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Tag: Tips
Ghost Recon Breakpoint: 5 More Tips For Terminator Event
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is in the middle of an invasion by Skynet, and that means killing plenty of Terminators.
Right now we’re in day three of the Terminator event and mission #2 should be releasing on February 1. With that in mind I’ve decided to delve a little deeper and talk about more tips for killing those metal rust buckets making life on Auroa just a little rougher.
#1: You Can Kite Terminators Across The Island
Have a lot of time and patience? You can kite Terminators pretty much anywhere. Kiting refers to pulling enemies away from where they would normally be hanging out.
In tip #3 for the last article I mentioned that Terminators can and will mow down an enemy base in order to get to you, and that Skell soldiers will in turn open fire on a Terminator once it is activated in their vicinity. You will know this is happening because the “faction warfare” indicator will pop up on your radar.
What you might not know is that with enough time and effort you can pull that Terminator along like a pull-string duck taking them from base to base and using it as your own personal walking turret, granted one that will prioritize your death over everything else. Awesome. Just remember that the Terminator is not in any way subtle so bringing it as your +1 to a base party is almost guaranteed to get reinforcements called in. You probably also lose out on some exp gain in the process.
If you are looking to cheese the game some people have reported success in pulling the Terminator into being submerged in water which apparently is an instant kill. This isn’t a guarantee.
#2: “I Can’t Start The Mission!”
There have been bug reports from people who are unable to start the event period. Ghost Recon doesn’t allow them to obtain the mission kicking off the whole Terminator event as it just isn’t available from Maria Schulz. The most reliable fix for this seems to be joining co-op with someone who has the mission available. You want to look for “The Coming Storm,” a green faction mission in Erewhon. Taking the mission in co-op will keep it available in single player so you are free to go back into solo mode and the rest of the missions should come up fine.
An alternate answer appears to be creating a second character. Unfortunately neither of these two options is a 100% guaranteed fix. Ubisoft is evidently aware of the problem and hopefully can provide a suitable fix before the event is done and people lose out completely.
#3: Terminator Damage Is In Two Stages
This one should be self evident given the big glowing red light that pops up once you bring a Terminator’s health down, but it’s worth noting given the confusion I’ve seen on the forums and Reddit.
Each Terminator has two stages of damage that operate differently and may be confusing. The first stage you’ll find a Terminator in is the blue bar of health that gets whittled down by many of the weapons in your armament (see below). Once you knock down the blue health bar, the Terminator will go into mode #2 where you see the big glowing red light on its chest. This is the part where you’ll absolutely need to use the Mk14 sniper to overload its circuits.
Despite what conventional wisdom will tell you, this red bar is a count up, not a countdown. So you’ll fill the bar instead of depleting it in order to overload the Terminator. A small distinction but one that might result in your fights making a little more sense and give a better idea of how close your are to killing the Terminator. You’ll know you are damaging the core because of the distinct sound that each hit makes.
#4: Mk14 Needed To Kill, Not To Damage
Conventional weapons cannot kill a Terminator, however this does not mean you are stuck using the Mk14 for the whole fight. In fact you’re likely to find just about any other weapon in your loadout is more effective at whittling down a Terminator than a slow shooting sniper rifle. Youtuber Mannocrity found that the best way to take down a Terminator is with the Stoner light machine gun kitted to effectively make it a laser.
Your mileage may vary and you might find a weapon better suited for your play style in taking down Terminators. Where the Mk14 comes in however is the stage of overloading the Terminator’s circuits. You absolutely need the Mk14 for this stage. Otherwise Terminators are classified as drones in Breakpoint’s system so if you have a weapon that is better built for taking down drones, use it. It will most likely serve you better for that first stage.
#5: Maria Schulz Has More Cosmetics
There are 21 levels of rewards for the Terminator event battle pass, however if you have some Skell credits to spend you can head over to Maria Schulz’s shop in Erewhon and buy some extra goodies for your character. Personally I like the torn arm sleeves and damaged face (see photo above). The items aren’t too expensive and it’s pretty obvious which ones are from the Terminator franchise.
