DIGITAL_DEVIL_DATABASE Community Forum

So it seems that I'll be writing articles about Aeria's version of this game. I look forward to being able to contribute information and answer questions that may have been left answered, though of course the game is still only in its third week of open beta. I also look forward to any feedback about anything that I hear from anyone forum member or not. I hope you enjoy my contributions to this site.

Thanks for lending us a hand, Aren! And welcome to the forums!  :biggrin:

Let us know if there's something we can help you with. :wink:

Awesome! :rainbow:

I just switched your WordPress status over to Contributor, so you can start composing new articles as soon as you are ready. I also took the liberty to disable the "Visual Editor" for your account. You can turn it back on from your profile, but to avoid confusion I ask our writers not to use it if they can help it. It can especially cause trouble for pages with the system we have setup.

Basically this system pulls page content from hidden posts which takes a lot of burden off high privilege users like me. If you're to be writing pages you will become familiar with how all of this works, but for now just start a post and write it as if you would like to see your Imagine pages, or anything else you'd like to help with.

All you need to remember is we're trying to avoid editorial content (ie. opinionated articles, op-eds, score based reviews, and so on) ...even though a lot of the stuff in some of our older articles (written by Tony) stray a bit from these standards. So just try to keep everything 'objective' (translation: no value judgments) fact wise, but feel free to exhibit as much personality as you can stand too :smokin:

If you need help, the fastest route to take is going to be to use our forums. We encourage discussion of site content generation in our forums, as the content of our site is user generated, and we want readers to know how hard everyone is working and how things are done around here :rainbow:

Finally there are no qualifications at this time as far as who can and can't write for us... anyone who want's to help is welcome. If you feel like you could use help from an editor it's no prob, and if not, we won't insist your stuff be edited for the most part as long as it meets our minimum standards and practices. There is also no limit to what kind of content you can bring to the table. If you wanna do something, just let us know, and I'll try to see that everything is setup asap.

Speaking of which, if you have any particular thoughts about what pages you intend to work on, and where you'd like to see them, let us know. Our IMAGINE pages are by far the most regularly visited at this time. We have nothing slated for the Megaten Online page. So you can write for that. This page is about IMAGINE east and west, and any future online Megaten titles, but in general is an introduction to the online options Megaten presents. I will setup an Aeria Games & Entertainment page that can be about Aeria and it's Imagine.

I am working on a more authoritative IMAGINE page. If you're a long time player on the Japanese servers you can help with that as well. If you feel like you need some sub pages that's no prob.

Major Imagine happenings can be posted in our news blog. Weekly update info though I might try to setup a sub blog for on the Megaten Online page, or information could be posted in Comments instead, perhaps with  monthly digest post on the front page for posterity sake.


Oh Yes! Welcome to the DDDB team! :hearton:

Now go make us proud :smokin:

Worldwide Imagine overview page:
http://www.digitaldevildb.com/games/megaten-online-titles/

A long page detailing Aeria's handling of Imagine from day 1:
http://www.digitaldevildb.com/games/megaten-online-titles/aeria-games/


PS: Sorry if the filing of this stuff seems confusing... but Imagine being an evolving MMORPG and more complex than a traditional game in general, it seems like treating it as if more than a one off game is a more reasonable approach.

Btw, as soon as it's ok with you Aren, I'd like to make a front page post announcing are intentions to cover Imagine. That way I can also move the Comming Soon graphic I made on this page:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/games/megaten-online-titles/

out of the way, and give it a final resting place in the news blog.

Sounds good to me. As for I'd like to do I would like to start out with something similar to what Tony had but of course more polished and a little less biased. I figured I would write an article giving an overview of the basic plot,gameplay,etc and then depending on how that goes more detailed articles. As for the JP version I have not played and as such think that's best left to you for now. I more then content to make articles and cover aeria/megaten,which reminds me item mall comes out the 14.

That sounds good. Just keep in mind the front page shouldn't be overly long. It's basically a summary. The Aeria page should only mention the Japanese game in passing. And basically the way we're planning the future of the site, is the very detailed stuff will center around the Japanese game page. And the international versions of the games' pages will focus more on what changes were made or what challenges the games encountered while transitioning to different markets. Which is to say we kinda don't want duplicate information all over the website. Like gameplay specifics in two different articles.

Eventually we'd like to turn most of Tony's articles into North American market centric pages, and write up new Japanese release centric pages for primary game info. But for now all we have is Tony's stuff which is pretty hybrid, but clearly from the NA pov.

