lizzard Entertainment is the main reason this blog exists. Not directly, but I was a fan of their game Diablo, back in the 90s when I played a lot of video games. Around that time the Internet was just beginning to take off, and fan sites and official sites were becoming a valuable source of information for gamers. I was not a really early adapter to Internet life, but I was in on it pretty early on, and back then, there weren't really any quality gaming websites. When I wanted information about Diablo and then the expansion pack Hellfire, I couldn't find it. I eventually bumped into this little gaming hub called www.reality-x.co-uk, which was run by someone named Elly. I never gave much thought to what it meant to run a website, nor did I have much interest in running one myself. I did like the game info there, and when Diablo II was announced, years and years before it would finally be released, I started checking several sites every day, most often Elly's D1/Hellfire site. I started sending in news tips, corrections to things, etc, and eventually Elly asked me if I'd like to help out working on the site.

I said no, I knew nothing about HTML or working with web pages, but she asked me a couple of more times, and eventually I gave in and said I'd help out, once she said I could use an HTML-writer program called Frontpage, since I didn't need to know HTML. I started slowly, in the summer of 1997, contributing the the occasional article and news item, but as I got a handle on the technology, and started to enjoy the instant gratification of writing for a website and the competition to contribute to the best D2 info source online, I was hooked. An hour every now and then turned into multiple hours a day, and I was soon creating almost all of the site content, though Elly and her boyfriend Paul did almost all of the site design and grunt work of setting up forums and such.

After working exclusively on Elly's D2 site for several years, which became (and remains) Diabloii.net in 1998, I started to hunger for more, and did some freelance web design, as well as considering working for various gaming sites and maybe even companies. Not that I had any offers or the coding qualifications for such jobs, but who ever said dream jobs were realistic?  I did eventually branch out into my own website, which you're looking at, and I almost certainly would have in any event, even without the D2 site work to get me into webmastering. In fact, without the D2 site stuff, I would probably have done started something like BlackChampagne.com long before I did, since I wouldn't have been spending so many hours a day working on the D2 site, and would have had to spend them on something.

Long digression-filled introduction aside, this page collects blog entries about online gaming, gaming websites, and more. More recent entries are added on top.

May 30, 2003

For a quick follow up to the whole "Blizzard North visit announcement" from yesterday.  The big forum thread about it on the D2 site has some interesting stuff to read, mostly from players who are taking it somewhat personally that I got to play, but can't tell about what I saw yet.  Though mostly people are annoyed at yet another release date miss.

I'd like to ridicule people for actually putting hope behind any announced Blizzard release date at this point, but I guess if Bill Roper has yet to learn not to give a firm date, the fans can hardly be blamed for falling into the same trap. 

My favorite post in the whole thread is what's currently the very last one, by Alrin.

You all sound like Flux was invited to Area 51 and given a tour on the Roswell spaceship or something. Geez, he got to play a patched diablo2. Big deal. Download a mod or something.

Such a delightful example of how to utterly take the piss out of things.  As it happens I am in complete agreement with the guy.

The thing I am most surprised by is that no one has started yammering on about Projects X and Y, the as-of-yet unannounced titles Blizzard North is suspected to be working on.  I'd think people would be far more interested in asking if I'd seen anything of that/those upcoming games than whether Berserk barbs will be slightly faster or slower come v1.10.  Yet I've not seen a single mention of that in any post or comment.  I suppose people just don't know enough about the whole situation to wonder, or else the ones who would are elsewhere, and all we've got are players who still actually give a damn about D2.  Poor damned souls.

One and two more amusing posts from far angrier fans can be seen in the Battle.net forums, where a couple of threads started from people who were apparently furious that the v1.10 patch won't be out by the first week of June, when Bill Roper said it would be.  The problem seems to be that he said it in an interview with Elly at E3, and since we conducted the interview and posted the transcript, it's like, "Dii.net posted it, therefore it's their fault that the patch is late.  Or else they were lying to us in the first place."

What makes these two troll-filled Bnet forum posts amusing to me is how other readers totally shoot down the idiots with cold hard facts.  One guy in the first thread eventually quotes our actual page entries, both of which clearly say "maybe", "possibly", "if there aren't further delays", etc.

People really are quite stupid.  Online is worse than real life, but unfortunately there are dumb people everywhere.  But you really realize it when you see what people are upset about, and how often them being upset is 10% the other thing, and 90% them just being too stupid to comprehend any nuance or subtlety, and therefore being all infuriated over something that shouldn't even make them blink, if they were smart enough to read a one paragraph introduction before leaping right to a quote.