Notice anything we missed? Leave a comment below.
MMO Fallout’s Tips For 2019: Consumer/Industry Edition
I am a neglectful person. First I barely acknowledge MMO Fallout hitting nine years old last year, and now I look back at the archives and find out that I never published a predictions piece for 2018? You really get your money’s worth with this website, let me tell you.
So in that vein, let’s look forward at 2019 with a new column I like to call “MMO Fallout’s Tips For 2019.” This one is for consumers and the industry, so strap in folks.
1. For The Industry, Know Your Audience: This is a big one, it’s going to prevent a lot of you from getting laid off in the coming years. 2017 and 2018 were the years that big players in the industry snubbed their noses at the consumer, and the consumer hit back with the kind of force to qualify as a crime in ten states plus the district of Columbia. I’m sure most people didn’t think we’d ever see a year where Star Wars, Battlefield, Fallout, Tomb Raider, and a whole host of other games would crash and burn in the same 12 month period, but here we are.
So lesson #1 for 2019 is know your audience, and you may notice that I didn’t say “do whatever you’re told.” You need to know your customers, and that means filtering out the voices of people who aren’t going to buy your product. For instance, you wouldn’t listen to a vegetarian’s advice on the proper way to market steak because they will never buy a steak and their threat of boycott is meaningless. Imagine that, but with video games. For example, Battlefront II took what people hated about EA’s other games (the heavy microtransaction use) and amplified it up to eleven for this release. It didn’t work.
Compare that to Spiderman, a game that while having its flaws figured out what people wanted out of a Spiderman game and they were rewarded in piles of cash money. Square Enix, despite their constant claims that people don’t want turn-based RPGs, released Octopath Traveler on the Switch and lo and behold it made bank. In fact, a lot of big publishers who ported their games over to Switch saw an enormous return on their investment. Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s almost as if we exist in a customer driven industry and listening to the customer will get you paid.
2. For Consumers, Spend What You’re Willing To Lose: This is the part where most Youtubers and consumer advocates will tell you “stop preordering,” and frankly most of you would do well by following that advice. I hate to impune on my audience or gamers in general, but the vast majority of you do not have the strength of will or patience to deal with the industry’s increasingly shoddy development practices, and you could save yourself a lot of money and anguish by simply not preordering that new game simply because it has a cool keychain that you’ll lose within the next two months.
But I’ve been writing in this industry long enough to know that making ultimatums just ensures that people are going to do the opposite of what you say, so instead of “don’t preorder,” I will suggest that you don’t spend what you’re not willing to lose. Is $20 too much for Planetside Arena if the game comes out and it sucks? Great, don’t preorder it. If that game in early access were to cease development tomorrow, would you not buy it today? Then don’t buy it. Why subsidize a disappointing failure when there are so many others willing to throw their money away? And let’s be fair, there’s millions of games available for you to play. If you don’t get that release now, are you really going to miss it in five months if it isn’t good?
3. For the Industry, Start Working On Those Lootbox Replacements: I consider myself to be pro-market, which is a fancy term meaning that I sit in my ivory tower and watch people be exploited by the evil games industry. Big thanks to my college civics professor for this apt description.
I think it’s safe to say that loot boxes, while not about to die completely, are in a decline across AAA premium priced games, as well as more notable free to play titles. Developers are going to need to move on to safer waters if they want to remain viable (or avoid the ire of the base) in the years ahead. Thankfully the work has already been done by Epic Games, and many developers are moving on to seasonal battle passes as a way to sell cosmetics without their game being banned in Belgium.
Personally, I love the battle pass. It’s basically an incentive to keep playing the game and just do what you’d do anyway, and I assume tit for tat it probably provides a more stable basis of income for many developers. Particularly I like it in games where you have the ability to cheapen or fully pay for future passes if you maange to do well enough, such as Fortnite or Realm Royale. There’s also merit in the Annual Pass, similar to Destiny 2 where you pay $35 and it gives you access to expansions over the next year.
