Bryant: I think both structures have their place. Forums are often a good medium for quick distribution of news, whereas it takes a lot longer for news to percolate through the blogosphere. And forums are excellent for getting questions answered quickly. (Well, the medium is good for it; the answers may not be very good. *grin*)

If I were feeling deeply radical, I’d consider taking the Livejournal codebase (which is open source) and implementing it as a replacement for forums. Generate an account for each game account, and let people post there instead of forums. It’d be an interesting experiment in community. I don’t think you’d have the same sort of broad community that a forum generates, because there’s no reasonable expectation that anyone will see your plaintive post.

And that alone might be sufficient to keep players from buying into it. Hm. Perhaps a couple of complaint/suggestion communities to provide that outlet?

I can imagine a community with stronger social links among smaller networks, rather than the sort of pyramidal structure you get with forums (a small number of frequent posters dominating).

One idea I had was, when we create our characters we can also select various settings for personality, then an actual blog entry will be automated per that personality in a similar manner to the way 360voice.com works. The player would have the option of manually editing any entries, and of course changing personality descriptions to change the “tone of voice” the blog was written in. This could cover not only levels, but pretty much everything you did from which town you began in today, to talking to which NPC’s and where you traveled, which quests you completed, which gear you decided to wear, how much gold you earned/lost… any number of things could be auto-recorded, and yes, the obligatory XML feed for inclusion on your own site.

I. Hate. You.

Stop saying things that make sense when I don’t work with you any more. :(

Of course, I’d probably do it on a specialized page with the player’s post and a little picture of their character, or whatever. Name recognition is fine, but actually linking to a blog may not be a good idea. Suddenly people start doing it for money, putting up ads, griefing with the old witty post -> gay porn switch out, etc.

Okay, those things probably wouldn’t happen. At least all that much. But the first time it did, especially if you’re, for example, working on WoW – you’ll very much regret linking 30,000 grandmother/granddaughter teams to replicas of goatse.cx when the lawsuits start to roll in.

Cameron: That’s an excellent idea, and probably not nearly as complicated to set up as Vanguard’s auto-screenshot/blog feature (which I really should have mentioned except I forgot about it).