The past few days gave enough room for speculations and guesses. Missing posts? A server change? A new Portal with new domain?
Besides those questions above 3 other questions might come to your mind:
WHAT? WHY? HOW?
So lets bring some light into this situation and start with the "Why"
As I have told you (i leaked that info to this community) there was a LR staff meeting about the future of LR.
Before that i had to convince Eraser (one of the LR owners) to call for such a meeting.
The options LR had at that point of time were either to watch a slow death or to close LR. Since that were Erasors options and not mine i convinced/motivated him to change LR instead and call for that meeting.
Unfortunatly that meeting wasnt what i have expected.
Instead of talking about the real probs of LR and solving them the discussion went over to "which game that is going to be ignored by the community do we cover next?"
The choice was an Xbox360 game called Mass Effect O_o and yes the community already ripped that idea into small tiny pieces.
Besides this the LR staff came to the conclusion that no other game besides FL will ever get a chance at LR because FL is dominating everything else, the entire site is there to present FL and the structure does not allow it.
Conclusion of this was -> LR site has to be replaced with something new and the FL content has to be limited
(I exclude myself from this conclusion since i was the only one that had a different oppinion there - the only reason why new games are not accepted is because the LR staff does not lead the community and say what is needed and that some ppl have to shut up... nvm... just my observations ^^)
As we can see again LR staff did not defend their position and the need to cover Mass Effect and the community did see the chance to destroy that idea before it got a chance.
Well in the end nobody can say that this LR staff meeting (which i left before it was over coz i was a bit pissed at the way it was hold) had no effect on the community... it had the effect that since that day LR has 17% less visitors because of some half hearted decisions.
And the upcoming changes have not even been presented to the community yet. They know that if ppl hear something about limiting FL support even more ppl will leave.
ok that was the background story and now to the "why":
SWAT needs a future that is independent from LR, we need new fresh blood here, we need to have a place where players can go and have fun, we need a place where players can get information that they dont even find at LR anymore, a place where other games next to FL get a chance.
And now to the "WHAT" and "HOW"
Since the new Portal is already online for some time its no big secret how everything will look like.
Basically i giant portal for Scifi games, clans, mods, downloads, news, communities.
The first choice of games includes Darkstar One, Eve Online, Freelancer, Freespace, Infinity, Jumpgate, Nexus, Privateer, Spaceforce, Starlancer, Starshatter, Tarr Chronicles, Wing Commander and the X games.
A very nice mix of old and new games, some with multiplayer, some only with singleplayer, some with modding support.
Why did we choose these games?
Because these games already have a very big fan community or have a high potential for the future.
Why are there such old games like Privateer and Wing Commander?
Because for these games many mods are available. Partly those games have been recreated using new game engines and after 15 years they are still very popolar. Not to mention that in case of Wing Commander there are still games on the market and in development -> Wing Commander Arena (released for console)
Do we support console games at all?
Yes we do.
If those games show a good potential to become popular.
Why are there no games such as "Bang: Gunship Elite", "I-WAR" or StarTrek and StarWars games?
Currently we support 14 games already which means alot of work due to the fact that we have to find ppl will to work for the Portal and post news, update the content pages and keep the threads on the forum running.
If we are able to sort out the starting problems and if we find enough members willing to help SWAT with their work we might introduce new/other games to the Portal.
In case of StarTrek and StarWars there are so many games out there and so many communities supporting them already. The content of those communities is heavily loaded with mods, trailers, addons.... currently too much that we could handle it atm. But who knows... if SWAT does develop well we might also expand into those scifi-movie genres.
Ok what exactly do we cover for these games?
Downloads -> movies, trailers, demos, mods, maps, basicly everything we can find.
Links -> every link to other communities and fan pages
News -> as the name does already say it... news about those games, mods and everything related
Galleries -> hmm i dont think an explaination is needed
Content pages -> introductions of the game, features, maps, guides, walkthrughs, ...
Forum -> tutorials about modding, discussions, introductions,... the usual stuff
In order to be able to host all that stuff i did a server change...
the old server had limited mysql databases (100mb only and considering that our forum did already use 70mb of those 100mb we would have been in trouble very soon)
the new server also has a large hdd... large enough to host thousands of downloads
and the important thing is the traffic is included (no additional costs)
so we have almost everything we need
almost?`
well yes
we need ppl working for the portal... a team... a big team
who did have a look at the portal might have noticed the staff page and its structure
there we have the Administrators, Site moderators, Forum moderators, Newsposters
Administrators deal with the Portal as a whole... all the stuff nobody else has access to
Site moderators
create content pages, upload mods and other files to the download sections, fill the galleries with content, post news, moderate forums (if needed)
they are basically there to keep the portal up to date (involved html knowledge and a fast connection)
Forum moderators
those are the ones which are responsible for the order on the forum, to keep discussions running, to deal with trouble makers
there will be one forum moderator responsible for one game -> one for FL, one for eve, one for dso...
if they need stuff to be done that they dont have rights to such as uploading new pics to a gallery they will have to ask a site moderator to do so
Besides the moderation of the forum they can post news aswell
Newsposters
those are supporting all others... they post news.. get info from developers... do interviews... and so on
Once somebody did join the SWAT Portal Staff i expect that this guy really does do something... if i dont see any activity (no matter what reason) i remove that guy from the staff again
ok the forum got an update aswell in order to support all these changes...
i think the structure is understandable (even it is very complicated to moderate it with more than 200 differen boards)
the access rights of the past have been completly removed and a new system was integrated
partly this system did already work for the clan leaders of CF when they wanted to enter the leader board
only if they are member of a special user group they have the right to there restricted boards
the old forum use groups have been removed since they were too complicated to use and didnt support the adminstration by group leaders
that means in case of BG i have no change to change userrights anylonger since the old user groups do not exist any longer -> which also means i am also not able to enter the BG boards except the groupleader (wavey) would give me access
but ok - enough of this management stuff
what this portal does need now are ppl willing to join the SWAT staff and help with building up the portal now
fill the portal with content while i work on CF 1.8
