CoN 25th Anniversary: 1997-2022
Recommendation of updating the site

Posted: 8th October 2013 15:35

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I'm voting on adding new sections to add new members to your site.It keeps your site active and fresh.

I personally think things should be relabeled:

FF1-X section
FFX-FFXII
FFXIII-FFXV section
FF games general for all the ff games that don't belong in a category in itself, like FF dissidia 1,2.Final fantasy crystal chronicles and final fantasy adventure, and final fantasy legends 1-3.
Non FF section:For all the rest of the games that don't belong in the ff category, such as etrian odyssey, parasite eve, secret of mana and dungeon siege.

I personally feel you would add more members, and you wouldn't necessarily have more threads.

This post has been edited by Magitek_slayer on 8th October 2013 15:41

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Posted: 8th October 2013 16:27

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there should be a FF tactics advance sections

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Posted: 8th October 2013 18:23

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Not going to lie, I saw this thread title in the new threads and thought: "Here we go, this is going to be f**king brilliant."

From what's been said on previous threads like this, the forum sections are ordered according to what games have walkthrough sections on the site. Personally, I think that's how it should be. New members will be unfamiliar with the forum format and will tend to comment under the game for which they've been using the walkthrough. So it makes sense to have the forums ordered as they are.

On the topic of getting new members, I think the issue is content not restructuring. Everything that would get new members takes more time, effort, and possibly money. Opening the News to members is a good move. I wrote some at first but right now I don't really see any gaming news anyway other than CoN and what my friends tell me. I'm guessing that's the same for some other people.

An idea might be to walkthrough FFXIII or XIV (whichever's easier) to bring in more people (probably people who've not played many/any of the older games) and then hope that they would get involved in the community, play the older games and talk about them. This obviously takes time, effort, and possibly money...

In seriousness, R51 and others, what's your view on a balance between quality and sustainability? I mean although the walkthroughs are some of the best in the world, do you think it's a sustainable level?

But yeah if this did change FFX should appear in at least two different sections. tongue.gif

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Posted: 8th October 2013 19:10

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Its just that f1-7 is old news.

People are going to be playing A lot of new games and new news and walkthroughs and updates would bring new people.

I personally feel there must be a way to reach out to people who play games like the world ends with you, and maybe for an example one of you could even write a walkthrough, or for an example you could keep the space limited if its too expensive.

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Posted: 8th October 2013 19:46

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Quote (Magitek_slayer @ 8th October 2013 12:10)
Its just that f1-7 is old news.

People are going to be playing A lot of new games and new news and walkthroughs and updates would bring new people.

I personally feel there must be a way to reach out to people who play games like the world ends with you, and maybe for an example one of you could even write a walkthrough, or for an example you could keep the space limited if its too expensive.

I would be down to write another walkthrough but i don't want to start all over. I have 127 hours into that game

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Posted: 8th October 2013 19:48

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Quote (Raiden314 @ 8th October 2013 12:46)
Quote (Magitek_slayer @ 8th October 2013 12:10)
Its just that f1-7 is old news.

People are going to be playing A lot of new games and new news and walkthroughs and updates would bring new people.

I personally feel there must be a way to reach out to people who play games like the world ends with you, and maybe for an example one of you could even write a walkthrough, or for an example you could keep the space limited if its too expensive.

I would be down to write another walkthrough but i don't want to start all over. I have 127 hours into that game

I also have a lot of fan art that i can contribute but i need a scanner to transfer it

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Posted: 8th October 2013 21:09

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That would be great thank you.I could even convince some more people to come here and join up.

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Posted: 8th October 2013 22:05

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This is more of a retro FF site. Yes, they are old news, but you should be happy with what you have or Climhazzard will blow up your house.
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Posted: 8th October 2013 22:49

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That's strange, since we talk about new games too.

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Posted: 9th October 2013 00:29

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I joined this forum precisely because it was dedicated to the old-school FF games. If more coverage was devoted to the more recent FFs the older, and in my opinion better Final Fantasies could end up being buried under the newer additions. Plus, there's nothing to stop members discussing the newer FF games in the general Squenix gaming forum...

Nah, the site is fine as it is. flag-red.gif

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Posted: 14th October 2013 19:57

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I want to first say, here, that once again this topic might create some equivalency in readers' minds between the forums and the site. That equivalency doesn't really exist - subforums for each individual game have only been added as the game content has been added to the site proper, not the other way around. This precedent dates back more than a decade.

With that out of the way, I wanted to mention that I hadn't responded to this thread yet as I knew it had been discussed before and I hadn't had time to find it. Now I have that information handy, presented more articulately than I can muster by Tiddles: http://www.cavesofnarshe.com/forums/ipb/in...ndpost&p=190996

To save folks a click:
Quote (Tiddles)

You can't just create forum sections in the hope that topics will fill them.

That's just not how it works.  For anyone who's tried the "Let's make my own pointless message board" game - and got anywhere with it - this was lesson number one.  Empty forums don't encourage traffic on that subject, apart from at most one pity topic, regardless of what their name or supposed subject of discussion is.

The other point:

There's a perfectly good forum for discussing other Square/SE games already.