The selective memory of people is interesting also.  To quote from one post:

As for the Eta's I don't belive it's Diabloii.nets fault. However they are the ones that brought us many rumors such as what the chat gem does every other week, The infamous "no portals" when killing baal rumor, and the ever popular full tome to create more cows, rumor.

This is just wrong.  We've had a Chat Gem page since the fricking D2 beta (over 3 years ago) and it has always said that the chat gem doesn't do anything.  I should know, I wrote it.  I'm not even sure what he's talking about with the "no portals when killing Baal" thing, but I vaguely remember that as one of the stupider MF boosting rumors.  And yes, it's listed on the MF Misconceptions list in part of the giant MF guide I wrote, where it's specifically labeled as bullshit. We have also said several times that full tomes have nothing to do with the number of cows you get in the Cow Level, including lampooning it in the April Fool's FotD just last year. We even have a "stupid rumors" item in our main FAQ, which specifically rebuts all 3 of the things this guy says.

So how does a seemingly-competent individual matter-of-factly attribute the spread of 3 stupid lies to a website that has repeatedly made an effort to shoot down those rumors? Good question.  Did I mention how stupid people are?

April 15, 2003

Speaking of things that I find unreadable, does anyone read ExpectNothing.com?  It's the home page of semi-famous Blizzard webmaster Geoff Fraizer, a site I keep meaning to bring up since a reader mailed about it a couple of weeks ago (yes, this is one of those emailed subjects I keep meaning to discuss, and never quite get around to discussing). The reader's AKA is ArchLich, and he said:

To the illustrious Mr. Flux:

I stumbled across your site several months ago and I don't remember why. It fell off my radar, and then was rediscovered when you put a link in one of the Decahedrons on the D2 site. It never occurred to me until now to wonder why I wasn't captivated the first time, yet I have been an avid reader since. So much for the "Why am I here?" part.

I'm going to be bad and try to draw a comparison. I am also an avid reader of ExpectNothing, which, I'm sure you are aware, is the famous GFraizer's personal site. I came across his site looking for driving stuff and ended up sticking around. Anyway, it's amazing how much I can agree with either of your personal opinions/views/whatever -- when it seems blatantly apparent that the two of you have almost nothing whatsoever in common. The different perspectives are refreshing.

He's a die-hard SDA who's one of the "it's only a THEORY" crowd when it comes to evolution. I respectfully disagree, but I can understand why some people can't get their head out of their ass about religion. My girlfriend was one of them until I helped her see the light. Needless to say, I agree with your stance on the matter.

He's also a heavily right-wing Republican and boy does it ever show. With that, I mostly sympathize -- but it's probably a leftover from my teenage rebellion years, as the remainder of my family leans Democrat. I do live near one of the most liberal cities in the US -- Ann Arbor, MI -- and it's easy to see how some people just get stupid when it comes to being liberal.  College-age people are so prone to activism about things that will never concern them. I would wager there are more "Free Tibet" bumper stickers within a ten mile radius of this chair than there have ever been in Tibet.

It's sort of an interesting issue, that two people both known for Blizzard gaming sites, and both running home pages, but with such different perspectives on world events.

I wondered what Malaya would think, since she's my sweetie, but more over she's a Blizzard gaming fan, and has read Dii.net for a long time, but doesn't usually view the Blizzard.com sites, and knew nothing about who Fraizer was, or what his home site was like.  I sent her the link w/o any editorializing at all, just that a site reader had mailed about it, and said that he was a Blizzard webmaster.  She looked out of curiosity, and sent back in maybe 2 minutes (or less):

"I had to quit Internet Explorer; that drivel hurt my eyes and upset my stomach."

I swear this is an exact quote, and I did nothing to influence her opinion.

My objection to GF's site isn't his politics, though I certainly think he's an idiot in that way.  It's that there's just nothing there you can't hear from any ranting ultra-conservative.  And I don't find demagogues interesting, even if I sort of agree with them.  And I don't agree at all with him.

I don't know of any fanatically hateful liberals, and I wouldn't really agree with one that much if I did, but just to have an example, how about the Political Strikes cartoon site. It's a cartoon site that takes news photos and puts cartoon speech bubbles on them, solely for the purpose of insulting the right wing people pictured in them.

Of the cartoons I've seen there, maybe 1/25 are actually sort of funny, and about 4/25 are good observations.  The other 80% are just crap.  Pointless insulting crap that I have no use for.  I just don't see any humor in a caption implying that Bush is going to screw his semi-rat dog. It's juvenile and makes you look like an idiot for thinking it's clever satire or sarcasm.

