Originally Posted by Malorn
Seems like potential abuse to me.
I don't see why people can't "cover" the story from each side's perspective. It's more immersive that way anyway. We won't have bias-free journalism so we may as well embrace it and let it run as ongoing propaganda.
You don't need any special powers to be a journalist. Just write what you see like an embedded journalist does in the military today.
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It's not about bias-free, it's about giving them the tools to do their job. If they're unable to follow the battles without dying, they can't do it effectively. It may be more immersive for the person doing the journalism to do it as a live player, but it's not about HIM, it's about the people who are going to view it on the community sites later.
And I completely disagree about immersion. Immersion is enhanced by giving the ability to get more videos and photos out of the combat areas. Being interrupted by dying because you could only do it as a live killable player is inefficient at best.
As for abuse, I covered that. The players cannot create a character on the same server as their journalist account, and indeed, they could back that up with an IP block preventing secondary accounts from that household logging into the same server. And also, I said that SOE would firm up their relationships with community sites and vette the applicants. They could also be rotated monthly or something.
No, I think the uniqueness of being able to have a fully-featured news service could do a lot to attract players to the game.