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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 3483190" data-attributes="member: 41">Thanks for handling this, Morris!I have to say, I was surprised and a little dissapointed with the general flatness of the interview and lack of information.  You really don't have things worked out yet, which explains the silence, heh.  Which brings me to my next point:Yikes.I think you guys rolled a 1 for your digital initiative.I feel for you guys; you're kind of up against it now and it sounds like you don't know how you're going to do what it is you're going to do.  Four months is not a very long time.Quoted for truth.Quoted again, because it's just that true.  Like everyone else here, I love the game, and I want very much for this to be a great idea and not a mistake, but . . .  I think it's a medium with gigantic potential, but so far, the handling of the announcement and the interview aren't filling me with confidence.  In some ways, the web is much harder than print.  It's not a known thing, it's not . . . hashed out.  There isn't very often a traditional way to do things, or crusty old shop foremen who has done nearly every job in the industry over the last 45 years you can ask.Worse yet, while a magazine is always a magazine no matter who is reading it, websites just aren't the same.  The more complicated the delivery, the more complicated that question becomes.  The less completely you answer that question, the more you whittle at your potential user-base.  It can be a real suck-spiral.You, me and Wired magazine all think that the future of computing is online applications. But unless you're Google (and even still), they're freaking tough.   Aaaand, they take years to make.So yeah, it doesn't look good for our heroes.  A friend of mine recently described an aspect of his business as "fighting the dragon, no spells left, one alchemist's fire and single-digit hit-points."  I'm starting to think that's the position you're in on this 'digital initative' as well.  Of course, as a player, I really do hope I'm as wrong as John Terry's training shorts.-----Here's my top suggestions/wish list:1.  Keep it focused on the PnP game.  Use the site to make my weekly game better, exclusively.2.  Keep your ambitions very simple.  Do your core goal (deliver content) and do it as perfectly as you can.  Do not chase down the candy-strewn path of "pushing the digital envelope."  You've got to show me that your envelope doesn't suck before you try to push it.2a.  Get it right.  Just get it right.  Seriously.  The content is going to be very good-- you guys have good game designers out the wazoo, but you have GOT to get the delivery right.  Show us the love.  There really is web production value.2b.  Please avoid Flash.  I know it's tempting, but making it look like your sweetest Photoshop mockup is ultimately missing the point.  That's the candy-strewn path to massively increased development times (a.k.a. less attention paid to function), increased uneccesary load times and all  this loss for essentially no user payoff past the first few "cool, rust texture!" impressions.   Flash has its place, yeah, but remember our interaction with the site is really the point.  "If it ain't go, nobody'll get in."2c.  UI design and IA will be much more critical  than an over-the-top look and feel as far as our use of the site goes.  Make it smooth, light, fast and intuitive.  <french accent> Lak a bootiful 'ooman.</french accent>3.  I would expect to see the site fully searchable by terms  and phrases but would love to see it searchable by categories-- think about the kinds of things DMs and players need and allow your content to be sorted *and filtered* by those categories:  Authors (natch), monsters, traps, encounters, tricks, descriptive text, DM advice, etc.  Just being able to filter down to encounters and stat blocks would be huge for me.  That right there would make the site worth it for me, provided it didn't suck to navigate.4.  Make the content portable.  No heavy DRM, please!  Don't do us like that.  PDF output of issues or compliations would be fine, but I have a better idea . . .5.  What I would love to see is the content broken into much smaller modules that can be pulled out of their context and sent into a "shopping cart" . . . so if the article on Orcus had Orcus' stats, a description of his demense, flavor text about his cult, a prestige class and stats for his high-priest, I could pull just that high preist into my cart without taking the rest of the article.  Then I could pull a location map from the sweet map gallery, a trap from the trap section and print it all for my game later that evening.  THAT would be sweet.I know you guys will put cool stuff on the site.  That's really not the concern.  You've got cool stuff coming out the wazoo, and Chris' comment that word count is no longer a constraining issue is music to our ears.I just feel like the production end might be under-staffed or under-smarted or under-fed, or maybe culled from under the bridge or just under-capable.  Prove me wrong, would ya?</blockquote>

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