Something we’ve been noticing more and more from Mythic over the last couple of months is their serious effort to reach back into the community and build grassroots support for WAR amongst bloggers and fans alike.
There have been some obvious recent examples of this — snail-mailed packages to prominent blogs like Keen & Graev and The Greenskin, dropping hints about new WAR classes to be announced later this week, and Paul Barnett’s latest video blog entry from over the weekend, discussing a handful of his favourite WAR blogs. Funnily enough, Paul suggests in the video that most of these attempts to tease bloggers recently aren’t something strategic or organized, but just random people at Mythic who decided it would be cool to get the community involved before any kind of official word has been released yet. I’ll take his word for it, but I have a hard time believing this wasn’t all carefully orchestrated. :)
In addition, the WAR: The Age of Blogging initiative started on January 1st, has done amazingly well so far, with dozens of new WAR blogs scrambling out of the woodwork. Not to mention that it’s gotten coverage in more mainstream gaming press like Massively as well as in Mythic’s own Grab Bag. It’s great to see Mythic supporting community-sponsored events in addition to pushing back at us with their own community-relations fodder. Like many others have said, there’s nothing like free PR, right? ;)
To top of all of this off, the last 24 hours seem to have produced a raft of bloggers who’ve received love letters of one kind or another in the mail from Mythic. No one’s entirely sure what’s going on yet, but I’ve seen suggestions ranging from a new vampire-themed dungeon, to vampire counts being introduced as a new race (uhh, this seems highly unlikely), to all sorts of wild speculation. The concensus seems to be that something separate from the Jan 29th announcement is going to be released this Valentine’s Day, less than three weeks away.
A new live event? Sounds like a fair enough guess. Regis over at Wizards & Wenches has an elaborate take on what’s going on as well that’s worth checking out. Apparently, ”Death Night” (which conveniently falls on our Valentine’s Day) is some kind of statuatory holiday for Witch Elves and Disciples of Khaine. Interesting. (I wonder if they get the day off work?) Either way, it looks like we’ll be finding out soon enough.
I’m just glad to be playing a game where the developers are open and interested in communicating with their players. It’s definitely a rarity and it’s something I don’t think most gamers are familiar with coming from a “triple-A” MMO. I, for one, really appreciate having that kind of relationship with a developer.
EDIT 01/27 4:15pm: Kutu has posted an interesting tidbit directly from the horse’s mouth (err, from Paul Barnett) mentioning that 13 different cards were sent out, meaning there are several still floating around out there, waiting to be posted on various WAR blogs. This is getting more and more interesting!