This does mean actually developing content so we’ll see how it goes.
4. For Consumers, Don’t Place Your Bets On Launch: MMO gamers will be well aware of this tactic because they’ve been dealing with it for years. How many MMORPGs have launched with the promise that they will never go free to play with cash shops? How many have kept that promise? Unlike the MMO industry, however, where free to play is done to avoid bankruptcy and sunsetting titles, the rest of the industry is a bit more insidious in its operations. In case you haven’t noticed, 2018 brought in a number of titles conveniently delaying their cash shops until a while after the game launched. Call of Duty, Red Dead Redemption, Battlefield, and a few others come to mind.
Because they weren’t ready? Nonsense, whenever we see games that launch too early the cash shop is always the first thing to be finished and presented in its full form. Is it because they don’t want review scores and day one purchases to be affected by the presence of a cash shop? I think we’re getting closer to the truth. 2019 is going to see more games pulling this maneuver, launching without predatory pricing models and then putting them in once the initial sales are done and everyone is past their refund limit.
5. For The Industry, Choose China Carefully: The Chinese gaming market is one that has only become more divisive over the past year. Culturally Chinese gamers see less of a fuss in cheating, leading to many western games being overrun with hackers to the extent that the Chinese government has made cheat development for online games a jailable offense. I wish I was joking. The market is also massive and growing at an exponential rate, leading many developers to begin catering to this growing audience. And that’s where the problem lies.
You see, for as massive as the Chinese market is, it is also under the authoritarian rule of a virtual dictatorship that puts strict controls on what its population can see. This came to a head late 2018 when Ubisoft made a large number of aesthetic changes to Rainbow Six Siege in order to ready the title for release in China, sparking a backlash by existing players. PUBG has faced a nationwide ban because the concept of survival deviates from socialist core values, and numerous games have allegedly seen demands to make changes for various offenses including blood/gore, sexualized female characters, “inharmonious chat,” missions including fraud, and rewards based on rank.
With 2019 here, you can certainly expect more developers to start altering their titles to pander to the Chinese government. Whether western gamers will be willing to tolerate it is another factor entirely.
Bonus: Get Yourself A VPN: Those of you who read MMO Fallout know that I’m not a big fan of sneaky data collection, but you might not know that I do a fair bit of work through a VPN. A proper VPN can keep your data secure, your identity private, and even allow you access to content that is arbitrarily closed off to your country. to your country. Thanks to my VPN service (I use NordVPN, but there’s a good review of the best ones here), I can trick Netflix into letting me watch Rings, the 2016 horror movie where a killer video is uploaded onto the internet, and is exclusive to the UK for some reason. I watched the cursed video from behind a VPN, and now Samara thinks I live jolly old London England. She won’t be finding me anytime soon.
Atlas Reactor: 11 Tips To Do Well
Atlas Reactor is the latest game from Trion Worlds, a turn-based competitive MOBA with heavy focus on twitch-based gameplay. With the free weekend starting, Trion Worlds has passed along a list of eleven tips to help players outsmart and outgun the competition.
After reading the list below, feel free to check out Atlas Reactor at no cost until June 5th.
1. Dashes are incredibly useful. Use them to dodge Dash phase and Blast phase attacks, or even save allies by dashing into the path of a shot meant for them!
2. Sometimes the best move is standing still. Traps laid down during the Prep phase can punish players that Dash or Move.
3. Knockbacks and Pulls are very powerful when used in conjunction with Traps. These displacement effects always happen at the end of the Blast phase.
4. Being next to a wall will reduce damage taken from that direction by 50%, unless the attacker is also adjacent to you.
5. You can “chase” a player by right-clicking on an opponent (or Ally!). When you chase an opponent you will try to move where they move to. Chasers will move at the end of the Move phase.
6. If you think an enemy is going to chase you, make sure to run through some ally traps; you won’t take damage, but your enemy will!
7. Free Action abilities do not count towards the usual limit of 1 ability per turn; if you don’t use an ability, you can sprint (double movement), which can help get you back to the fight or out of a bad situation.
