I just can't see where all this is headed. On the one hand Stratics wants to be more professional, profitable, more community-oriented. On the other hand all that went way down since new management. We all got a slight impression when forums went down for about a full week, when just migrating to a new server. The last update under Taylor brought us a modern bulletin board, the next will give us a crippled understaffed board.
Right now we have that developer feed, with all developer post. Reply from Nexus on new forum: Go check every Dev's profile if in doubt.
We get UO.com announcement directly streamed into UHall. What I read this is also no longer available too?!
On the other hand we got WoW forums and the like nobody uses. Of course they not gonna go away but be the heart of new stratics.
My question whether they designed the new site for mobiles got unanswered. But don't worry Nexus, I guess that's a "doh, we didn't thought of it". I guess the kids playing the new MMOs out there are a bit more progressive as us UO players in general.
Tina's question about when the transition will be made also yielded no reply. Maybe another "We don't know either".
Also, old forum is still up for couple days now, maybe you can consider making another sync before migrating?
I still also miss any public debate, why players of SotA, Shards or WoW would now all come to stratics? Just because it got a new layout (again)? Because they ever wanted on the same forum with UO old goats? Maybe Ron Bron can elaborate on why the new owner thinks this is going to happen. Will there be large advertisment campaigns? Or is it just wishful thinking and all?
Also, isn't Stratics just the main UO forum because Devs post here? If Devs didnt post here, there would be no real reason to not post on other uoforums or the like.
Will you get Devs of other games on board? I doubt it. Guess it will rather alienate the UO devs.
Go on alienating your fellow UO members and you can shut it down in a year.
There wasn't really much we could do about the last migration,
@Ron Bron had to get the site onto his own server, and the way the databases were handed to us increased the down time immensely (they were broken into chunks), plus not only that but we are using multiple database formats due to various phases in the sites evolution, for some of that content it provided unique challenges.
Feeds from sites like the one from UO.com will be there, they just won't be automatically made into posts, they'll go into a groups activity stream, you can still comment and discuss them like before and as long as they stay relevant and active they will stay near the top of that stream.
I can't answer honestly and completely about mobile browsing, at least not yet, right now the new site doesn't have everything in done yet that would be needed for me to really test it and give you an honest answer. I can tell you tapatalk will work, but we won't be doing the full optimization until after we get all the forum data moved in preparation for our launch, so it's impossible for me give you an honest reply as to how it will run on mobile until then. I know you can browse it on mobile devices as it is right now, it's a matter of how well that I can't determine until everything has been optimized.
No there wouldn't be a reason to go to another site, well other than no other single site has the collection of guides, articles, tools, and other information sitting in one place. That is just as much a part of why we have been their unofficial "official" forums, and have built the relationship with them in the past that we have. Not simply because the Dev's post here. Simply because no one else offers the extent of things we do, and have been willing to work with them at the level we do.
We already have Devs from other games posting here, and we do have relationships with other developers. We're not trying to alienate anyone, if you want to be quite honest, we're trying to do the opposite, we're trying to open Stratics up to more than just UO. While UO is and has been the backbone of Stratics, and we all still love UO, it's also become a very ridgid relationship. We've had staff denied access at conventions because they were reporting for "Just some UO Site", we're not taken seriously by many of the larger studios out there, which limits what we can do for, you guys, for the site, and for our own personal enjoyment. None of the staff is getting paid we all do this because we enjoy doing it. Part of why we're moving everything to under the Stratics.com label is so we can regain the mobility necessary to grow the site, bring new features and new community members.
All of us on love and respect UO, we plan to keep supporting it, but we're also going to work to build other communities, on Stratics that hopefully we can support just as much, and we are providing ways to keep those communities relatively isolated at an individual users discretion. That's a big difference between saying that we're making another title our focus on the site, no one has said that, what I have and others have said, is we're going to actively work at growing other areas as well. We're not talking about moving a bunch of our staff off of work on UO, we're looking at seeing where the interest is and allowing the community with that interest help us build these new areas.
Every organization reaches a tipping point, a place where they've reached a size to where overhead increases dramatically, and where they are still too small to have the leverage necessary to have people scrambling to work with them. That's the point Stratics is at and has been at for years, and just like those organizations our choices are limited, we can evolve and grow so we become more attractive, we could cut a lot of stuff out, shrink and decrease overhead, or we try to hold on where we are and the odds say we'd slowly decay and close. It's a gamble no matter how you look at it's but one that has to be taken.