I happened upon a curious thing this past weekend when I was digging around online. On Sunday evening I was play Halo Reach and the game always shows the number of current players online for the whole of the game, and then it has a breakdown of the gaming population based on game types as well. With those numbers in mind, I thought back to the Xbox Live activity report the week after Halo Reach was released. The chart showed that Halo Reach was #1 in the list followed by Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3 was #3. I decided to check population stats at bungie.net and the information there was quite comprehensive and easy to find and read.
Chasing my curiosity further I decided to navigate to www.callofduty.com to see if I could find any reported stats on that page. I wasn't able to find anything easily, but found myself flowing through the game pages and eventually landed myself here: http://www.infinityward.com/browse_blogs.php.
I landed on this page and to my shock I saw the following list of blogs on the front page.
This is not what I would have expected to see within the gaming community pages nor even Infinity Ward's (IW) community. I've been a gaming community user/reader for a while. Some of the biggest game forums I used to track and participate in were for Call of Duty 4 and Bad Company 2. I loved reading the posts, picking up tips, posting grumblings, and then just chatting it up on off-topic posts. I've never run across such hatred, anger, and just pure rage as these blog postings.
After seeing the IW blog pages there, I decided to roll back to the Bad Company 2 forums and then even to the Bungie forums. I've pasted images of their front pages for what I would consider the closest topic to what we see with IW here. These are not exactly the same format as what is presented through IW, but you can comparably see the difference in what is posted and how it is presented to the community.
My question here is, what kind of community plays MW2? Is this representative of all gamers and gaming communities? Has IW brought this on themselves? They have the highest grossing game of all time and still one of the most popularly played games in the world. Yes, their user base is much larger and spans further, but the reaction from these gamers is unseen in other communities. Take into consideration though that postings you view publicly may be policed by a forum admin or similar role, but I've revisited the IW blog page and they still have the same, if not more similar, topics posted on there.
Do any of the readers participate in gaming communities, whether locally or online forums? Do you have a comment to make on my observations or the online communities in general?
Welcome to the internet. First off, Halo 3 and Halo Reach are console games only. So only console users are talking. Console users, tend to be less inclined to use the PC online community for the simple reason that the game is not on the PC. If I am on my Xbox, and I want to be involved in the community, I need to go over to my PC turn it on, go to the site, and post.
ReplyDeleteWhere as with PC games, you just Alt-Tab and post a rant / comment on the website. It is way easier to do. Which means...
You heard of the silent majority? Well the minority + the internet = Lots of angry posts. People don't often post about how awesome they thing something is. If something it awesome, it makes people smile and they go on about there day. If something makes you angry, however, you seek vengeance, you want people to pay and you want people to know you are angry. Where best to do this but online... and particularly on the forums.
And getting back to my previous point, you will just find less people as willing to get up from their console and post online unless they really have something to say. And then it will probably be more well laid out and spoken because they went through extra effort to post, as opposed to just making a flippant remark.
So, I don't think it is reflective of the MW2 community, but more so over the fact that people who game online and on the PC tend to have a very vocal minority who rant and rave about everything.
I look back to this famous image:
http://icbf.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/boycottmw2.jpg
http://www.shrani.si/f/1Y/ca/9M7tbLc/1258048783080.jpg
Welcome to PC gaming. Everyone makes a stink.
I've been strictly console gaming and when I do visit forums I visit for my platform, which is usually Xbox 360. I have seen people comment and post on both sides of this argument. When I was on the COD4 forums, people actually had a lot more constructive conversations going on about clan practice, weapons and claymore placements. Every so often you get a rant.
ReplyDeleteOn the BC2 side of things, most of the posts are people starting weapon threads or other general ideas and information. The worst flaming posts I noticed were about the Lag that is associated w/ EA games. Once that was finally touched up, most people were quiet. I do note thought that people still rant on this recurring issue where people have their stats zeroed out randomly.