts about WoW. Note that I’ve made a distinction above of the different types of posts WoW.com has. Blog posts are very different from encyclopedic reference posts. You shouldn’t include a Monty Python joke in a 50 page knowledge dump about in-game mounts. But you should include a Monty Python joke (or two) in a blog post where you answer random questions.

An example of this was The Queue that I wrote today.

I’ve reached this conclusion about diversification and inclusion of external non-game content based on the feedback we’ve had to The Queue. When something like Hawaiian Pizza is mentioned, we’ll get 75 to 100 comments talking about Hawaiian Pizza. Post some music or comic reference, guaranteed to get lots of comments on those references too.

Last week my fellow editor Alex Ziebart included some music to listen to while reading The Queue. People loved it, and we’ve continued to include optional reading music. The music doesn’t have a damn thing to do about WoW, but it’s still a piece which people seem interested in and want to comment on. That helps build a community, which means the site gets more traffic and will be around much longer.

Now on a scale of WoW.com, where the site is already well established, has been around a long time, and will be around for a long time to come, it doesn’t have an immediate impact on community building and traffic numbers (however we do see popular and well written articles have increased traffic, of course, just like anything else). But when everyone at WoW.com suddenly starts building communities of readership around their posts and columns, the site’s heath sky rockets. This is true for any long established blog. Just because you’re big, bad, and are pulling in billions and billions of visitors a day doesn’t mean you can’t improve. And that improvement, is, well, awesome.

This might seem like a justification for including off-topic content, and in some ways it is. But it’s also a recent epiphany of sorts on pulling in readers and keeping them here.

Anyone can have a blog, but only the special blogs will make a reader raise an eyebrow at their content.

I think I get it.

Commenters on WoW Insider get mean on Tuesdays, more so than normal.  I can spend a good hour going through and deleting comments that curse and make lude remarks.

Why Tuesday?

Because the realms are offline for maintenance and people have nothing better to do than sit around and throw bricks at one another.  Seriously, go outside and enjoy life or something.

People noticed today that the official forums were offline to some extent; that people could not post on them.  I’m going to put on my conspiracy theory hat a moment (it’s made out of tin foil) and say that there could be a chance Blizzard disabled them while the realms were offline.  Now I realize it’s probably not true and was just part of the maintenance, but man – that’s one helluva smart idea if they did that.  Disable the forums while realms are offline to stop all the asshattery that comes out to play on Tuesday maintenance.  That’s just awesome.

I really don’t get it.  Blizzard is sitting on the patch notes, etc… if they’re getting the PTRs up ASAP as Zarhym has been saying tonight, then why not just release the patch notes in a blue post and be done with all the idle speculation as to when the PTRs will be up, what will be in the patch, etc…

And to be honest, it’d make my job 100% easier.  At this point it’s Friday night around 9:45 p.m. and I’m sitting infront of my computer waiting for some updated information – all because it needs to go up on WoW Insider fast, as soon as it’s released.  Now I’m not saying that my fellow writers and I shouldn’t get this up right away – we should.  What I’m saying is that Blizzard should give us the notes early, place them under an embargo until a specific time, and let that be the way they communicate with the largest WoW sites out there (WoW Insider, MMO-Champion, World of Raids).  This constant “oh lets play the waiting game” thing is kind of getting old.

And to further illustrate how out of touch Blizzard is with their communication, which I’ve written a lot about at WoW Insider, is the fact that they don’t usually post the patch notes on the forums until a few days later.  It’s obvious that they, to some extent, rely on the official fansites (like WoR) and other news and info sites (like WI and MMO-C) to disseminate information.  When we get a few million people visiting WI in a single day because we’ve got patch notes up and stuff, well, it just goes to show where we exist on the information chain – and that chain really needs to be fixed.

It’s a little rusty.