8. When choosing where to move, you can right-click more than once to set waypoints, which are great for moving around traps or through powerups on the way to your destination.
9. There are light indicators at the base of powerups that will tell you when they will spawn. Landing on one when all 3 light indicators are lit up means you will automatically get that powerup next round.
10. You can see powerups even in the fog of war. If you see one disappear you know an enemy is around that area.
11. During Decision Mode, mousing over an enemy will display the cooldowns of his abilities, letting you know if s/he can dash or not. Mousing over allies shows the abilities they are targeting this turn. Holding Alt will display all of this information at once. If you Alt + Click, you will ping the map.
Top 5: More Tips For DarkScape Survival
[Update 10/2/15: A game update has rendered some of this list obsolete.]
The previous Top 5 tips for DarkScape has been insanely popular, but recent updates have made several options on the list either already obsolete or about to be obsolete. With that in mind, and considering I am further in the game than last week, I decided to go back and produce five more tips for survival in DarkScape.
5. Stay On Top Of Updates/Plans
This one is pretty important. Since content updates aren’t coming to DarkScape for a fair amount of time, you might be inclined to ignore patch notes during content updates. This isn’t advisable. For instance, if you didn’t check the patch notes you may not be aware that entering the abyss no longer skulls players, or that a toolbelt has been added, or why your interface has been set to retro by default after an update.
Right now Jagex are performing some heavy tweaks to the game in response to player feedback, tweaking certain features to make them easier in some areas and harder in others. If you don’t keep watch on update notes and particularly discussion on the developer streams (which you can find summaries of on the DarkScape subreddit), you won’t just be at a disadvantage against the game, but you’ll be at a disadvantage against other players.
It also helps to keep up with the forums to know what content is currently broken, because there is a fair amount of it (see #2). For further reference, the DarkScape wiki is slowly being populated.
4. Tier Bank Trading Made Easy
Three tiers of danger means three separate banks, each with their own supplies, each irretrievable in other areas. While DarkScape would like you to believe that moving items between banks is a matter of sheer danger, the truth is that there are enough routes to go down that finding one or two with minimal risk of player interaction, let alone players looking to randomly kill you, is pretty good.
When trading between low and medium risk areas, the closest route I’ve found is between Lumbridge and Al Kharid. Starting out at the Lumbridge Grand Exchange, you can head south and over the bridge to Al Kharid, reducing the amount of time spent in medium-tier areas. The level range in the low-risk portion of the travel only goes up to six while you spend, at most, six or seven seconds in the mid-risk zone before reaching the bank, which itself is patrolled by three guards in a very enclosed space. When trading back, just be aware that the medium-tier area extends to the end of the bridge on the Lumbridge side rather than the city entrance as it was when you came in.
For moving items to high risk zone, one of the safest routes that I’ve found so far is between Varrok and Canifis. If you haven’t been through the area before, you’ll need to kill a level 30 monster before you can proceed, but the travel from Varrok to Canifis is one that is sparsely populated with players and even less so with player killers. Cities like Ashdale, Zanaris, and Al Kharid have more open areas and lack choke points that pk’ers can nab you in, making them rife for smuggling goods between zones.
Initially this spot was supposed to discuss easy access to high-threat areas, due to the fact that the game automatically identified any zone as high risk until labeled otherwise. Areas like Death’s office offering easy access to your high risk bank have been fixed.
3. RuneSpan For Runecrafting/Nexus For Prayer
Runecrafting in DarkScape is a long, difficult, and dangerous affair, even more so before Jagex updated the Abyss so that it no longer skulls players effectively taking them out of towns for a full five minutes. If you’re looking at training runecrafting with a focus on pure experience, your best bet is to take on the RuneSpan activity. Available right off the bat at level 1 runecrafting, RuneSpan offers far better experience than it has any right to in DarkScape. Starting off at level 1, I managed to make my way to level 39 within an hour. Bear in mind, these experience rates are coming from a member with member experience rates, with no bonus experience.
