I have not turned my comp on in two days.

We’ve had family in town since last week + a service project to decorate the local public elementary school’s library that I somehow got roped into.  I’ll be back into my normal blogging and gaming routine starting tomorrow.

On a completely unrelated note, Happy 4th of July to our readers from the USA!  This is one of my favorite holidays because of the BBQ, fireworks, and patriotism.  Have you ever seen King of the Hill?  Hank and I have a lot in common.

Easily the best science fiction story anyone will see at the movies this summer, probably all year.

Robots in love, a ship full of neotenic humans who have to discover the difference between surviving and living, and a legitimate answer to the question, “What do we need a planet for?”

Plus there’s a new Peter Gabriel song, which is kind of a bonus. You’ll want to stay through the credits.

Seriously, go.

Happy 4th of July! Let me take this opportunity to do something truly American: complain about my work.

Sanya has a post about "best practices" talks at conferences. She mentions that she has a sense of deja vu: saying the same thing to the same people taking the same notes as before. She then laments that conferences never really seem to be educational, just excuses to get together and network.

It's the same thing I was feeling several years ago and why, although I love making games, I really fucking hate the game industry.

The first problem, that people don't seem to learn, becomes really obvious once you start consulting on projects. Often you're asked to come in and give feedback on the process. The problem is that 9 times out of 10, the people hiring you just want you to confirm their own ideas. If you say something that contradicts them, they'll probably ignore you. Of course, if you confirm their ideas and they fail, well, they have someone to blame for not telling them otherwise! These experiences have been repeated between a lot of other game industry consultants I've talked to.

But, there's aother big problem, and the main reason why conferences are about "networking" instead of "classes": the culture of secrecy in the game industry. And, frankly, it's stupid.

Here's a situation I've run into quite a few times now.

Someone says, "I'm working on something I want to license to other developers!"
Psychochild says, "Oh, cool. Tell me about it, I might be able to get people interested."
Someone says, "I need you to sign an NDA?"
Psychochild says, "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of me trying to get others interested?"
Someone says, "Er... let me get back to you...."
(Months pass....)

Or, how about

Someone says, "I may or may not be working on something cool!"
Psychochild says, "Hey, perhaps we can work together?"
Someone says, "Well, I can't tell you what I'm doing because it's a SEEEEEKRIT!!!!!"
Psychochild says, "Oooookay, then."

The truly ironic part here is that after the conference you can buy drinks for people and they'll spill almost any beans you want to hear. But, when it would benefit them? LIPS ARE SEALED!

This is especially stupid for smaller scale indie developers, because all it means is that we potentially duplicate efforts on things like technology or infrastructure. Yeah, you have a great idea for "Transformers meet Pokémon with a Hindu religion twist!" I have no interest in "stealing" your idea, I have plenty of my own and not enough hours in the day to implement them. Especially if you already have a design doc and work done on the idea, it's unlikely that I would be able to do better than you even if I wanted to "steal your idea."

Now, this doesn't mean there are not very good reasons for keeping some things secret. If you signed an NDA, then you are obligated to keep some things quiet. Trying to close a sensitive deal? Posting about it on your blog may not be a good idea. Part of what you have to consider is if sharing information is likely to bring greater rewards than the risks you're taking in revealing it. But, it's just hypocritical ti dismiss the "game designs" of wannabes as "worthless ideas" and claim "it's all in the implementation" then turn around and pretend every nugget falling from your design orifice is pure gold to be hidden away from prying eyes.

Finally, we have to look at the fact that people often don't understand why things succeed or fail. We can ignore attempts to mislead others ("We had almost no marketing!" "What about the two-page spreads in all the magazines every month for 3 months before launch." "...I like pie!"), or egos ("This project succeeded because I'm such an awesome leader!" "Everyone hates you." "I SAID AWESOME, BITCH!"), or even blatant idiocy ("That company came out of NOWHERE with a successful game!" "What about the years of history of developing games and IPs?" "Look, Elvis!"). Sometimes it's hard to really understand the dozens of different factors that went into it. And, frankly, sometimes it's just pure, dumb luck; you can do everything right and fail, just as you can do everything wrong and people struggle to enjoy the game despite it all.

Lately, I've been looking at most conferences as an inefficient use of my time. I'm not much of a night owl if I have to get up before noon, so I sometimes miss the really late night gab sessions. I am already in contact with a lot of people online so I don't need to meet them in person. I have a pretty good reputation, so I don't need to get in front of an audience to "prove" myself. I don't play the stupid political games, so some conferences seem to specially reject my proposals. On top of rising travel costs and the extreme hassle of flying anywhere, there are a lot of considerations that make conferences simply not as useful to me at this point. The only benefit is if I get to buy people like Richard Bartle dinner as a way of thanks for his generous nature over the years.

So, there's another in my endless series of rants about how the game industry sucks. What are your experiences?

This is a long one folks, but if you have any interest in the way blogging statistics are analyzed, I think it is well worth the read! Hopefully, you can learn from my experiences and take something away for your site. For everyone else (who isn’t a blogger), you can call me a giant nerd in the comments section!

