Zubon from KTR is retiring from blogging, and our little corner of the internet gets a bit smaller.

As I wrote in the comments on that blog, much of what he wrote is exactly how I feel about things now. For me growing older has resulted in me being overall less combative, which is good in life, but less entertaining in blog world. Some of the most successful posts here (in terms of generating traffic, comments, and reply posts) were pretty aggressive attacks on a game, another blogger, or a gaming group (damn tourists). While I always separate ‘blog person’ from ‘real person’, both for myself and whoever I was talking about, it often did get under people’s skin, and the replies were often equally if not more venomous. Which again, is good blog content. It gets the people talking and thinking. And while I still have my moments, and no doubt will in the future, they are now far fewer than in years past, when “Friday Blog War” was an actual thing that (mostly) naturally happened regularly.

The other aspect of growing older, both personally and this blog, is that so many things have already been said. I’ll repeat or bring back concepts sometimes, but do I really need to write yet another post on why WotLK ruined WoW? Do you want to read another one of those? Combined with the fact that so little is really changing in the MMO space, and the amount of stuff you can write about is just more limited now, and with fewer bloggers writing, that also means fewer opportunities to write a response post to something. I talk about momentum all the time in gaming, but its true for blogging as well. When our group of bloggers were all humming, cranking out posts daily, it was much easier to spot something and continue the conversation. That’s just not really the case anymore.

There is also the fact that with the MMO space slowing down, people move on to different genres, and non-MMO games just aren’t as interesting to write about. Single player, linear games are the worst, because everyone has the same experience, but even more open-ended games like Civilization make better video ‘Lets Play’ content than blogs. Maybe you can get a post out about some interesting design concept, but that won’t lead to dozens and dozens of posts like a good MMO can (Life is Feudal was a great example of that here most recently).

This isn’t my own retirement post, in large part because I still want to drop a post when I need to about whatever it might be. I also still value the community built here, however diminished it is today compared to its peak. I’m also very curious to see how WoW Classic will play out in terms of blog content. Will it bring back some of the buzz, or will we all make a few “oh this brings back memories” posts and that will be that?

For now, I’ll just end with saying that I’ll miss Zubon posting, and the whole KTR blog not being active (RIP Ravious, can’t believe it’s only been two years). I’ve been reading that site since I first become aware of blogs more than a decade ago, and it was one of the very few blogs I checked daily.