While the entirety of RuneSpan is high threat (no guards, no limits on combat), I’ve found very little combat going on outside of the random troll. The time and resources required to move about in RuneSpan for the relatively low amount of players present makes player killing in the area a massive waste of time, even for the dedicated troll. Runecrafters in the area are more interested in crafting than killing. Which isn’t to say it is safe, I was killed once while writing this piece. After today’s update, your points are redeemed upon death.
Compared to RuneSpan, the Nexus is a lot more popular and prone to player killers coming in and ruining your day. That in mind, the mini-game is not far from the Lumbridge respawn point and is generally filled with enough other players that you should be able to slip around relatively unnoticed. Unlike Runespan, however, your experience at the Nexus is capped and will eventually come to an end. Once you receive 37 thousand experience, not counting the extra experience from bones, the event will no longer grant prayer experience.
On the plus side, thirty seven thousand experience will get you to level 40 assuming you begin the Nexus at level 1.
2. Taking Advantage of Oversights
DarkScape is (to the best of my knowledge) officially considered “experimental,” another name meaning any issues that should have been considered have not, leaving players at the mercy of Jagex to eventually fix them. In this case, if you were looking to finish your achievement diaries or a number of quests, look again. While Jagex has been rolling out updates to fix these oversights, DarkScape’s restrictions on teleporting left players literally unable to complete quests because the game won’t move them with the quest rewards in their inventory.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t currently existing oversights that can be taken advantage of before they are fixed in the coming weeks/months. For instance, right now it is extremely easy to craft blisterwood weapons assuming you finish the quest line required to craft them. Jagex has detailed plans to make blisterwood weapons much more difficult and costly to craft, as right now they are high-tier equipment that can be mass produced with little effort (other than the quest line).
There are plenty of things to take advantage of outside of that example, including how easy it is currently to smuggle items between risk zones (see above). Keep an eye on the forums for other shortcuts.
1. Only Use What You Can Lose
This one likely goes without saying, but always play with the mentality that you will probably be killed and lose whatever you are carrying. That said, you don’t necessarily want to go out constantly with just a weapon/tool and no armor or food on you, you’ll just be easy pickings for even the least equipped killers. This is where welfare equipment, gear that is cheap and can be easily replaced, comes into play.
If you’re making a decent amount of money, you can go to shops or the Grand Exchange and buy your welfare gear in bulk. If not, your best bet may be to level up relevant skills (mining/smithing, crafting, fletching) and use the resources you gain leveling in order to build the equipment you’ll be using for your own protection. While it won’t deter everyone, a player wielding just a weapon is less likely to attack a decked out player with full armor and weapons of his own, and you’ll be better equipped to fight back/run away and get to a safe zone.
A few of your inventory slots should be dedicated to food to survive or teleportation to quickly escape, but be aware that teleportation is slower in DarkScape than it is in RuneScape, you can still be killed even using rune-based town teleports.
Top 5: Tips For DarkScape Survival
DarkScape is out and that only means one thing: Prepare to die a whole lot, and lose your items. Since DarkScape isn’t just RuneScape with open world PvP, MMO Fallout has put together some opening tips for players looking to make a start in this new world.
5. Get A Head Start
If you’re anything like me, it’s been so long since you’ve been a low level in RuneScape that you are unaware of what conveniences are available for new players. Go to Burthorpe and talk to Mary Rancour in the building above the Heroes guild and ask her for free stuff. She’ll give you a dwarven army axe, a multi-tool that will come in handy with the toolbelt disabled. The dwarven army axe acts as a steel-tier hatchet, pickaxe, as well as a needle, tinderbox, chisel, knife, and a low level weapon. She’ll also give you a steel full helmet, combat potions, and teleport tablets.
You can pick up various free items at vendors all over RuneScape. Right off the bat, you can complete activities like the god statues which give a massive head start in slayer/prayer experience as well as construction. Beginner quests Shadow Over Ashdale, Demon Slayer, and Blood Pact can be completed for good starter equipment, not to mention combat experience. If you lose any of these items, you can always go back and pick them up again for free.