And in my experience, "humor" on that level is extremely popular with angry right wingers.  I only saw parts of the Rush Limbaugh show a few times when he was on TV, but every time it seemed like they'd have a picture of baby-faced George Stephanopoulos, and have a cartoon-looking baby bonnet on his head, or a pacifier in his mouth, and Rush would make mocking baby noises.  And the overdressed white audience would just go insane with a hateful sort of heckling laughter.

It wasn't about humor, or clever remarks, or intelligent commentary.  It was about this seething hatred that so many conservatives seem to have for people who don't agree with them on political issues, and how anything that makes them look bad is enjoyable.  Stuff that wouldn't even make the cut for an Adam Sandler movie was applauded as thought it was comedy gold, and all the time Rush was fidgeting at the desk, his hot water bottle face and beady eyes and fake smile radiating low grade terror and high grade desperation for approval.  Then he'd mouth a bunch of tired platitudes about how liberals were to blame for all the evils of the world, and the audience would clap frantically, as if they could crush the opposition between their palms, if only they struck them rapidly enough.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but that's the vibe I've always gotten from Fraizer's site, even back when it was (relatively) non-political and called by his old nickname, shlonglor.com.  There's just this seething rage and anger all the time, below the surface.  A common state for zealots and true believers, especially ones who believe in things that most people consider to be delusions.

I have never written much/anything about other Blizzard fan sites, or Blizzard people themselves, or anything along those lines, since I don't think it's appropriate. I suppose it would be interesting, since I know so much "inside" info from my five years of working on Dii.net, and visiting Blizzard North, talking to Bliz people at E3 four years running, and knowing all sorts of behind the scenes stuff about Bliz and their PR and other Bliz fansites.  But having teased all that, I don't talk about it since I'm still involved with the D2 site, and anyway, it would be cheesy to gossip behind the backs of people. Also I don't really worry about it anymore, or really care about it that much.

I'll just say a few quick things.

The whole fansite "community" concept is bullshit.  The vast majority of fansites are run by immature kids, teens with a few semesters of programming or web design, teens or college students with free time and a jones for a game, etc.  There is zero journalistic integrity or personal integrity, and most people doing it are very part time and will drop it the minute they get a new girlfriend or part time job or lose interest.  The ones who keep at it for longer usually become hit-obsessed and almost all have an enormous hard on for Blizzard and anyone from Blizzard, and will masturbate furiously for any sort of recognition from the company they so worship.  The other side of that coin is how easily their love and devotion can turn to hate if they feel betrayed or ignored, and both of those emotions are marinating in their general teen angst and hormones. Plus they want a creative and emotional outlet, so you tend to get several news posts, nothing for a couple of days, and then a rambling 10 paragraph news post about how some guy at school isn't their friend any longer, or how their GF broke their tender young heart.

Fansites steal news and content from each other and from Blizzard ravenously.  Most sites are run in amazingly-unprofessional fashion, which isn't exactly a surprise when you consider that kids are running them. Back in the early days of D2, when there were a ton of D2 fansites competing for attention and hits and Blizzard info, Elly and I (and not too long after Gaile) would get 95% of the news first, from surfing or email tip, and would post it, and almost always within 30 or 60 minutes the same news items would pop up on the other d2 fansites, almost never with any credit given to where they'd found the news item.  We would update the items or skills or quests sections, and then other sites would suddenly update their versions of those pages a few days later, often with exact cut and paste versions of what we'd updated.   Eventually we started doing news items or section updates with one or two intentional errors, just to see who would copy our version of something, rather than actually reading the new D2 preview or magazine article and writing up their own summary of the information.

Answer? Everyone.

You are surprisingly unwilling to post news about some new feature on another D2 fansite when you know for a fact the person asking you to post the news has been copying your ever page update for the past 6 months. And then when the other sites wanting the link say you are selfish and don't "support the community"... well yeah, that about sums it up.

Enough on fansites.  But this happens with every game, in my experience. It certainly did with Warcraft III, though I wasn't directly involved in that.

What I was going to say was that back in the early days, when I was still enamored of the whole "webmaster for a profession" concept, I was much interested in doing that for Blizzard. After all, I was enjoying spending 12 or more hours a day working, for free, on a website about a Blizzard game. What could be better than to do that and get paid for it?  Especially when the Blizzard websites were just awful back then, in terms of content.  Great design, but the writing on them was ghastly, typo-ridden, but more than that, just generally with a very low level of literacy. They did a nice Starcraft Guide, but the D2 site was crap with virtually no game info.  Blizzard's strategy seemed to be that they should put up just the bare minimum of information on their sites, and let the fansites supplement that with news and rumors and such. The odd part was that they almost never linked to any fansites, and never directly for anything other than a download mirror.

