Woo first vote.

Yeah, flamebate all the way.

Black Boxes.

Though, Black Boxes that link to a flamebate post would be better.

MC Banhammer Posted:

There’s also a link to the blog at the bottom of every site page. That’s a scroll/click.

Never noticed that before.

All of you voting for the black box — you do realize that we don’t have an option to get rid of those, right? That they’d have to be timed to go away, so site update history would be lost if that’s the only way?

And do you really want these entries pushing your character information down the screen?

Both Flamebate and blog. And maybe the black box for very important updates – updates that really influence the gameplay, e.g. if forums became significantly harder. But mostly Flamebate and blog.

SimplyTHEBEST Posted:

Black box for updates that significantly affect gameplay, since people who just play the game won’t visit the blog, twitter, or flamebate.

Blog for general announcements and ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, or anything that requires more than one or two lines to describe.

Twitter for minor changes, status updates, and other quick blurbs.

Flamebate for things that require user feedback, like this thread.

That’s basically the way things are now, it just needs to be codified as procedure.

The reasons for this is simple:

The black box is invasive, annoying, and as near as I can tell impossible to hide or remove. That makes it perfect for it’s job, as it should only be used for short messages that people NEED to see. It’s the “You are going to ****ing pay attention to me” way of telling players things.

The blog is like a dumptruck; you can load so much **** into it that it just feels wrong to post in it for tiny chucks of text. Also, smaller messages clutter things up while pushing the larger posts off the page.

Twitter is ideal for having lots of short messages, so anything that doesn’t warrant a flood of text (Hi!) can be easily handled there.

Flamebate lets users respond without having to make/login-to a different account on a different service; if they play forumwarz, they can just go into the thread and contribute. That makes it perfect for getting feedback from the community (Moreso for ideas and suggestions than sample data – threads skew early and often if you’re trying to get facts out of them)

I couldn’t have said it better myself. I just wasn’t sure if this opinion was shared with the mbumes Log in to see images!

There aren’t links to the blog within flamebate when I have IDC open.

The whole line of links goes away actually.

If the links were there I’d be more likely to check the blog frequently as I like the blog and twitter updates.

For me, the answer is, none of the above are quite adequate.

I don’t want to have to search in multiple of these locations for major, minor or trivial updates, especially ones which are time sensitive (alot of them, for different reasons) I’d much prefer to see them all in the same place, and I want that to be immediately accessible whenever I log in. As a small example of the problems – playing dom against players who weren’t aware of the changes to the ties rule was frustrating, both for me when I was offering players ties, and later for those who realised they’d just shot themselves in the foot. So really, I want other players who are considerably lazier than myself to have a fair chance of seeing these changes as well.

Have a look at the way Kingdom of Loathing does announcements. They put some thought into it and it works well, both as a means of disseminating information, and keeping the community energised about the game. The latter is the reason why you shouldn’t be hiding game enhancement announcements in blogs, twitters and flamebate (with multiple forums to check since announcements may be relevant to one but not another, e.g. domination, forumbuildr, the core game)

Something should be on the character page, which players will see if they’re active, but it should be an integral part, and not quite so intrusive as the black bar at the top e.g. a list of major and minor updates in the sidebar, leading to something more comprehensive in a dedicated forum. Such a forum may mirror the blog and/or twitter combined but it needs to be an integral part of the site. Or reuse the tutorial style prompts for game update information, so players can just click the x after having read them.

meeeeeeeeee Posted:

Or reuse the tutorial style prompts for game update information, so players can just click the x after having read them.

You mean the hints? I’d be down with that.

the black box is cool and you can make sure, everybody reads it. I also read the blog, where I get the twitter news.