The 2006 Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards
Welcome to the first annual Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards, where I present “The Gnome” to those bloggers who have stood out as the best in the MMO blogosphere for the year. The competition was stiff, but somebody had to make these important choices. Read on to discover the winners of the 2006 Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards.
Best Developer Blog: This year we give the award to the best written, most frequently updated, and most relevant dev blog of the year: Broken Toys, home of Scott Jennings, formerly known as Lum the Mad. Tied for runners-up we have Raph Koster, who didn’t win because of his randomly interspersed non-game posts, and Psychochild, who is almost always relevant but doesn’t post as much as Lum.
Best Player Blog: More good commentary came from this individual than multiple other blogs combined. I give you the best player-written blog of the year: Van Hemlock. The first runner for this one was my friend Aggro Me, who could have won if he didn’t get a life last year and stop posting so much, and AFK Gamer got pretty close to the win.
Best Dev Bloglomerate: This award goes for the best blog-esque website that is written by a conglomerate of gaming professionals. This year goes to one of my favorite new blogs, even if it’s half magazine: The Escapist. The main competition here was Terra Nova, which has a decent dearth of compelling posts lately even with 16 writers. Creating Passionate Users was a contender too until I decided it might not be a blog.
Best Player Bloglomerate: We award the ultimate group of player bloggers with this distinguished award. Kill Ten Rats edges out the competition to take the cake for the best congregation of MMO players, followed by Faith, which will be considered a player blogomerate until they publish a game.
Best New Blog: Who’s the best new kid on the block? Mark Wahlberg, of course (yeah, he was seriously in that group before it got popular). The best new blog on the block award goes to Sierra Kilo, followed by Tattered Page and Lost Rambling (and a couple others… This was a tough one).
Best Carnival: The best Carnival of Gamers–a monthly festival that celebrates great game blog posts–goes to n3rfed, for the creative use of chat window screenshots. We’ll go ahead and give Slashdot the runner-up spot, because it linked to a number of good articles (even though it was probably the least pretty of all of them).
Best Podcast: There are a lot of good podcasts. In fact, I should probably create a link category so I can link some of the ones I listen to. This was a hard one to decide on, but I’m giving this to a podcast that both appears regularly and covers a broad range of relevant topics: Virgin Worlds. Hot on its heels is the podcast from the EQ2-Daily crew, who kick a lot of ass but cover a more concentrated range of topics.
Best Rant: Everyone loves a good rant. This award could go to the rant that was written the best, made me laugh the most, was the worst written rant ever, or any other random range of criteria I felt like defining. This will seem like favoritism, but I’m giving this to my boy Moorgard for “An Open Letter to Big Timmy’s Burger Place,” which accurate mocked almost every poorly written MMO rant ever.
Best anyuzer Impression: AKA Best Disappearing Act. It doesn’t go to the Cesspit, because Abalieno can’t stop posting. It doesn’t go to Plaguelands, because Krones pulled a ninja move and came back. Instead, it’s a tie between MMO Critic, which would have won best new blog if it still existed, and Mining for Fish, since Andrew disappeared without a trace.
That wraps up this year’s Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards. I look forward to more bloginati goodness in the coming year. Which blogs will disappear, and which will completely explode? How many times will Abalieno quit blogging this year? Will anyuzer come back? All questions that will be answered this year! Oh, and here’s The Gnome Award for you winners!
the first annual Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards
The 2006 Nerfbat MMO Blog Awards
You’re too kind sir. Many thanks for the recognition.
I wuz robbed. I bet I have more game posts per week than Lum does!
😉
I don’t mind being second to brent. If you would have put another eq2 podcast up there I would have been pissed though 😉
I agree completely with all awards except for “Best Player Bloglomerate”. Those KTR guys are just after the glory and don’t deserve it. I bet that tomorrow they’ll even make up some “awards” page so they can display their award and will probably be bragging about it all week long.
“will be considered a player blogomerate until they publish a game”
Excellent, then since we’re only planning on releasing in Q1 ’08, we get a chance to get this award next year. You just wait, KTR! We’re coming for you!
Excellent set of awards.
Hey, thanks man!
Anyone know where the RSS feed is for Sierra Kilo?
I don’t think it’s linked from the site but I use this one:
http://steve.madrogue.com/?feed=rss2
Raph: Yes, but he writes in stupid people speak so it’s easier to glance over. When I read your stuff I have to *gasp* THINK! I think I gave it to Scott over you in part because I still think of him as “Lum the Mad” from UO days, and in part because you have a better beard than I do. Yes, these awards were definitely biased.
[Raph lost] in part because [he has] a better beard than I do.
Hey! I was robbed!!! And Moorgard’s rant is a total ripoff of my Letter to Stephen King. That’s it, I’m pulling my game out of the competition, too! 😉
I thought the two dollars I sent you paypal would have been enough to secure victory. What a bro, what a bro.
Bah! I sent him 3.00! hehe
[…] Our dear friend Grouchy Gnome has said a nice thing about us. Accordingly, Ethic has enshrined it before he thinks better of it. Mike Nichols, director of Spamalot, perhaps said it best: My love to those who have not won tonight and I just want to remind you of my motto: ‘Cheer up, life isn’t everything!’ […]
http://lost-rambling.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-would-like-to-thank.html
I’m not sure it’s deserved, but I do thank you. I hope to live up to the expectations or I’ll end up making you regret it, I haven’t decided yet. *Pulls out a quarter* You want heads or tails? 😉
“Ryan dear, how exactly did we pay for this lavish wedding?…”
“The NMBA’s baby… the NMBAs…”
It doesn’t take Gil Grissom to ‘notice’ that Andrew’s last post was about Vanguard: The time I likened Brad and Raph to each other on MUD-Dev 4 years ago, Raph wrote me an email, but Brad… Well I could just sense him casting something… And I knew that I wouldn’t know what it was until it was done. Assuming he had the reagents. But I suspect that he was distracted by another post and couldn’t easily retarget me after I ducked behind some other posters.
So in the end he wrote me an email too, as it happens. But, I don’t go about just sensing things like that. Andrew isn’t missing, he was Bradguarded.
I half hoped you might have had a “Biggest cluster-fluff of a holiday patch” category that we could have won. I mean, we worked so hard to earn it.
Why is the award a cameo of Richard Stallman, after he’s just been told that he just shook Bill Gates’ hand? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Richard_Stallman_2005_%28chrys%29.jpg) When he joined us at a Balti Restaurant in London, I never saw him make use of a knife. Has Richard Stallman truly discovered the way to wealth is giving your code away for free and not investing in cutting tools?
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