Anyway, I saw Blizzard's websites as very under-developed and what little they did do, in terms of FAQs and such, as barely-adequate.  Meanwhile I was doing 2 or 3 major features a day on Dii.net, and had ideas for much more stuff that I could have done if I'd had more inside information.

So yeah, I would have liked to have worked for Blizzard, and the company seemed remarkably-clueless about the Internet back then (this is in like 1999 and 2000) and could have really used me.  Given that the games I would have been doing website stuff for all sold record-breaking numbers of copies, just how badly they needed me can be debated.  But I would have made their sites better, in any event.

What were they not doing?  They had Battle.net and all of that, but they did just the minimum required on their company websites, and often didn't update for days or weeks at a time, and what they did do was so much less good than it could have been.  And this wasn't all due to Fraizer's incompetence; the D2 site was initially run by Blizzard North, and they had one guy working on it who I'm not going to name here since he's sort of a friend, and I'm being wimpy.

Anyway, he was a good web designer and artist, and could write well, but his main job responsibility was to work on Diablo II, wince he was one of the senior programmers. This obviously left him limited time to do anything on the official D2 site, plus he wasn't in the community at all, so had no idea what was new and what wasn't, and didn't know what the fans wanted to read about or learn about. So even when there were updates, they seldom had any real useful info in them.

See my comment a moment ago about Blizzard not taking their website upkeep seriously, when most of the D2 fans were getting their info from it. Or trying to, anyway.  We'd (at diabloii.net) get emails every day back then from people who were astonished at the amount of game info and images we had, after they'd seen only the tiny Blizzard official site for months, and finally stumbled across Dii.net via a search engine or forum post referral. Because, of course, Blizzard didn't link to the fan sites, despite almost totally lacking game info on their official sites.

As I said, they were doing a very poor job on it, since they just didn't make it a priority.

What made this so interesting to me was that I had some friends who worked for Blizzard, nothing to do with the websites, and they always told me how colossally unpopular Geoff Fraizer was with virtually everyone in the company.  He was the under-achieving webmaster, he had delusions of grandeur in terms of the value of his game testing comments, he had the whole D2 and other development teams pissed at him constantly, etc.  I was told at least half a dozen times that he was an inch from being fired for one thing or another, and I heard quotes from people I certainly can't name now to the gist of, "Why don't they just fire him and get it over with?"

This was two, three, four years ago, and obviously it never happened, since Fraizer still works there. I have no explanation why not, other than that Blizzard is a very easy-going company and really they never fire anyone.

Since then, Blizzard has since done a lot to improve their websites, with Fraizer convincing them at some point that they should do sort of "official fansites", and post a lot of the game info type stuff that fansites do, but with a better design and do it faster, since they have all of the info before it's released to the public. I still think the Blizzard sites could be massively-improved, since no one working on them has any real creativity.  There aren't ever any decent strategies or player questions answered, there's no news or bug info, and since no one working on them has the ability to write, their FAQs read like military press releases.

Tooting my own horn, but something like the Item Generation Tutorial I wrote, while not perfect, has so much information, absolutely none of which exists in any form on Blizzard's site.  Or you can look at something like the Dii.net Warnings section, which again was my creation, and is a valuable resource for players. Nothing like it exists on Blizzard's site.  They did eventually start to give some pre-emptive warnings in their Support section, but it was well over a year after the Warnings Section went up on Dii.net.

Anyway, yes, I coveted Fraizer's job for a couple of years, and wondered why Blizzard put up with the very mediocre content on their own websites.  I'm not even saying Fraizer should have been replaced, by me or anyone else.  They should have just hired more people, since their sites were their main interface with the fans, and they were (and are still) perpetually weeks or months behind with updates. It's not lazy employees, they just have so many hundreds of pages to get updated, and everyone doing it thinks they are a brilliant gamer and wants to be famous by posting in the forums, and wants to be involved in the game design.

Which means much less work gets done on their websites, but Blizzard is very lacking in internal company discipline, and they are too friendly.  No one is ever fired for anything less than incredibly gross negligence, and their focus is so much on the games, with no real task masters to keep them on schedule and under budget, or make sure all the ducks are in a row on their websites.  Big friendly families are great for small companies.  When the bosses are the designers and everyone's friend, it's great for morale, but the employees get away with murder.

The ironic part is that I wouldn't take the job today if they offered it, and I'm glad I didn't get it 2 or 3 years ago. I would probably not feel that way if I had, since I'd still be caught up in the thrill of doing it and gaming all the time, rather than realizing that that's not how I want to spend my life. After spending 3 years often working 12 hours a day on Diabloii.net, I finally began to realize a couple of years ago that it wasn't really what I wanted to do or should be doing with my time.

