Announcing new website: WePlayCiv!
- Thread starter Dale
- Start date
eastsidebagel
Deity
I really hope that will work out well for you guys, Dale!
Love your mods, buddy!
Some minutes later:
I gave your site a visit shortly before making this post and now I'm making this proposal to you:
Let me become an OT mod at your site and I vow to be perpertually loyal and steadfast to weplayciv.com.
EDIT2: OK Dale, I'm ready. I just became a member 10 minutes ago!
Love your mods, buddy!
Some minutes later:
I gave your site a visit shortly before making this post and now I'm making this proposal to you:
Let me become an OT mod at your site and I vow to be perpertually loyal and steadfast to weplayciv.com.
EDIT2: OK Dale, I'm ready. I just became a member 10 minutes ago!
Ball Lightning
www.sporedum.net
Fantastic site guys! Hope this goes much better then CivUnited did 
!
!eastsidebagel
Deity
Yet you still have that site as your custom user title!Fantastic site guys! Hope this goes much better then CivUnited did
Ball Lightning
www.sporedum.net
Yet you still have that site as your custom user title!
Never got around to fixing that, doing so now!
And i think with Dale, Solver and Locutus running the new site, it won't go down the drain like CivUnited did.
And i'll probably will be a frequent visitor.
eastsidebagel
Deity
Yeah, me too. It looks promising so far. And it already got 100+ members, so that's definitely a good sign!
Broken Hawk
Emperor
What happened at Apolyton that prevented this new "fresh" approach from happening?
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Moderator Action: If you want to discuss that, please go to Apolyton. Not here.
Fierabras
Emperor
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As this concerns the entire civ community which CFC is a part of, why can't we discuss it here?
UPDATE: Just read the thread on Apolyton. Nothing more than the usual troll war that got a bit out of hand. Dale went a bit nuts in a PM and definitely overstepped a boundary, but still, "on the internet, nobody hears you scream".
Member Action: Reconsider what is good for the civ community as a whole
Dale
Mohawk Games Developer
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When Dan announced to the other admins he was retiring (and this was done months ago, even the Poly staff knew months ago) Locutus and Solver thought hard about what to do next. They could've put in a bid for the site but due to technical issues with the hacks implemented into Poly and the server costs and troubles they decided that maybe the best idea was to start a new site where the technical and financial aspects could be redone completely from the ground up. Remember, Poly has some unique hacks that were written up to 10 years ago, they were EXTREMELY difficult to merge into vbulletin3.
Anyway, long story short they approached me as I'd expressed in a willingness to maybe consider buying Poly too or starting a new site, and the three of us teamed up to start WePlayCiv.
The Asher-Dale "war" as some are calling it didn't cause what happened. It was a minor component for sure, but there were some much bigger considerations.
Anyway, long story short they approached me as I'd expressed in a willingness to maybe consider buying Poly too or starting a new site, and the three of us teamed up to start WePlayCiv.
The Asher-Dale "war" as some are calling it didn't cause what happened. It was a minor component for sure, but there were some much bigger considerations.
Fierabras
Emperor
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For those who are interested: Dale and Locutus gave a detailed explanation on how WPC will differentiate from CFC on Quarter To Three Forums
I still would have rather seen a joining of forces (CFC content, DanQ's podcasts, Locutus's better bandwidth infrastructure, etc.) to prevent more scattering of the civ community.
I still would have rather seen a joining of forces (CFC content, DanQ's podcasts, Locutus's better bandwidth infrastructure, etc.) to prevent more scattering of the civ community.
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Because its not generally good for this site. We don't want any bashing of any other sites to occur at CFC, and we most certainly don't want any bashing of members of other sites to happen here (from a straight netiquette perspective, they're not here to defend themselves, or provide their side of the story.
This is a good example. Please don't post any more on that again, especially given that I specifically asked you not to above. PM me if you want to discuss this further.
Personally, I don't think that having this issue debated on many different websites is good for the community as a whole, but I am motivated first and foremost by what is good for CFC. And besides, debating this issue here detracts from the discussion about Dale, Locutus and Solver's new website. Please keep it on-topic.
Other than those points, I also feel very strongly that having multiple sites is good for the community. That creates friendly competition which makes everyone make better sites. Some 8 years ago Apolyton was in essence the only place for everything Civ related, which ended in Apolyton's content getting gradually worse until it became a distant second-best site. Now CFC is definitely the best site for Civ (Civ4 mainly), it could also use some of that friendly competition.
