Vision for the Lurker Lounge: World of Warcraft
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The Lurker Lounge: World of Warcraft Edition

Bolty hasn't mentioned it, so I'm guessing he's letting me be the one to say it. A few months ago, Bolty suggested to me the idea of becoming the Site Administrator for the new Lurker Lounge: World of Warcraft site, and over the past couple of weeks, we've had some serious discussion of the matter. Much cajolery, a heavy helping of flattery, and some complete fabrications ("Chicks dig game site administrators" -- what the heck was that one, Bolty?) convinced me to take the job. With game release a day away, it's time I formally introduce myself as your new Site Administrator and let you know what my vision is for the Lurker Lounge: World of Warcraft edition.

Vision statement: The Lurker Lounge: WoW Edition is a site devoted to intelligent and civil discussion of strategy, tactics, and gameplay issues in the game, World of Warcraft. The Lurker Lounge is not a guild, and we welcome players with any guild affiliation to join in the discussion and post content here.

The Lurker Lounge Content: The content focus of the LL:WoW will be on strategy, tactics, and gameplay issues. However, I can't provide all that content. The content instead comes from *you*. Yes, you, the person reading this post right now. Examples of potential content include: Class guides, PvP guides, guides to individual instances and zones, and discoveries of important game formulae. You don't have to be an expert in all things WoW to write something. Just spend some time experimenting with one small thing and write about that. For example, you could become the expert in "how to get to level 10 as a human the fastest" and write about that.

The Lurker Lounge "Guild": The Lurker Lounge is not a guild. Lurkers are free to and even encouraged to find and join guilds on the servers they happen to play on. However, there are many players who come to this site who do not have any affiliation with a guild and would like to play with fellow Lurkers. For these cases, we will provide a list of servers that have a higher than usual number of Lurkers playing on them. If a server has enough Lurkers playing on it, the players on that server are welcome to form a Lurker Lounge guild in order to enable better communication between the those players. The administration of these "guilds," including minutia like tabard design, are up to the players on the individual server.

Generally, I prefer a "hands-off" policy on guild issues. However, since characters in a Lurker Lounge guild will be walking advertisements for the Lurker Lounge, I would expect gameplay from anyone creating or participating in such a guild to reflect the higher standards of the Lurker Lounge community. I will provide a separate small list of Lurker Lounge behavior guidelines later, but that'll be about it for the Lurker Lounge "guild." If you would like something with more stringent behavior guidelines and more built-in safeguards, then I suggest looking into joining the Amazon Basin guild. The AB already has a history of organizing and maintaining fun and safe guilds to play in, and it seems silly to duplicate their efforts.

LL:WoW Size Issues: As is usual with the Lurker Lounge, we will make no attempt to actively publicize our existence. We will instead depend on word of mouth to spread the news of the Lurker Lounge. After all, the best way to keep out the "wankers" is to not let the wankers know about the site in the first place. However, with the game being sold to well over a million people, that word will spread and we, the old guard, need to accept that we are going to be swamped by the number of new players who will be joining us in the coming year. This is good, because we'll have an influx of new energy, new discussion, and new content coming into the site. This is bad, because we'll have the usual periodic invasion of wankers.

The site cannot stand still with the player base it has now. While we have had some good discussion during the beta, the quantity of real information provided in the forum has been low. If we want the Lurker Lounge to do to WoW what it did to D1 and D2, we need new players with good ideas to join us. That's why I feel it's important to encourage people with any guild affiliation to join in our discussion. Some of the players with the best knowledge are in some of those big elite guilds, after all, and I'd like to tap into their knowledgebase.

The site's success will be determined by how well we encourage new players with good ideas to join us and how well we discourage the "wankers" from joining us. It's for this reason that I feel we need to plan and prepare ourselves for dealing with a larger community of players now. One of the first things I want to do is get a team of forum administrators together who will monitor the forums and make sure the general policies of intelligent and civil discussion are enforced. If you would like to be a forum administrator, send me a private message and let's talk.


That's about it for now. I have some specific ideas for the site that I'd like to bounce off the community, and I look forward to hearing your ideas as well. However, I'll write about the ideas I have in future separate threads.
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Vision for the Lurker Lounge: World of Warcraft - by MongoJerry - 11-22-2004, 10:21 AM

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