Lemur Lad

Yup SotA was one of those 'real life' things that came up, same with Liquid's column I think. It should be back next week.

We'll work on getting that fixed for you. We're not quite at the stage where we can triple check every name we get, but you have my apologies. If it's any consolation, my local newspaper mispelled my name once, and I worked for them for 5 years.

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Just so you all know I get a nickel per publication that goes into my off shore Rogue Isle account, so keep that in mind.

Ew I have .35 cents already I can almost buy a pack of gum!

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Sigged because you're freaking awesome.

huh? oh no worries, everything is good. I just have a really bad habit of closing PMs before I send answers.

I think it's a shame that the article didn't mention some of the good games that foster learning out there, in particular a lot of the Sim games by Will Wright. Sim City taught me a lot about the basics of design, and it inspired me to look at other books that taught me more. And all at the same time, it was fun.

The thing is, those kinds of games are lightning in a bottle, and the skills they end up inspiring are general versus specific. That's the big divide between the business games mentioned and the really good learning games. Since they have the interests of the business at heart, they tend to have specific teaching goals, and that doesn't seem to work well at all.

Games seem great for learning about systems and generalized knowledge. When you get into specific benchmarks, they cross that line into boring or next to useless.

I'll see your piece on Gamers as Business leaders, and raise you
Slate's recent piece on Educational games.

I think it's relevant because the piece somewhat lambasts Seriosity, the same company mentioned in the other article. It raises the most excellent point that unless the game is done such that what you're learning is fun, it's worse than useless as skill building.

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There are also a couple of players who are going to be on "Who wants to be a Super Hero?" and I think getting an interview with one of them (or both) would rock. I mean, not only do they play this game but they love the Genre enough to try out for the show.

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We've been pursuing that idea for a month or so now.

I'm just going based on things Teldon has told me before. In the end, it's his piece to put up as he pleases, and I think on the whole most people like it. They like it enough to want to be in it and to get jealous when other people are in it instead of them, at least

Now that the other thread is duly locked, I wanted to say one more thing here.

I just find it funny that people seem to think we didn't know Lord Stryker's rep before we ran the interview.

Of course we did. That's part of the point. Famous, infamous, or unfamous we're trying to be somewhat representative of most viewpoints, including people with a reputation for causing problems.

Some folks can't seem to make up their minds whether they want us to include everyone, or just their version of everyone.

I also see a huge rush to judgement. According to some, the entire concept of the publication is trash simply because it's been 7 issues and we haven't decided to interview them yet. 7 issues at about 4 people per issue is 32 people. Out of over 120,000. And we're a bunch of stuck up snobs with an agenda against Freedom server because we haven't gotten to them yet. Sorry, no, don't agree with that. This is not Behind the Mask Weekly. It's a great feature but it's not the core of the piece.

Yup, they spend literally months coming up with a specific set of formats and rule they will use ahead of time. Hope it doesn't make anyone feel bad to know that we're doing this Live and they're the guinea pigs, because that's really the easiest way to test our limits and find out what people like.

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Newspapers have done justified margins for a long time, though. The idea is to make a nice even column on both sides, which means "big and complicated" words are going to, well, complicate things.

Look at modern newspapers and you'll see it still, and sometimes, they even break the word causing the trouble up ("l i k e t h i s"; usually if it's a one or two word line).

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Newspapers also have a full page width to work with. Even with html activated, we're limited by that little column on the left. That limits our options when it comes to columns. Even a real paper would run into the same problems if they ran such a narrow width.

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Where is the art section?

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The person in charge of the Art section had obligations of a personal matter that detained them from submitting their work. Hopefully, the Art section will be restored next week.

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Is it possible to incorporate that kind of notice directly into the City Scoop, since other sections will probably run into the same situation down the road?

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Good idea! We'll be sure to do that in the future.

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Also just to note, as part of our plans to get more people involved and put less burden on everyone, we're going to be building toward a rotating deadline system. Basically that means you may not see some of your favorites every single week anymore. We'll still publish each week, but we are trying to set ourselves up for the long haul here, and keep things fresh. If someone is more comfortable getting things done every other week then that option is going to be open to them, and something else will be out there the week they're off.

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was it really neccesary to have a from page article that shouts "Hey, look at me! I was in Closed Beta!"

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I'm sorry, I didn't see it that way. We'd held off on stories about the Issue until beta opened because we didn't have any info other than the announcement.

My goals in the piece were these:
- give people a rough idea what is in the issue
- demystify the closed part of the process a little. as you can see in the Discussion thread on the topic, there's a lot of unecessary handwaving over the whole inclusion/exclusion thing, as well as occupying the test server for however long.
- show people where the Issue was at the start, and how it got better throughout.
- demonstrate the process so that the next time it happens, people will have some idea what's happening, even if they don't get to participate.
- let people know a bit about what's left to accomplish as we're heading into a big Testing weekend. The first weekend of Open beta is important. If people see that certain patches are yet to come, it may save them writing the 4 page post about how the Invasion event has problems, or how the missions are still buggy.

The last thing I was trying to do was toot my own horn. Sorry if it came across that way.

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Where is the art section?

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T_A had something come up, it will be back next week.

There's at least one big patch to test coming. That may be as early as tomorrow, so it's up over the weekend. If that's mostly clean, there's no real reason it couldn't go live in the first or second week of July. They have had a lot of good bug reports on the stuff that's broken, they've had a goodly amount of time to code the changes, I think it's going to be soon. Remember, the wouldn't have opened the beta if they thought there were a lot of things they wanted to fix. Open beta is for load testing what they're almost ready to push.

Interviews for news stories are literally 'man on the street' where the reporter goes to a server and talks to people.

