Reply To: Beasts of War – OnTableTop – Phase III: Time for speculations and conspiracies

[jamescutts 7032xp 0]

I’m also with @sundancer on this. I like the automatic email notifications, otherwise I will forget the topic exists. I actually tend to read the email rather than the post on the forum, then go to it if I want to contribute.

Having had a more indepth read of your posts @warzan heres my thoughts, sorry it got long again 😀

FORUMS

I actually think the forums are perfectly functional as they stand, this topic seems to be working out fine (albeit getting mildly sidetracked) and the number of users and activity is very low, I cant really see how changing them would magically make them better or more popular. Based on my last observations I think there’s limited value in changing them. Putting my work Architect hat on, technically it would be a improvement to keep them separate from the main site, with a “dedicated” forum product on a subdomain like forums.ontabletop.com but again there’s limited real value in that at this time.

PROJECTS

I think i covered quite a few bits in my last post of general improvements, its the unique feature of OTT and needs much love. I’d echo others that the number one issue is contributing to it, nobody wants to write a update to then loose it because of a error. I think this should be the top focus,. As a quick improvement I would adapt the contribution to be a client side submission rather than posting the who page, this would allow it to keep the content if there was a error and the user then retry, this also would make it much “safer” for people to contribute. Realistically when you create a new entry I would have it autosaving constantly with the entry marked as private/draft, when you get to the end you then publish it.

I get there’s some limitations here with the existing technology stack, I’m more than happy to offer any advice to the team to help guide them.

CHANNELS

I love the Idea of pulling in user generated content, I try and use this feature but i think its just a bit lost for users visiting the site, unless you directly go out and look for them, I tend to find a dual post to the Channel and the Project system because that gets surfaced on the homepage.

I think my ideal would be as a person with a channel that its instead called something like “Community Content” and theres a hub of all this content surfaced, and with a feed through to somewhere possibly on the homepage (maybe by removing the duplicate “news sections”.

It would also be cool if these pulled through automatically, so that a youtube upload is published on your channel (should be possible via the youtube api) and things like Sundancer could also set up recurring polishings of the UHH, samilar for YBTT. I think for the live stream content it would be good to have these in the hub as posts ahead of time, with a “coming soon” sort of thing i discussed back on my chat about themed weeks.

DISCORD

I think I’ve made my view clear, I dont think it needs massive sweeping changes, it also needs like the forums to become more active again. I think there’s some useful thing that could be done to make it more welcoming, and create more on topic and themed rooms but I don’t think users who are mostly active on the forums are the best people to be asking, any discussion on it should equally involve the users who are active participants on it.

CONTENT

I love the Weekender and XLBS, i know the format has changed somewhat but I’m watching them every week, not always live but I do always watch them. I’m really enjoying the latest tweaks, I think bringing back the VLOG into these shows has returned a lot of the lost energy, I’d personally like to see more VLOG style content outside of these shows too, for me its the best stuff when you guys are super excited about something and sharing your thoughts and process.

I do find I switch off with parts of these shows sometimes, I think thats fine as everyone has different interests. I think the worst culprit is when the shows 20min of G’Wulla released new stuff, now it might be theres a huge audience for this but if i was being picky i think those who want to know about G’Wulla stuff probably already do? I think the news segment works best when its coving a whole host of indie stuff as news in addition to indie of the week, the sort of sharing and discovery that excites you and is different, rather than just another GW news update.

As for general content on the site, I do come and check OTT daily for news, that’s a key function for me, again personally I’d like to see more indie stuff that GW stuff, i think OTT is a great highlighter and champion for the indies, and and love this to become more of a focus, id take finding out about things like Multi Award Winning Moonstone anyday over whats effectively reposting Warhammer Community content a dozen other sites have also posted.

I’m a little indifferent to the Kickstarter and 3D printing content, they are often overlapping and theres just so much of it. Personally i like the KS and 3D from really cool indies, like Midlam or Piano Miniatures, but im less keen on the “heres some random generic sci not space marine” sort of bits that feel very generic.

I would also champion that unboxings dont just need to be videos, I actually find at times written unboxings very useful, especially when its say a product that doesnt have sprue photos on the website, I’ll go hunting around for things like that in photos on blogs etc.

I actually wouldn’t mind seeing some 3D printed stuff done as reviews, which could perfectly overlap with things like table builds for the VLOGs. For example, how easy are buildings to print out on a fdm printer, and whats the results, or how do these resin bits come out. I think there would be some good cases there where you could offer something liking existing content, reviews and also tutorials all sort of in a “package” of linked content.

COMMUNITY

I love your revisiting this stuff, Its a great library and catalogue but its also very lost, I’m not sure the last time a game got a review by you or the community? I’m not sure how valuable the interactivity is on these, i think it just dilutes it down a there so many places for it but there is absolutely value in being on a news article or project and being able to click on a game to then discover more content, id actually love to see those game “hub” pages improved to better highlight the varous content, projects etc.