Battlefield 3 and the future.

i think the webpage is in dire need of an overhall.And some clans sites show the server(s) and the top players list on the homepage etc. and a teamspeak link with who is online etc.
example ,
http://thezeclan.com/

some bloody yanks i play with occasionally

i think it will help with getting some new players in.

Here’s a question which I probably should ask more often, but what do you guys want to see going forward, as in what do you think would add to xdc? The recruitment thing is one thing I agree with, but I have my own ideas about the future, and while I plan to work towards them, it’d be interesting to hear some other ideas.

Oh yeah ,

GET WIPERS BACK!!

@=xdc=maniac wrote:

@Alzir wrote:

Yea, it’s been on the todo list for some time with the biggest obstacle being a lack of artistic talent. I may just go ahead with a change anyway since certain areas are simply redundant.

I did offer my help a while back 😉

And if you remember I said go ahead and produce something and see

@=xdc=maniac wrote:

Ok, why don’t we make a start sooner than later? Title our server as running match settings and recruiting, get a well worded post in the Battlelog forums. Get the front page outta there because it’s 3 years out of date.

@=xdc=maniac wrote:

Matt, if you delegate tasks to people it’ll make things go so much easier. I think we should also get a Facebook page, so the “real” people and potential people involved in XDC can be seen, and any news or online events can be posted quickly.

I think it was about this time last year when we built up an XDC corporation in Eve and had a long look at the website setup, and there was actually a lot of work put into some features, and an attempt was made to update the site. We ran into a couple of technical problems though.

I can’t recall exactly what it was, but while Andy did give us as much access as we could realistically get to the back end of the site, there was something we couldn’t do which was causing a massive headache. It was enough to basically knock any motivation out of us, and to be perfectly honest it’s still a struggle building up that motivation to tackle it again.

That being said, there is a possible solution, in that we simply move hosting off Andy’s server, until we can figure out what it is we can do about whatever that problem was (Stalker will know more about this). Since stalker actually does a lot of work on websites we’ve been discussing what we can do to this one over the past couple of months, in a series of emails at work. We’ve pretty much decided to focus the site on the forums, since that’s pretty much the only thing we use here. There are all sorts of features we could add to a front end, which may look good in terms of presentation, but in future these will be linked from the forums, or links around the forums. This is where I run into a problem in that I don’t know how best to do this.

I’m looking into it, and in the meantime I’ll post a new thread asking for ideas.

As for facebook, that is also something I’ve been discussing with Ben, possibly Twitter as well, but there are also a couple of problems there. The first thing is who’ll use it, as I hate facebook with a passion, and who else in the past has ever tried keeping a public page of news and events up to date. The other issue is whether facebook would then take over from the forums, or split us between them. Why talk about the same thing in two different places? It’s certainly an idea worth exploring since it’s probably another area where we’re also behind the curve. If anyone has ideas on how we could keep a facebook page interesting, feel free to put them out there.

@=xdc=maniac wrote:

I like the idea of the youtube thing, and there are players like Max and Ben who can really add some value there.

This is also a work in progress. I’ve got some good footage, but keep running into a problem capturing voice input, without which the video sounds crap.

@=xdc=maniac wrote:

While I’m on my yearly “controversial post”, I’d like to bring up this issue of hardcore v normal. 😈

I was really amazed that this caused so much controversy when we had the debate regarding our server, I think the main problem the “hardcore brigade” (and I include myself) had with the normal mode was FF. There is no reason or need to sub-divide XDC over this issue, but I’d personally like to know on what biases a decision like how the server is set is made? I would guess that if it was a majority rule, the server (which we all contribute financially to) would be on some kind of hardcore settings. I respect the fact that Matt, Stalker and Queeks prefer normal, but I suppose I’d like to know if we’re a democracy or a dictatorship, and that may sting a little to read, and please (Matt) understand I’m saying this with as much tact as I can in the interest of going forward and expanding XDC. If its a case of “my ball my rules” then thats fair enough, but I would like to know up front.

