Penny Arcade has written an article on how fans of Camelot Unchained made sure the press would not touch it, by sending out several mails to news sites about the campaign. We've received quite a lot of mails on Camelot Unchained as well, urging us to write about it, but as we aren't really focusing on MMO Kickstarters, I've tried to ignore them.
More information.
After the story the fans flocked to Penny Arcade with the result of the comments thread being clopsed now.This isn't promotion, it's harassment
This is what it looks like from our end: dozens, if not hundreds of e-mails that all say the same thing, urging coverage of the Kickstarter. In many cases the exact same wording is used. This is what spam looks like, and it takes a decent amount of time to clean it out of your tip section. I've spoken to multiple editors about this issue, and they all expressed annoyance at the Camelot Unchained spam, and this has led most of us to not cover the game. No one likes spam, and coverage sends the message that harassment campaigns work.
I've complained about this a few times on Twitter, and finally a fan of the game contacted me to explain the situation. "One of the guys involved with another successful Kickstarter suggested that we email the same places they emailed and ask for some media coverage," backer Justin Majeroni explained. "This turned into someone coming up with a pretty good email and posting it in the comments along with the list and asking for a few people to hit up all these media outlets."
During my one-on-one conversations over e-mail it’s clear that they didn't mean to become spammers, but that was the end result. Their efforts had the opposite intended reaction; the press is actively annoyed due to the flood of spam, and bombing forums with information about the game is likely to turn other communities against Camelot Unchained as well.
It’s a fine line. Our readers often point us towards interesting Kickstarter campaigns, but we’ve complained about spam in the past, and organized attempts by large numbers of people to cover a campaign usually backfire. This is especially true if they’re simply repeating some or all of what amounts to a chain letter.
More information.
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2006
- Messages
- 11,223