4. Know Your Bank Restrictions
Banking in DarkScape is miles away from that in RuneScape and even Old School. Unlike its standard counterparts, your bank in DarkScape is split up into three areas: low threat, medium threat, and high threat. Adding onto that, you’re going to find bank space very limited: 100 spaces per zone, less if you’re a free player. Not only are the banks separated, but so are the Grand Exchanges. You cannot home teleport between areas with any items on your person, and you can’t use rune-based teleports between threat zones.
What does this mean? Effectively, it means your goods can only be transported in the area they were found. To bring your gear to higher/lower threat zones, you’re going to need to walk it over the border and hope that nobody kills you in the process. Banks within those zones are shared, meaning you can gather resources in Varrok, home teleport to Taverly, retrieve the items from your bank, walk them over White Wolf Mountain, and store them in Catherby to retrieve in Ardougne. You can’t, however, bank something in Lumbridge and then retrieve it in Seer’s Village.
Part of the goal is to create three separate economies and create a new form of income, by allowing players to move items from zones where they are cheaper to zones where they are more valuable. It also means spending a fair amount of time hauling goods between zones. That being said, players should still go through the new-character process of unlocking lodestones as quickly as possible. Energy is back to how it was a few years ago, meaning it recovers very slowly. You’ll need the lodestones for easy travel.
3. Resources Have Been Moved
If you haven’t started DarkScape yet and are already planning your leveling route, don’t bother. In creating three distinct threat zones, Jagex also took the time to relocate resources around with the higher tier goods resting comfortably (or not so comfortably) in high threat areas. For example, you won’t find lobster or harpoon spots in Catherby anymore, those are gone. Where did they go? You’ll need to find them, or wait until guides start popping up.
For people looking to quickly level up, the shuffling of resources is sure to put a wrench in your operations.
2. Be Wary of Griefers
DarkScape’s respawn mechanic currently makes the game very open for griefing. In some cases, players will sit in banks that have easily accessed second floors (stairs/ladders) and come down to the main bank area to attack someone before quickly moving upstairs. Since the game allows you to change your respawn point, many players have taken to repeatedly assaulting banks, either in the hopes of killing players or with the goal of simply disrupting your banking.
One popular method of griefing at the moment is to run into a bank with an active skull and retribution, a prayer spell which causes the player to explode upon death. The player is immediately killed by guards and explodes, damaging the players around him. Said player then respawns nearby and starts the process over again.
1. Be Very Mindful Of Where You Click
The presence of PvP everywhere (and I do mean everywhere) has made the game very dangerous, even for those who don’t necessarily want to go around killing everyone they see. In DarkScape, banks and most towns are patrolled by very powerful guards, level 138, certainly high level enough to take on most of the playerbase at this time. Guards will immediately attack, stun, and instantly kill players who are skulled (those who attacked other players).
What this usually leads to is an incident where a player will enter the bank, misclick and accidentally attack another player, and then immediately die. If you accidentally attack another player, your odds of getting out of the bank without dying are quite slim, meaning you lose everything you were carrying on you and respawn somewhere else. When getting back into town with a big haul, always be mindful that you are essentially one click away from losing it all.
To mitigate this, you can do two things: Turn on one-button mouse or always right click to bring up the context menu before you bank. Left clicking to bank in a crowded (or even not so crowded) area is playing with fire, and you’re liable to get burned.
MMO Fallout’s Tips For Newbie Bloggers
The Newbie Blogger Initiative, of which I consider myself to be a loyal follower and mentor, is nearly halfway through the month of inspiration, and I have to apologize for the lack of usual tips for newbie bloggers. You see, I’ve been way too busy sailing the Mediterranean with Richard Garriot, waxing poetic while sipping wine and wondering how many secret tunnels he installed in his yacht, all while he detailed the free housing I’d be getting in Shroud of the Avatar for being so awesome at my job of writing about games.
