The idea of the an online ghost town is easy to describe: A site that was once popular but lost momentum and subsequently bleed pageviews until the only visitors are bots and spamnets making random poke-tests.
The theory is so appealing to me. The concept of a place, once bustling with e-commerce, teeming with digital life with 1s and 0s all over the virtual landscape turning into a bunch of servers where cyber-tumbleweeds drift aimlessly past forgotten user profiles.
Enough verbose wandering. I was reading through an interesting article about the ghost metropolis’ of Everquest, and how some of them are really low-res but aren’t going to be updated any time soon. I’m not an Everquest player so I can’t speak to the efficacy of the details, but the idea of deserted locales in an MMO, bereft of all life, is immensely fascinating to me.
Why won’t they open up the areas for updating by actual users? Again, I’m not a player so I’m not going to editorialize, but it seems like other expansions have updated some of the current zones so there isn’t really a need, and SOE (Everquest’s parent company) isn’t going to devote the resources necessary for such a huge project. Understandable. This way, you can still stroll through old scenes and remember what once was.
The theory is so appealing to me. The concept of a place, once bustling with e-commerce, teeming with digital life with 1s and 0s all over the virtual landscape turning into a bunch of servers where cyber-tumbleweeds drift aimlessly past forgotten user profiles.
Enough verbose wandering. I was reading through an interesting article about the ghost metropolis’ of Everquest, and how some of them are really low-res but aren’t going to be updated any time soon. I’m not an Everquest player so I can’t speak to the efficacy of the details, but the idea of deserted locales in an MMO, bereft of all life, is immensely fascinating to me.
Why won’t they open up the areas for updating by actual users? Again, I’m not a player so I’m not going to editorialize, but it seems like other expansions have updated some of the current zones so there isn’t really a need, and SOE (Everquest’s parent company) isn’t going to devote the resources necessary for such a huge project. Understandable. This way, you can still stroll through old scenes and remember what once was.
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