I don't want to be a webmaster for a profession; I enjoy doing it when it's my site, at least doing the writing part.  I'm much less fond of keeping all the archives and such up to date, and doing webdesign for a job is mostly about that, as well as posting other people's updates, and that's quite boring.

It's also why they call it a "job", and pay you to do it.

And my goals are with my writing, and my eventual rewards will be infinitely greater from that than they could ever be from webmastering.  At least that's what I keep telling myself.

There was more on this subject in the next day's blog:

Hi Flux,

Just read today's update and I have one more thing to add to your musings re the blizzard info vs diabloii.net: A while ago (no idea how long ago, probably more than a year) diabloii.net was down for a few days, changing servers or ISP I don't know; after about 2 days a post from gfrazier appeared on "the arreat summit" that the number of hits on his site had tripled, quadrupled, whatever, in the last day or so.

Well DUH! since the only real D2 info site was down we all had to go for second-best and just keep on hoping that D2.net would be up and running again soon!

JR

I quoted this one to Elly and she remembered the event and fumed at the recollection.  I might have seemed to be making nasty comments about GF yesterday, but trust me, I didn't even scrape some snow off the surface of the iceberg.  He is one of those people with an inherent ability (one that he glories in) to piss off pretty much everyone.

A follow up from Archlich, who sent the mail about this site and ExpectNothing in the first place.

Saw my e-mail on the update today . . . thought I'd weigh in (again) on some of the points you raised.

Don't laugh, but I stopped reading ExpectNothing shortly after the war started -- which I believe was also shortly after I sent that first mail to you. I couldn't take the "F the liberal aholes" attitude, and "We're kicking their ass so hardcore!" war updates. Definitely evidence of the "anger below the surface" quality you speak of.

If I'd waited a month, the e-mail you'd have received would have been quite different.

One last thing: The link to the Dii.net warnings section actually links to the item generation tutorial page; not vice versa though, the first link works fine.

This one cracked me up.  First of all his "I stopped reading it." part, which I guess happened shortly after he mailed me about the topic.  But I am mostly laughing at myself, since in a long rant about what a super clever webmaster I am, I inserted two links to stuff I've done on the D2 site... and managed to screw up half of them. *cough*

And lastly, here's an excerpt from a mail from Mike.

I knew who Geoff Frazier was, but I did not know he had his own website. Well, thanks to you, now I do.

His website is an abortion.

First of all, I accept his explanation that he is not a web designer, but let's just talk about fonts and colors. And general readability. It's all a garbled mess, and difficult to read besides.

Next, let's discuss his political slant. At the risk of offending you, I am now coming out of the closet as generally conservative. However, I am embarrassed to admit that, given the current public practitioners of it.

I have told you before that I agree with your assessment of our current president. I only hope we can repair the damage he is doing. Since he will most likely be the Republican candidate next year, I may have to vote Democrat.

Rush Limbaugh is a flaming jackass. Dr. Laura is beneath contempt. And now I can lump Geoff Fraizer into that vile heap.

Just in case you are wondering why a conservative like me enjoys your political writing, there are two reasons: my opinion is always subject to change with the introduction of new facts hitherto unknown to me, and your writing is always thoughtful instead of blathering like the previously mentioned public practitioners of conservatism.

Anyway, to answer the question of whether anyone reads his site: I went there briefly today, for the first and last time. So that's one "No".

I don't have much to add to Mike's comments, other than to chuckle at the layout part. I hadn't really mentally processed that part, but yeah, it is pretty ironic that Fraizer is the Bliz webmaster, and his home page is actively painful on the eyes.  There are two web designers at Blizzard, and various of their artists help out with stuff.  And they do a great job, though the whole "every page must have a flat black background" is pretty cliché at this point.  It's also a crutch, since solid black is by far the easiest color to get everything to tile neatly over, and allows you to use virtually any bright color of text and be legible, if not entirely easy on the eyes.

I don't claim this site has any amazingly cool design, but it's functional, and I don't have the patience with graphics and design and layout changes to rework it.  My main goal going in was to use colors I liked, and make it pleasant to read for a long time at a stretch.  True, my thought was that my fiction would be here and people who be reading that, and I hadn't considered back then that my blogs would one day be 30 or 40 or 50k in length on a regular basis.  But oh well, at least I thought ahead.  Sort of.  And I think it's nicely-readable, which was, after all, my main goal.

I don't find solid black backgrounds very good for sustained reading, and solid white is even worse; too bright for me.  I really prefer some sort of textured background, like the nice quality paper stock you get in hardcover novels.  Or like this page.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.