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

[sundancer 43435xp 2]

Oh, one more thing from my side:

Decide on a URL and stick to it. Currently ontabletop.com is just a “sticker” and every link still goes to beastsofwar.com. Come on guys. One or the other!

[amachan 25701xp 2]

If I go to the website I still just go to beastsofwar.com. I also still call it Beasts of War 9 times out of 10, OnTableTop just doesn’t stick well for me.

[jamescutts 6936xp 4]

I’m sure I could chip in with a huge list here, and a may well do so but my hit list would be:

1. Return of Bootcamps, including virtual ones,
   1. I feel these where a big driver for community engagement and excitement and created a whole host of excellent supporting content in their build-ups along with being potentially great sponsorship opportunities.
2. Updated project system, its the really unique and differentiating feature of BoW and it deserves more love both to make it more usable when contributing but also to drive people to it and interact.
   1. Currently there’s no easy way to get to the projects your working on it takes several pages and clicks
   2. using it is a bit clunky, and anything around images especially so, this needs to be drag drop and forget.
   3. theres no feed/timeline of project updates, instead you just get reordering of the list of projects and you have to then open the project to see its latest content. to comment you then need to open it up further, this just makes it hard. a timeline you could just directly comment on and interact would improve engagement. Activity wall is similar but lacks the more detailed view of content and has the same issues as above.
   4. remove the item limit in project posts, this limits people creating longer pieces of content
   5. add in new features and functionality that would be useful and improve it, e.g. a paint list selector that let you pick and brand, paint range and colour and then adds that to the post with a colour swatch, relevant codes and maybe even a link to wayland games to purchase.
3. More great content, the revitalised weekender over the past month has really brought that spark back, the VLOG format was great of old so I’d love to see it more often, maybe a mid week episode of whats going on? I also love how varied the teams interests are so I think this could create some awesome content. For me I love the 10-15min limited editing rambles about projects, be it in the studio or not, more of that content would be awesome, its your guys passions that make this so awesome.
4. Improved homepage design, while this was once great i feel its become dated and has far too much information its just huge cognitive overload, here’s my suggestions:
   1. bin off the scrolling game logos, its distracting and adds little
   2. consolidate the features and breaking news sections, these are just too diseperate and also a bit confusing. Have a upfront focus on the latest content, and then a news section. at the moment these have several breaks and splits in the.
   3. remove the forum, game ratings, reviews and other extra stuff from the homepage, make it more focused on the BoW content, breaking news and latest project updates and key things like events your going to.
   4. review the navigation, its too busy with confusing icons and too much. keep it simple, News, Projects, Forums an CoGs should be key navigation items and emphasised, the other stuff less so.
   5. a more subtle integrated way of doing the big add, I think by having a bigger BoW content section above it.
5. General site cleanup
   1. Remove the extra noise in sidebars, latest from the forum on every page even with caching adds load and adds noise to the user
   2. remove dead feature links in the footer, no more [coming soon]
6. Even better themed weeks, i love these but on the site they get a bit mixed and and lost as there not the most emphaised thing, again teaks to the homepage but i think this could easily be adjusted to that the themed week section is front and center.
   1. I’d possibly suggest having the full weeks content on show as a timeline, but with the upcoming bits greyed out with a coming at “wed 10am” sort of thing, to build up the hype train
   2.  thinks like a themed week having its own page section so you can go back and revist the past ones
   3. look for some easy tie ins, links to go buy you stuff at wayland, or the company direct. Maybe look at them sponsoring things like discounts for actions to gamify it, create a project and share 3 posts for this game during themed week and if your a CoG member MAWM will give you a small freebie on your next order with X Code that will be sent. Finish the project in a month MAWM will give you a 5% discount code off your next order.
7. separate out the forums
   1. this is the bottom of my list, mainly because and sundancer im sorry, its a red herring, forums as a whole have become much quieter, investing in them will have limited returns but i agree they need improving and need moving away from the site in terms of wordpress and the the performance hits they create.
   2. You can do Single Sign on using wordpress, find a forum solution that works with Single Sign on and setup a new forums on a subdomain e.g. forum.ontabletop.com it will split of a thing that is too tied to the main site, offer a better experience.
   3. id favour moving to a better platform than keeping old posts, as sad as it makes me.

Oh dear that turned into a longer list than expected. I love BoW its the one site i always visit every day so I’d love to see it improved, they key points for me are, focus on the good and differentiating bits, bootcamps, the great content and the project system.

 

 

• This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by  jamescutts.
• This reply was modified 6 months, 3 weeks ago by  jamescutts.

[sundancer 43435xp 1]

this is the bottom of my list, mainly because and sundancer im sorry, its a red herring,

@jamescutts  Ye olde traitor!11!!!1

But I do get the point. Sadly.

[jamescutts 6936xp 2]

Also @sundancer, agree, decide on BoW or OTT, the domain and branding dont match!

[athelstaneParticipant 700xp 4]

I was reading the other day about how Wikipedia came about.  Off the top of my head, I wonder if there is a way of making the ‘Projects’ more prominent and easier to interact with?  I know others have asked about this.    The reason I mention the two things is that there might be mileage in making the community members to all intents and purposes the content creators.  Obviously this would have to tightly policed.  But before you know it, and if their articles, videos, who knows what were read/watched/commented upon, you could have lots of people regularly posting their hobby stuff here with OTT as the umbrella for all things gamey.    Why, it could even become the YouTube/Reddit of wargaming – is that a good thing?

[sundancer 43435xp 2]

That actually doesn’t sound bad IMHO.

[grantinvanman 2592xp 0]

@amachan I too use beasts of war. BoW. I don’t even think of it as OTT.

Beasts is a far better domain name.