An example of why that's good for the community. In 2005, briefly before Civ4 was released, I got permission from Firaxis to write an Apolyton-exclusive preview of the game that the community later found interesting. Thunderfall also obtained permission to write a CFC-exclusive preview and in the end, the community got two interesting writeups, whereas it would have been just one if there was just one big Civ site.
An example of why that's good for the community. In 2005, briefly before Civ4 was released, I got permission from Firaxis to write an Apolyton-exclusive preview of the game that the community later found interesting. Thunderfall also obtained permission to write a CFC-exclusive preview and in the end, the community got two interesting writeups, whereas it would have been just one if there was just one big Civ site.
Fierabras
Emperor
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I just wanted to point out the fact that a lot of members are cross-members, being member of both CFC and Apolyton, and therefore "members of other sites" doesn't always apply.
Furthermore, the announcement is made by such a cross-member, Dale, and I don't understand why we can't discuss their initiative from a perspective of a cross-member community. They posted it here and are fully aware that it might lead to critical review. It's not that they don't know what usually happens on internet fora
I thought my post would help to keep this thread on topic and therefore I touched upon what happened at Aployton to prevent more "What happened?" posts. Dale's post after mine and the link in my post after that covered it enough.
It's up for interpretation, but my "Member action" part was intended to start a discussion on if having a lot of civ sites is good for the civ community as a whole. To give a specific example: are modders happy now that they have to release their mods at yet another site?
If you still consider my train of thought off-topic and not good for CFC, feel free to delete this post, give me another warning, permaban me, or whatever. You are The law...
EDIT: Ainwood, I see now how the confusion started. Your moderator action was based on not fully understanding the reasons yourself. In my first post I tried to understand both your action and the real reasons as described by Dale. To answer Broke Arrow's question:
What happened at Apolyton that prevented this new "fresh" approach from happening?
Answer: technical difficulties with vBulletin upgrade and web infrastructure mainly
Fierabras
Emperor
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It's clear by now I don't agree, but I have some questions:
What are you competing for? Being the best civ community site? Why do you want that?
Competition can be a catalyst, but what about mergers? A merger of forces/skills can also lead to better product/services.
Wouldn't it be possible to have different reviews on one site? Do you need different sites to have different point of views? As a counter-example I'll point to the How to design a mod thread
On a more general note: Has WPC considered to become a civ content aggregator (sort of like a Google for CIV), instead of another civ content creator? I would love to support such an initiative.
"Best" is relative. What was the best Civ site 6 years ago? We want to provide the best we can for Civ players and modders, then it's up to individuals which site to consider the best. This competition I'm referring to isn't competition in the corporate sense where you ultimately want all clients to be yours and the competition to be out of business. None of us who run major Civ sites make money on that and the sites wouldn't benefit from making other sites disappear. It's competition purely to provide better content and service to civvers.
Mergers are good in some situations but variety is the spice of life. There will always be more variety with multiple sites. You can't have just one site anyway, there will be people who don't like how the site handles things, who will want another. Moderation policies are a prime example. I don't agree with some of CFC's moderation policies and I really dislike the moderation style. The other WPC owners feel similarly. Say, if there was only CFC, some people who dislike the moderation would be unhappy and would perhaps make their own site instead. Having one big site just isn't the answer. I've been there, I've worked on a site that was the one big Civ site (and which itself developed after a merger). It worked fine for a while but then the lack of competition ended up being a disservice to the community.
We're certainly not interested into creating a "Civ Google". Of course, we don't want to work in isolation and we're looking forward to cooperation and content-sharing with other sites but we don't just want to be a bunch of links to other content and a search engine. That's not fun and satisfying. Remember that satisfaction is the main thing Civ site owners get out of their efforts.
There are also a few other ways how we differ from CFC. We're very interested in coverage of the old Civ games, like Call to Power and SMAC. We don't just have a forum for those, we have downloads, active multiplayer games, etc. One reason is that we're actually CtP guys originally, another is that we're all people who appreciate quality games even if they're old. For 10 year old games, it isn't always easy to find a place where you can discuss it, let alone get MP games going, a few rare exceptions like StarCraft notwithstanding.
Locutus also mentions on 2.75 how we're able to accommodate large mod teams, that's another key point in our efforts. We've all modded games and we all contributed certain parts to Civ4 - so we really understand why modders need support and how they need it. Our ability to host large mods is a serious asset, some of them are really, really bandwidth hungry.