I started The Greenskin in early November 2007, which means it’s been about seven months of blogging so far. I just noticed that we recently hit a nice milestone of 100,000+ page views, which made me want to dig a little deeper. Here’s what I found (slightly rounded numbers):

• 7 months of blogging
• 200 posts (blog entries) - 201 including this one!
• 110k page views
• 55k unique visitors
• 2717 comments/trackbacks
• 3800 views (best day ever)

From this, it can be determined that we have averaged:

• 0.95 posts per day
• 550 views per post
• 13.5 comments per post
• 2 pages viewed per unique visitor

Here are a few figures you might find interesting:

This is the current timeline for my blog. As you can see, there have been some pretty big ups and downs, but overall, traffic has been steadily increasing (slowly but surely). I’m mainly happy about two things: 1) pages/visit and 2) average time on site. Pages per unique visitor means many people have found something else that caught their eye during their time here. An average time of nearly 2 minutes per visit means more people than not have probably come here with a purpose, rather than by accident (though I’m sure that is the main reason this number isn’t higher). You see a major drop down to zero today because Google Analytics is always a day behind in its reporting. It doesn’t actually have data for today yet, which is reducing these numbers slightly (but oh well)!

This pie chart represents the proportion of traffic sources to the site. As you can see, the majority of unique visitors come from referring sites. This really illustrates the importance of a strong network, and I want to thank all the sites who have linked to me these past several months! Without your support, the reach of this little blog wouldn’t extend very far at all! More on that later…

Our second largest traffic source is a wide range of search engines, but mostly Google (94%). If you play your cards right, Google will send you so much love, you won’t know what to do with it all! The people who visit your site from search engines probably got there because they had questions, hoping you would provide the answers. Once WAR launches, I think everyone will see a giant spike in search engine traffic! My general/WoW blog hosted on Wordpress still receives an average of 500 uniques per day purely from Google and I haven’t written on that site since launching this one. Good SEO (search engine optimization) + good content = good success with Google. I’m halfway there with Wordpress (excellent technical SEO under the hood) and hopefully we’re getting there with content!

Direct traffic comes from bookmarks or typing in thegreenskin.com directly into your address bar. No idea what “other” is! I’d like to analyze my Feedburner/RSS statistics but I’m not really familiar with the system. Any help on that would be appreciated (comment away)!

I could give a really detailed breakdown of daily and weekly traffic but I won’t because I think the monthly stats tell the best story. You can see that I peaked in January, which is due to the immense popularity of the 2007 Greeny Community Awards I was hosting. I was linked everywhere from guild forums to general forums to fansites and even from the WAR Herald.

The two following months saw a steep decline because there was simply no way for me to retain all the visitors I saw during the awards month. That said, it really helped gain the site some notoriety in the community and that was the best I could hope for!

The following three months saw a fairly steady increase in traffic, which I have to attribute to the wonderful help I received from several site contributors. NoneSuch helped develop the Greenskin Lore section, which is the most visited page on this site. Cicadymn (Sam) took over the Forum Watch feature because I just couldn’t keep up with it any more. It has become a fan favorite! Finally, Bo helped by pushing out some thought (and comment) provoking opinion pieces. Most recently, Rominus has been putting together one heck of a modelling guide, which I’m sure several thousand people will appreciate (even more) once the completed version hits the search engines! Thanks so much for your help guys!

You see a dip in the last month because it is July… this month! Already, by July 4th, we have more traffic than I did back in December of last year. That’s pretty impressive imho! I have no doubt this month will be even bigger than the last and continue it’s skyward reach.

Giving back some love

If you want to increase your traffice from referring sites, my advice to you, and I should partake in it more myself, is to do five main things: 1) comment on other blogs in your niche, especially ones that have a large audience; 2) join forums in your niche, put your site address in your signature, and become very active (but not trollish or spammy); 3) make personal connections (email/IM) with other fansite owners - they may be more willing to link to your content in the future; 4) submit your best entries to news portals; and 5) write the best, well-thought-out, well-edited, catchy posts you can - practice makes perfect!

These are the top 10 referring sites, according to Google Analytics:

1. warhammeralliance.com
2. warherald.com / warhammerherald.com
3. war-rvr.net
4. stumbleupon.com
5. waaagh.wordpress.com
6. virginworlds.com
7. warhammervault.ign.com
8. tentonhammer.com
9. warhammerconflict.com
10. keenandgraev.com

Thanks for the love! I’d love to show more, but you have to cut it off somewhere, right!? As you can see, the list is a good mix of blogs, forums, news aggregators, and social networking site(s)! Expand your reach - expand your potential. Wow… that was almost Zen!

And finally, to the readers and commentors!

I want to thank each and every person who stops by this little corner of the WAR community and has a peek at what random thoughts are on our minds that day. I primarily write on this site as a creative outlet but it wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling if no-one was paying attention. Maybe that sounds egotistical? I guess, but it’s nice to stroke it once in a while! Uh, yeah… moving on.