If you want to talk FF9, you can do it in General Squenix.  Making a big empty room (aside from the crickets) would not make more people talk about it than they do there.

With the level of traffic we have now, if we made any forum structure changes, it should be to consolidate the existing Final Fantasy/Square forums into one.  Maybe the whole lot.


As on many things, I happen to agree with him on this point. (Mostly) empty forums don't necessarily bring in new traffic. In fact, I think you could argue the exact opposite. If you were to see, say, a Final Fantasy X forum that had only three threads in it, would you be more likely to say to yourself "Wow, I can be the first person to post ten threads in here!" or would you say "Wow, this place is deserted. Why bother signing up here? It doesn't look like anyone would even respond to me." You can make an argument for either one, but I doubt you'd sway me from my belief that the latter is more likely. I've seen it dozens of times over the years, as people post their forums in Your Creations or spam them elsewhere - most of them end up with a couple hundred posts, half from the administrator, and then fade into obscurity.

That's not strictly what you're suggesting, though, I recognize that. You're actually suggesting something that I would consider a little more strange - smushing topics for nearly fifteen years' worth of games into one location, and then having other forums for games newer than that. I can't work out the logic of how that does anything of benefit to us; it's not a semantic division based on console era, nor does it provide any real impetus to increase posting as far as I can see. Not only that, the threads that get smushed together would be for all the games we cover and then some - there's a little bit of chicken-and-egg at play, but for me, I find it awkward to force a user who has found the site due to, say, our Final Fantasy IV content to dig through a massive forum to find threads relevant to that game when the game itself is clearly and artfully delineated on the main site.

I could almost see doing the General Final Fantasy vs. General Square Enix pots that you're talking about, Magitek, though I think even those might cause more confusion than they're worth. For instance, which bucket does Theatrhythm go into, really? Final Fantasy, because it uses FF characters? Or the general Square Enix bucket because the game is pretty wildly different than the Final Fantasy series? Some gamers might think that Final Fantasy Legend should go in the FF forum, but semantically they'd be wrong: Final Fantasy Legend is actually a SaGa game. Isn't it easier to avoid confusion and have those threads in one place?

Other responses:

Quote (Sweets)
In seriousness, R51 and others, what's your view on a balance between quality and sustainability? I mean although the walkthroughs are some of the best in the world, do you think it's a sustainable level?
The site outside of the community aspects does a fine job of sustaining itself. I haven't run the numbers to draw any direct comparisons in quite a while, but I would say that site traffic is about where I would expect it to be these days. We have made gains by releasing Skyglade, Final Fantasy V Advance, and Final Fantasy VI Advance, and because there really aren't many other sites offering fully-interactive walkthroughs for the games we cover, we still manage to cover most of the losses we might have due to the games themselves being rather old. [More] [re-releases] tend to help keep the numbers decent.

Our mission has always been to first get good information to gamers in an accessible way. We're not always perfect in doing it, for sure, but that is the mission. Because of that, the quality of the site takes precedence. That quality also goes a long way to the sustainability of the site itself. With regards to the community, that's a different beast. The community, as per the mission, is behind the game content in terms of importance. I know that the community is not as active as it has been in the past, and that does upset me, but part of it is the splintered nature of the gaming universe online, and all we can do is continue to offer the quality of community that we always have, and try to focus on the big picture to keep it growing or at least stable. Overall, I would characterize our goal as this: try to keep the main site improving in major ways, even though sometimes it takes a very long time to do so, and allow the community to build itself on that quality. I would love to be able to also focus on building the community as a separate channel, but I think time has shown that perhaps I am not the best person to do that either due to lack of skill or lack of time or some combination of both. If someone out there feels like they have the quality to step in and help, there, more power to them. Talk to me in any of the dozen ways that are obvious. smile.gif

Quote (Magitek)
People are going to be playing A lot of new games and new news and walkthroughs and updates would bring new people.
Agreed with you on news. That's why we try to keep up, even when we fail. On the other stuff, not so sure. We didn't see a massive blast of new forum users when we released Chrono Trigger, and that was probably the biggest release we've had in the last five years. Not much new forum traffic attributable to FFV or VI's new content over the last couple years either, though site traffic as a whole has benefited, as I mentioned above.

Quote (Magitek)
or for an example you could keep the space limited if its too expensive.
Not sure what this means, really. How would one use limited space but still cover a game? If you did only limited coverage, why would anyone in their right mind think "hey, CoN must be a good place to post about this game! They clearly did a bad job of covering it!" wink.gif

The expense is a non-issue and has been for many years. You've asked me about that privately before. Some sites probably have issues making ends meet. This one does not (though, I won't ever say no to more people shopping AmaCoN to offset the bills).

Quote (Magitek)
I could even convince some more people to come here and join up.
You could also do that right now. Why haven't you? If you can't convince people that they can talk about "Square Enix Game X" here without having a forum, they probably wouldn't post much anyway, IMO.

Quote (Magitek)
That's strange, since we talk about new games too.
As stated in the first paragraph, it's done to match the site. The site is the main focus of Caves of Narshe, not the forums - the forums therefore follow the site structure, not the other way around. We can talk about new games all day long, and we should, but the site structure dictates that of the forums.

Wall of text gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

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