Mergers are good in some situations but variety is the spice of life. There will always be more variety with multiple sites. You can't have just one site anyway, there will be people who don't like how the site handles things, who will want another. Moderation policies are a prime example. I don't agree with some of CFC's moderation policies and I really dislike the moderation style. The other WPC owners feel similarly. Say, if there was only CFC, some people who dislike the moderation would be unhappy and would perhaps make their own site instead. Having one big site just isn't the answer. I've been there, I've worked on a site that was the one big Civ site (and which itself developed after a merger). It worked fine for a while but then the lack of competition ended up being a disservice to the community.
We're certainly not interested into creating a "Civ Google". Of course, we don't want to work in isolation and we're looking forward to cooperation and content-sharing with other sites but we don't just want to be a bunch of links to other content and a search engine. That's not fun and satisfying. Remember that satisfaction is the main thing Civ site owners get out of their efforts.
There are also a few other ways how we differ from CFC. We're very interested in coverage of the old Civ games, like Call to Power and SMAC. We don't just have a forum for those, we have downloads, active multiplayer games, etc. One reason is that we're actually CtP guys originally, another is that we're all people who appreciate quality games even if they're old. For 10 year old games, it isn't always easy to find a place where you can discuss it, let alone get MP games going, a few rare exceptions like StarCraft notwithstanding.
Locutus also mentions on 2.75 how we're able to accommodate large mod teams, that's another key point in our efforts. We've all modded games and we all contributed certain parts to Civ4 - so we really understand why modders need support and how they need it. Our ability to host large mods is a serious asset, some of them are really, really bandwidth hungry.
Fierabras
Emperor
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Thanks for the extensive explanation. I wasn't aware of a style of moderation. I'm interested to see what you guys will do with all that bandwidth and I hope to see some form of civ content sharing through API or something like that, so the civ community at large can benefit. Basically similar to what Google does at code.google.com
I agree that just being an aggregator would become boring when you get satisfaction out of content creation. I guess that if I want to see an aggregator, I'll have to make it myself (I do have the skills for it, it's what I do in RL). I get my satisfaction out of making data accessible, without being interested in the data/content itself.
Maybe I was disappointed too soon, because at this point WPC is only a forum. I'd like to thank you, Dale and Locutus (his post on 2.75) for providing some more details on the future of WPC.
I agree that just being an aggregator would become boring when you get satisfaction out of content creation. I guess that if I want to see an aggregator, I'll have to make it myself (I do have the skills for it, it's what I do in RL). I get my satisfaction out of making data accessible, without being interested in the data/content itself.
Maybe I was disappointed too soon, because at this point WPC is only a forum. I'd like to thank you, Dale and Locutus (his post on 2.75) for providing some more details on the future of WPC.
Locutus
King of the Collective
I think Solver wasn't very clear on this: we definitely do want to do some amount of content aggregation and collect as much good Civ content from all over the web on our site as possible. That's just by no means the only thing we plan to do. As Solver points out, it's by far the most boring and menial of tasks so it's not terribly interesting for us personally, but we do recognise there is a need and demand for this and that this is an area that can help us gain traction. So once we start to cover news (which should be very shortly) you will start to see us reporting on events from other Civ sites as well, not just our own. Later on that kind of aggregation will expand to other areas as well -- but much of our initial focus will be on building the infrastructure that we need to support the modding community.
Key phase: "at this point". We're only just beginning, the site is barely a week old. We have already begun to set up various tournaments and ladders, have launched a file database, are about to present our first contest, are running experiments with wiki software -- things are moving pretty fast all things considered, but not instantly. Down the line though, WePlayCiv will be a whole lot more than just a forum.
And don't butch Qt3's name to 2.75
We do intend to provide modders with SVN repositories as well if requested, so if the modders agree, their code can be browsed by others.
By the way, all three of us are programmers / IT people so we could probably indeed create an aggregator of sorts... it's just not our idea of fun (I'm referring to automated Google News style stuff here). Creating content is more fun
But again, we will also report on content from elsewhere, it's just that we'll be making our own.We're indeed mostly a forum at this point but we do already have some stuff going. We just launched our first contest and our file database has a bunch of good files for SMAC/CtP fans. Also, we are now experimenting with some wiki software that will provide us with on-site content, and some Civ4 stuff is coming to WPC soon as well.
I'm not trying to say that we'll be the ultimate place for all Civ games in a month but hopefully these posts explain our vision for the future.
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