I’m especially motivated by people who take the time to read through everything and leave thoughtful comments. Of the 2700ish so far, I have yet to come across once that needed heavy moderation or deletion, so I think it’s safe to say that Greenskin readers are highly intelligent, kind-hearted folk! I love a good debate as much as I love to hear affirmation that what I wrote was right on the money, so please leave a comment whenever you have the time and inclination!

It’s been an awesome seven months and the game hasn’t even launched yet. I can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon. I heard something inspiring by Garthilk during an unrecorded conversation for ChaosCast #3. He wrote up several design documents full of guiding principles for Warhammer Alliance. I’ve started working on a tiny one for The Greenskin that might help me keep things on track a little better (hello, webcomic?) as well as set a course for the future.

I hope you’ll be around to see it through with The Greenskin team.

We would like to wish all of you a Happy Independence Day. Have a great holiday and be safe. - Ten Ton Hammer Staff

Vanguard's producer, Thom Terrazas, has put out a 'State of the Game' letter that goes into detail about Update 6, the Isle of Dawn and the future of Vanguard. Check it out after the jump.

No honestly. In the last 2 years the market share of the mac has gone from 4.29% in July 2006, to 7.94% as of June 2008. And most likely will cross the 8% mark this month. At the same time the Windows Market has fallen from 95.19%  to 90.89% in that same time period.

So it 8% … that not really a whole lot of people, but at the same time Windows side of thing lost 5% and most of them went over to the mac side (a few to linux). On top of that the sales of mac is accelerating, that 4% every 2 year, might turn in to 5, or even 6%.

If your starting development of a new MMO it most likely will take you about 3-4 years before it is released. The number for OS market share are going to look very different. If the current rate stays the same the mac will have a 16% market share,  and windows 80% market-share. That is almost 1/5 of all potential customers would be on a mac. And if Mac sales continue to grow you may be looking at something closer to 1/4 of all potential customers on a Mac.

On top of all that Apple is marketing to the younger generations very very heavily, and it working. Hell even i bought a mac. And why? Because Apple gave me a 200 buck discount and a free Ipod Touch. It hard to beat a deal like that. And since i can run window on a mac, i don’t lose any of my window stuff either.  I found it a Win Win situation.

So if your in development of an MMO and your not considering Mac support…. You might want to start considering it.

Happy 4th of July to everyone

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Filed under: Podcasts, Culture

Continue reading MMOG Podcast Roundup: June 28th - July 4th

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Filed under: Super-hero, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Fan art

City of Heroes

Continue reading New City of Heroes fanzine launched

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Jumpgate Evolution opens up for guilds to enter the beta.

This week the beta news is dropping as fast as the stock market, only in a good way. Highly anticipated Sci-Fi MMO Jumpgate Evolution announced today that they are accepting applications for those people interested in joining the guild beta. While there are no starting or ending dates on the applications, if you are interested, sooner is probably better than later for completing the process. Similarly, there are no dates discussed as to when the guild beta will start, or if in fact is already has, but hopefully this marks good progress towards launch.

Make sure you have accurate information to reach all of your guild members and then fill out the application on the Jumpgate Evolution website.

Filed under: Massively highlights

	Ask Massively: Be careful what you ask for... Most of the time, when writing Ask Massively, it is fairly simple to keep my personal and professional life separated from my life as an MMO gamer and columnist. Today, I'm going to break down that barrier for just a little while.
	Winterblink: asset control and consolidation in EVE Online Warp Drive Active podcaster Winterblink is a man who's got everything, apparently. And too much of it, scattered throughout his hangars in New Eden. It's a common problem in EVE Online, particularly for players who roam a lot throughout the galaxy.
	X-play opens the Stargate and brings back Stargate Worlds gameplay video G4's X-play gained access to the FireSky Studios where the developers are hard at work on Stargate Worlds. G4 was allowed to open the Stargate and returned back with gameplay footage, while undergoing their mission they infiltrated ...
	Vivendi and Activision merge nears completion as Delaware Court denies preliminary injunction It's a hectic summer over at Blizzard HQ. Inundating the masses with Wrath of the Lich King across the pond at the World Wide Invitational, announcing Diablo 3 on top of that, and battling it out in the courts ...
	Ghetto grid: Katharine Berry slams Lab's negligence Famous Teen Second Life user Katharine Berry has spoken out on conditions in Linden Lab's Teen Grid. While, of course, there are rules about content and conduct, they're neither well-followed, says Berry, nor well-enforced.

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Realtime Worlds, developers of the upcoming MMO All Points Bulletin (APB), is looking for community officers. The job is based in Scotland and the press release can be read by clicking "read more".

As U.S. Dollar collapses, Blizzard Europe looks for Euros.

Apparently tired of watching Blizzard North America raking in all of the U.S. Dollars, Blizzard Europe has unveiled its own new store. While the word new is used in the announcement, the store looks identical to its North American counterpart. Everything that is except the price tags.

Does the European site cater more towards PvP with the black t-shirts? Are they implying that this side of the ocean prefers the more gentle store? Count your world currencies, calculate the exchange rates and then head to Blizzard Europe's site to see for yourself.

Filed under: Fantasy, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Game mechanics, Leveling, Opinion

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Here’s wishing our American readers a Happy Independence Day! For the rest of you, Happy Friday!