Interviews for Behind the Mask are picked, based on different criteria depending on what Teldon wants to cover.

An in character version of Behind the Mask doesn't make much sense to me...

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This is just a general note about the Scoop ~

As a former Editor and Proofreader, the misspellings and lapses in grammar really jump out at me. I realize this is all volunteer and everyone makes typos -- I commit them all the time -- but I keep seeing the same issues crop up: plurals that have apostrophe-s, common misspellings, tense changes, etc. It detracts from my enjoyment to see those things, so I tend to avoid reading publications that regularly have them.

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Just to note, like Frost said, we're getting better at catching it in our own stuff all the time. However, we kick back and forth whether we ought to be doing the same in interview answers. Chances are, if there's a grammar error you see in an interview, it's from the person being interviewed. It's an ongoing debate we have. We are doing our best, between having more people check each piece, to talking about other more organized ways to mark up pieces for the final.

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Sorry but... Hero/Villain co-op zone is lame. Total copout for content sake.

What about my villain who also is hell bent on the destruction and/or conquering the planet?

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My villain who is bent on the same things would stop to counteract someone (Rikti) who looked like they might accomplish his goals first.

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I'm actually getting kinda bummed that I've put a lot into the horoscopes and it's just doesn't seem worth the effort so far.

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*hug* I think they're cool Athy, but you knew that. I'd also say that we knew ahead of time that not everyone would get it.

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On the other ... there is a distinct air of cliquishness and favoritism about the Scoop. If you're not in "the group," then you're out. And cliques, for the most part, are don't have that much interesting to say.

Personally, I'd much rather see a wide variety of articles and topics, collected through a submission process that is fully explained and open to everyone.

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As for the first, I say again that is perceived more than anything. We keep trying to dispel it, and people keep saying it, and I can't understand why. How many times and ways do I have to say, I don't really know or hang out with any of these people? The only person on the Scoop that I've even played the game with is Teldon, and that's because we're from the same server and I knew Behind the Mask would be a winner feature so I asked him to join.

The last thing this is, is a clique. Heck we're trying our hardest to get more new people in and rolling every week so we don't feel the need to burn out. It doesn't help that when we ask for people to volunteer for specific projects, the return is sometimes minimal (State of the Archetype is something I've asked for names on, and gotten a grand total of one from outside sources).

As for the second, submission guidelines are something we are in fact working toward. Is it ever going to be "submit something and it will be in the Scoop" no. That's unrealistic. However we've been working on ways to let people submit event reports, supergroup profiles, puzzles, and more.

I'm sorry things are seeming repetitive. We've been trying to change things up and keep it fresh, but on a weekly schedule we have to keep with things people are comfortable with enough to get done on time. That means once someone comes up with an idea, we let them roll with it until they're tired of doing it. This is the same thing that happens with any periodical.

I'd love to hear more ideas from people. Our Editors in chief are our main contact people, and I trust them to bring ideas to the newsroom if people send them in, but we haven't heard a ton of good specific ideas yet. The ones we do, we do our best to get them in.

So I say again now. If people want to write a State of the Archetype piece for one of the ATs that hasn't been covered yet, let me know. I don't bite.

If people have some good ideas for a piece or an ongoing column get in touch with one of the editors or staff. It's got to be a little more detailed than "I want to help" though.

Thinking about it as I write, I realize that one thing that may seem cliquish is the way we've been posting when comments about the Scoop are made. It's not like we all decide to swoop down en masse and defend what we're doing. We all watch this thread because that's why it's here. We all have thoughts when people make comments, and we like to explain the difference between the way things seem, and the way things are. If that's a bit overwhelming, I'm sorry. But the last thing we're going to do is limit the discussion if it's at all productive. Someone trashing what we're doing for the sake of trashing it (other threads not here), isn't going to be looked on kindly, but if someone wants to start a conversation about how to do things better, we're here to hear it.

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Wow, this was great! Fun to read and put together well, with lots of inhteresting facts and outlooks. More please!

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Just remember, if you look in the Announcements section you can see every issue so far. If you joined us late, there's a ton of stuff waiting.

It's not really a derail, I asked you to clarify and you did. I appreciate it. I agree with you that things are different now, but to me it's in a Good direction. I don't so much see favoritism as highlighting the good things people have been doing, in some cases all along. Having forum titles like that helps dispel the climate of post count snobbery and anti snobbery. But you know that too.

I'll be perfectly straight with you and say, we're doing our level best to avoid any sort of elitism or favoritism. However we're kind of like any new publication, we try on a few new hats before we learn what works. We look at every section of the forums and everything we think of going on ingame, and try to find ways to include it.

There's always going to be limits to who/what we can include though.

Just so it's clear, I don't think anyone on the Scoop asked about Forum Titles before Ex Libris offered them to us.

If you're making a serious point about favoritism and elitism, I'd prefer you make specific examples instead of general ones, because I don't know what you're pointing at. If you're joking (and it seems like you are), then I chuckled.

I'm not about to hold someone's individual problems against other members of the same SG, so it baffles me that someone would even attempt to bar their SG members from reading something as a matter of policy. The forum may be semi-private and not fully under the coverage of the First Amendment, but there's nothing in the Code of Conduct or the EULA that you give up your right to choose. I'm glad you're ignoring his policy if it really does exist.

That's how I feel too. We've kicked around doing editorials or having letters to the Editor, and we may still do that if people want to say something but remain anonymous, but in truth this fills exactly the same role.

If you want to talk to us about what we're doing or not doing, or what you'd like to see, go for it, we're listening.

At least we're listening if you have something reasonable to say. If you want to be like the guy in the Suggestion thread and just talk a lot of trash, well sorry there's no place for that in the forums.

darn.
*puts away the pitchfork and burning oil*