I’m amazed by short memories, but at the start we set it on normal after a discussion on TS. It’s always my opinion that a game should be played as it comes out of the box and we use that to gauge what we like and what we don’t, people agreed. Up until about Christmas there was some debate over hardcore settings, and we settled on having a hardcore set up for one night a week. Granted there was the odd week this wasn’t done, but that was because nobody in the hardcore camp took the initiative. I indulged in some hardcore drinking on these nights (I often misunderstand), using the night as a break from BF3, but I still noticed that the server sat empty almost every time we changed it over.

I then took a break from BF3 between Christmas and May, but kept an eye on the server and it was often on Hardcore for weeks at a time, and was empty. This annoyed me and frankly, when I saw so many of us then playing hardcore, it kept me away. To even consider there might be an element of “my balls my rules” though, is unfair. The server has been set on Hardcore for about 50% of the time it’s been up, and if it was empty during that time, then blame the admins who took control of it.

To go back to the numerous debates we had on the subject (mostly on TS, but also the forums), I think we had reached a consensus on tinkering with the settings to provide a mixed HC and normal experience (pretty much what I’ve suggested again in this thread). The reason this wasn’t done sooner, was because as soon as we touched even one custom setting, Battlelog was delisting our server from the quick match list which dramatically lowered the server’s population. We tried this several times, after each patch but always ran into the same problem. This probably still applies today, but we can’t devastate a population of zero.

After I finish up on the forums here I’ll switch the server over to match settings and we can see how this works out. If we want to fill it regularly we have our work cut out though, and that’s probably worth another thread in public.

@=xdc=maniac wrote:

As for playing on our server set to Normal, I’d still rather play on TS with my online mates in this mode and have a laugh, than play some German uber-leet hardcore server on my own, so please read the above with that in mind.

Pretty much how I feel as well, although I have my limits, but don’t worry about how I’m reading your post, it’s a good discussion to have.

The technical problems was around getting some of the CRON jobs to run on the server. It was mostly a problem when I set up the killboard for EVE and it just wouldn’t automatically pull corp kills/losses from either the EVE Online API or from other killboards. Don’t think the problems I had will have any real impact on either the forum of front page… unless we implement some fancy things which I kind of wanted to.

The site Jim linked had some nice stuff on it. I like the idea max mentioned about a site themed around games we play. Not sure how far we can implement this as if we style a site around a specific game, BF3 for example, it will be out of date within a year or so. I think it’s perhaps better to have a pretty standard dark front page with perhaps a “feature” area where we have a list of games we actively play. Each of these will be a link to a page about how we play these games, perhaps BF3, Planetside 2, Day Z, TF2, FIFA if the console guys play that etc. Then under that, we can have an area with several video thumbnails from our channel.

On the side bar, and this is where I think the CRON jobs may be an issue, we can have things like our current server stats (on any servers we run, perhaps for multiple games if we’re doing that).

An interesting thing on the site Jim linked was a side bar that showed their TS3 server, it’s rooms and who is currently on it. Not sure if we want/need that, just something interesting.

Other widgets we could have could be parts about upcoming events etc.

Lastly, and I’m not even sure if this type of integration is possible (as there is noway I could code it) is to open up a section of the forum called “site news” or something. Anything we post here will also be created on the front page as a news item. It’s quite often someone finds patch notes, or something relevant to the games we play and kind of create a post to show it to the rest of us. This would give us a specific place to post this stuff as well as keeping our front page “current”.

I’ve just sat and had a chat with Ben on TS and he reckons he can do what I’ve been saying above.

Is there any other features that you’ve seen on a game site. I guess here would be the place to list them.

Matt The best way to capture voice i have found also is to record ts using ts then line them up together. Pretty sure most vid editing progs can do that, i know sony vegas can anyway.

Saying that i guess its how you system is setup, if you have your game coming through a separate output to ts then the way i suggested is perfect.

Just make sure you say a keyword every time you start a map or do something in particular its easier to line up the audio with the vid then