[limburger 21948xp 0]

Rewarding finished projects with more stuff ? that’s insane … 😀

I think part of the challenge is that not every company has the margins to offer discounts or anything of substance. The big ones may have the budget whenever they launch a new thing, but the rest are probably happy that they could afford the advertisement at all.

btw : what does it take for a company to be featured on the OTT site ?
Are there any information packets you could send to companies so they know about the options and can budget for them ?

Definitely agree that being able to find / relive the themed weeks is very useful. Now they get kind of mixed within all the other content associated with the game that was part of that themed week.

I think a few small indies have discovered that creating forum posts and projects can be a way to advertise their products.
Maybe it’s something that could be expanded upon ? Those projects would have to be separate from the community content so it is transparent to the regular visitors.

While community created content is a great way of expanding the site it can also feel a bit exploitative.  And it kind of feels like unfair competition to the staff members themselves (why pay them when the community can do it for ‘free’?). It is a tricky problem to solve, but I think it does need thinking about.

[collins 16365xp 2]

I seem to remember the reason for moving away from BOW as a name/brand was heavily linked to the word ‘War’ being in it and it then automatically being flagged as mega super bad mature content and buried by all the algorithms. this naturally led to minimisation of random traffic which hurt the viewership reach.

Whilst I’ve been around since the early days (I remember the original channel disappearing from YouTube! the move to uk, GW being overly familiar, the move back to NI, studio one, riverside, roaming around in tanks and even the cheesy imperial guard lists from daryl) I think that the name change was a good thing and allowed the company to flex in basically any direction it wanted to because literally anything can be ‘on (a) table top’. I think the OTT brand is a good one, perfectly broad enough for anything and inoffensive to bots.

[athelstaneParticipant 700xp 2]

“cheesy imperial guard lists from daryl”

Thanks for mentioning ‘Daryl’.  My mind flashbacked to that never to be forgotten episode when he was in nappies.

They don’t make episodes of OTT like that anymore!!!

[avien 2034xp 2]

On the site name I like OTT, I think it has a clean and modern branding look and is broad enough to cover everything gaming related. That said I prefer the old school nature of “beasts of war” because it’s just cooler. But the branding change was the right call

[sundancer 43435xp 1]

Slight sidenote:

When I stumbled over BoW “way back when” that must have been in late 2018, early 2019 when Star Wars: Legion was released. After poking around in the internet archive that is the time frame in where the website got an overhaul and basically “baby-ott” was put out in the world.

Up until yesterday I was under the assumption that “old-BoW” had a proper Forum. But, looking at the internet archive it seems to have been a WP Plugin all along. Odd. I could have sworn there was a dedicated forum back then.

So apologies to @warzan and @lloyd and the team for nagging them with “why did you kill the forums”. Seems like I was wrong.

(I still would very much like to have a proper forum. I’ll die on that hill)

[warzanKeymaster 31139xp 3]

Well well well

Thanks everyone for inputting into this (just got a chance to start reading it this morning)

We have just had our strategy meetup (Monday and Tuesday) where we as a team got a chance to sit together in person and get a feel for things. We had spent a couple of weeks before that filling out online swatch boards with ideas and thoughts and issues etc so when we got a chance to meet in person we could all come at it with a lot of the bigger picture in place and thoughts and ideas a bit more percolated.

So when Gerry sent me this thread yesterday it was kinda funny as he said ‘Have a look here, it feels very like the conversations we have just had in the studio lol’

So for good or for bad, it seems we all share a lot of the ideas and values for the direction of travel. And all of the things that seem important to you are also important to us.

I’m currently in the digesting phase of this now to try and pull all of this into a more concrete plan that is actually achievable. Some areas (mainly the technical ones) require a bit of experimentation and testing before I can fully say what the direction of travel will be as in some cases we don’t know if an approach might work or not, until we’ve tried a few things out.

I also need to get buy in from the leadership of the group, so far they have been very supportive of this exercise and like you and us, want to see a successful and energetic third phase of the project.

At its most basic though the project is falling into three categories…

A) Technical – This looks at the platform and how we go about making all the performance improvements required.

B) Content – The team have some content ideas and approaches they want to begin testing, and how we re fit the studios etc.

C) Community – I see a lot of mentions of boot camps, and I understand the sentiment, but when we started this project our focus was on reaching people and including them where ever they were in the world. And I want to refocus to embrace that methodology once again. So yes we are well up for some highly interactive events but I’m fairly certain all of them will be virtual first with a view of being able to get anyone anywhere involved if they want to. You shouldn’t have to travel to our little backwater to fully engage with our community, or feel part of it or that you belong. This will take some working out and numerous experiments over the next few years, but I think its the right call.

I have more to say but I’m going to break it down over a number of posts

[warzanKeymaster 31139xp 1]

PROJECTS – FORUMS – CHANNELS

We are 100% with you on this, and your ability to publish cool stuff to the OTT platform is a priority. So all these main functions will be worked on to improve them. And my hope is now that we will have continuous improvement moving forward.

Obviously plans may change, but we are kind of looking at the following.

Tom, Lloyd and Myself will be getting stuck back into the code base of the platform to begin a tidy up phase. This is basically just getting things tidied up on the front end and the back end. You wont see any new features but things will gradually start to look cleaner and more importantly we hope to address some of the performance issues. Some performance related tasks are quite heavy undertakings so getting things tidied up is important as it helps ‘de-spaghettify’ things for us. And it helps us blow the dust of some of our skill sets too.

FORUMS – A really helpful exercise you guys could do for us is list the features you want from a forum. What is missing and what can improve, from this we can better evaluate how we tackle this aspect of the development. (The word’s ‘proper forum’ are not actually a great deal of help to us, whereas lists of the key functions and how you would use them would make life easier’

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