Open Letter: for the love of the game

Dear All

I find to my amazement that before this month ends, I will be celebrating the first year of this blog's existence. This was the first "one-subject" blog I ever started, meaning it was focused on a particular something. That something has been, and remains to this day, the MMORPG Granado Espada.

For most of this blog's existence I have been playing on the Cervantes server of the sGE release. In fact, this blog was begun within the last two weeks of the Closed Beta Test. I still consider myself lucky to have made it in during that first phase of testing, and to have seen the test through to the end.

Through pOBT, the Open Beta, and the switching around of business models, I have stayed true to sGE. That hasn't always been easy. I would get attacked on sight simply because I was trying to promote the blog as a resource and as a place where I could show the fun / lighter / more intellectual / storyline side of sGE. People would heckle this blog in its comments and its chat box.

[And there are the times when the game itself has misstepped, but that is not for this entry.]

The animosity from some quarters of the population remains to this day.

I single out one person in sGE who has seemingly made it his life's mission to put this blog down. When I make broadcasts about new content, this person replies with an insult to both me and to the content. This person has called me names and slandered the blog's good name.

The only time I was insulted personally was when he made a comment about GE machinima; this person's comment derided the genre and, by extension, the members of the community who wished to enjoy its possibilities - and in the process do some good for the game.

Dear annoying person, you know not of what you speak. And you have known not, since you began your campaign of insults.

What I do here is not always easy. I make no money from this blog. I devote much effort to improving its appearance and content - to the occasional detriment of my characters in the game. In the drive to make this blog better, my main characters on Cervantes server remain at level 84. Any other characters I have on the other four servers have not even reached level 50, the halfway mark of the standard game. I have never made Veteran, much less Expert. Not even in Closed Beta.

So why am I keeping it up? A plain and simple answer. I made this blog for love of the game. I continue to improve it for love of the game. I continue to write in it for love of the game. And I continue to love, and play, the game.

I have done all this for almost one year, and I hope to continue for as long as I can. I hope to see a second-year anniversary, a third, a fourth, and so on.

Do not, annoying person, think that I do this in response to your childish banter. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I write this entry, this open letter, because I want to stand up and say, I am proud to be the first sGE blogger. I am happy to keep up the blog. And I am happy to remain an sGE player.

Despite the problems and the occasional WTF? moment, I am happy to be here.

I remain your devoted sGE blogger

NineMoons

P.S. 10 March 2008

To commenters The Arc and Darrick, as well as to Leoz [!] and to Artaxerxes, thank you very much for the good wishes.

Just so everyone knows, the actual one-year anniversary of this blog is on 13 March. [That's just three days away!] Here's the very first entry.

^^