Actually no, I’ve been busy dealing with my present day job going bankrupt and the inevitable unemployment from the job that funds this website. In fact that brings me to my first tip for newbie bloggers:
1. Write Because You Want To, And Not Because You Want Things
When I started MMO Fallout, I came off of a previous website that I ran where I talked about news and absolutely hated every aspect of it. I tried to convince myself that I was adding in snide comments to make it interesting for the reader when really I was just trying to keep myself engaged. The only thing that kept me coming back was the chance to talk about video games, and that’s when I decided to spin out and start talking about MMOs exclusively.
Treat your blog like it’s an extension of your hobby, in this case that hobby being video games. Talk about stuff that interests you and maybe have a point while you do it. Show your passion for the subject and people will take notice. Most importantly, find something that you can write about that won’t feel like a job, because when a hobby becomes work, it’s no longer a hobby. It’s just a job that you’re not getting paid for, and that’s infuriating.
But don’t write because you want free stuff, because if anyone can see through faux-passion in bloggers, it’s the marketing folks handing out beta keys and review copies. Trust me, setting up a fake Call of Duty blog because you want free copies of Call of Duty won’t get you free copies of Call of Duty, it’ll just get you ridiculed for online panhandling. I didn’t do this and there’s certainly no need for you to check Google.
2. Don’t Make It A Job, And It Won’t Be A Job
I made MMO Fallout a job, but that’s only because I went to college for this sort of thing and some of the stuff I’ve accomplished here (interviews, columns, etc) actually looks good on a resume. That being said, there are multiple times I’ve made it publicly known that I was on the verge of packing my stuff and leaving, whether it be that one guy from Japan a couple of years back who hit our servers for five days straight before ultimately corrupting my entire database (thank you backups), or perhaps the time I drew the verbal abuse and death threats from a certain game community who blamed my negativity for the death of a $100 million company.
Like I said in the previous tip, you should never come home and say to yourself “ugh, I have to update the blog again.” Don’t write because you feel obligated to, do it because you have something to say. Trying to force content to keep up with an arbitrary schedule that you set for yourself, again crosses the line from hobby to unpaid job, where the unfair boss is you.
3. Expect To Burn Bridges
Assuming your blog isn’t all about brown nosing executives, you’re going to burn a few bridges. I hesitate to use the term “blacklist” because that would probably give MMO Fallout more credit than it deserves, but I will say that a couple of developers will not talk to me and their silence conveniently came after I said something negative about their game/company.
With a few exceptions, most game companies are actually pretty good about receiving criticism providing it is fair and has a point. And I do stress the difference between fact, opinion, and hyperbole. You might get some jeering from the peanut gallery by calling Blizzard a bunch of scam artists who’ve ruined the industry and punch puppies in the face for fun, and at best that’s all you’ll get for an audience: Jerks. At worst, you’ll be on the receiving end of a libel lawsuit.
And I know this because I’ve been threatened with more lawsuits than I can count, all of which I’ve been protected from because I deal in the truth and the truth can never be libelous. Most developers are good with criticism, there are others that are just as bad as their biggest fans. You’ll find this out when, after ninety nine positive articles about a game, your negative piece spurs an email from a company account asking why you’re on a crusade of hate.
4. Feel Free To Advertise
The internet is a massive void of white noise, so you can expect that if you don’t do any proactive advertising, your views are going to remain a consistent 0-5 daily. You don’t even have to go all out. Add a link or image to your forum signatures, create a Twitter account and link there, comment and link to other blogs and they’ll do the same for you. You’re part of a community of other bloggers now, whether you like it or not.
Socialize with your readers, socialize with other bloggers, socialize with society. People will like you a whole lot more if you engage with them on a personal level, and you’ll have a lot more fun given the chance to talk even more about something you enjoy with other people who also enjoy it.
I’m running out of words, so I’ll leave it on this: This is a hobby. If you’re not having fun or realize that it isn’t for you, there isn’t anything requiring you to keep going. Think of your blog as a forum where you’re the one posting lengthy OP’s, if you prefer you can always engage in conversation by chatting in someone else’s threads.
MMO Fallout 
