Topic: Scott Jennings

Scott Jennings (born c. 1966), also known as Lum the Mad, is an American commentator on MMORPG games. He is best known for creating a website, The Rantings of Lum The Mad, a pioneer blog, which existed from 1998 to 2001. It was regarded as one of the most respected sources of MMOG news on the internet until 2001, when Jennings was hired by MMO developer Mythic Entertainment, where he remained until 2006.

Jennings was born c. 1966, and began gaming at the age of 10, when he began playing Dungeons & Dragons. He created his first website to post tips and tricks about the 1996 game The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Around 1998/1999, his focus shifted to Ultima Online (UO), an early graphical MMO first released in 1997, and one of the first to become well-known in popular culture. Jennings, whose primary career was as a database programmer, became a respected critic of UO, as he posted detailed critiques of the game. Jennings's strong views on "macroing" – the practice of automating aspects of the game, effectively making it easier – made him very popular with some UO players. As noted by game researcher Edward Castronova, this was an early example of a site where a game's designers had strong opposition from certain players, who would use their websites to actively critique a game's development. Jennings' writing was characterized by a mixture of humor and vitriolic anger, and his posts were known to readers as "rants". The site became frequented by both fans and haters of UO, along with some of UO's developers and personnel, as well as developers of competitor games.

With the 1999 release of a competitor to UO, EverQuest, Jennings expanded his writing to the new game. His early analysis of EQ focused on its differences to UO. However, he went on to criticize EverQuest directly. Jennings argued that the game forced players to spend long periods of time to gain very little, and that this was not fun. He also argued that the game consisted of fighting the same monsters repeatedly. He offered several examples of player greed, in his view, damaging the experience of the game for other players. Other issues he covered included "squatting" by large guilds, class balance, real-money trading, server lag, "raiding" as an end-game, and the later expansions' lack of finished and working content.