Even if you just touch on story and gameplay there should still be a ton of stuff to write about in an Aeria centric article, which will probably require regular updates as Aeria rolls out it's flavor of Imagine.

I'm planning on writing a fairly detailed Japanese IMAGINE page. But stuff like gameplay specifics I would probably write up in a subpage anyway. So if you want to do something like that, it would be no big deal to sort out where to stick the subpages later.

I figure if our articles aren't thoroughly detailed and informed they won't have much more to offer than all the other sources out there. So our articles should be most in-depth available on the internet. And don't worry if it feels like it's getting long. We have varying layers of intro / info / detailed pages.

So I written two "articles" so far,both are waiting for review. I can keep doing they way they are now or can add them into one larger article if you'd like.

We can make post like these what we call "retro posts", that is posts that go into the news blog but are published when they were relevant. In this way readers wanting to get an idea of the Megaten timeline can choose to read thru our news archives and get a true sense of how things went. We welcome even posts about for instance the publishing of the first Megaten game ever. We like those posts to be written as if the article was to be published on that day and we have a special "Retro" category in case there is any confusion.


On the other hand you can combine these into a page about Aeria's handling of the game, possibly under separate headings. Again this page is setup for that:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/games/megaten-online-titles/aeria-games/


You can do both as well, but word them appropriately.



Also please include spaces after your punctuation where appropriate (ie. periods and commas)

I dunno if some romance language cultures don't do that, but we require it for our English articles, and our editors can't be expected to correct that. Also make sure all proper names are capitalized. If you're not sure, just capitalize by default.



Anyway, please don't stop now, the official Aeria page, like Tony's pages, should ideally be fairly wordy and cover as many bases as possible. Let us know what you'd like to do with your stuff after you think you're ready to be published :smokin:

Also can you show me a source for this? I only understood a German release was planned. I don't think any build supports runtime locale support, but I could be wrong.

http://forums.aeriagames.com/viewtopic.php?t=173594&sid=7e438113b901fc17f04d412ca88849f0

I took the liberty to edit the first paragraph of one of your posts: http://www.digitaldevildb.com/?p=2651&preview=true

You should be able to change / undo the changes via the Revisions tab at the bottom of the edit page. I don't wanna scare you off, but your posts are a little rough, so I figured you might welcome some editing. Ry is probably a more qualified editor than I but, he's apparently on sabbatical as ever :doh:

Please don't be discouraged :rainbow:

Don't worry I have no problem with people going over and editing anything I write. It's been a while since I've done any real writing and as such I'm a little rusty. Giving me feedback or advice is really the only way I can improve my writing skills.

Well I just quickly edited some stuff, so it probably isn't linguistically consistent as I left it, but I tried to give an idea of the level of writing we'd like to see (my writing ability is actually not the best)

Basically we do want you to do your best to write as a journalist, which requires a little more thought than just casually posting in a forums. However sometimes over thinking writing can make it feel unnatural as well -- that's when editors tend to be most useful actually. It just takes practice. Also journalist don't generally write as you'd speak, the way many of us post in forums. Transitional words like however, anyway, nonetheless, though, tend to be discouraged as superfluous and overly personal.

Your language was a bit un-objective. If you feel like something must be criticized, at least do it from the third person... ie. instead of saying x was bad, say the popular press unamiously agreed x was bad. Even still we'd prefer to avoid value-judgment statements like that altogether. If you feel like something is bad, you can make a comment. :sweatdrop:

Aren,

Please let me know when you're positive you'd like to have one of your posts published. The two posts we could publish in the blog, seem to be either sometimes repeating the same points in different sentences, and or in general not having enough information to set themselves apart from other news items. If you can track down any official graphics or screenshots we could use to add some colour / orient the post that would be cool as well.

We can use these as retro posts, but our blog is actually so far behind they'd probably end up being the first post on the blog.... so we will publish them eventually, but we need them to be pretty good if you know what I mean. And I don't wanna start personally editing them until you feel like there is nothing more you can add.

Also it's worth noting unless you feel your post is totally ready to show up on the website, it's better to leave it in "draft/unpublished" status. Pending Review status is when you're done working on it, and want an editor to send it to the presses so to speak.

Speaking of editors... I emailed DevilRy today to try figure out what the fuck he's doing lately. I'd like to promote him to Editor now that I have finer grain control over privileges. But he's never showed a heaping helping of responsibility for the website, or the ability to be present day to day. Regardless he's the only person I know qualified to be site editor, and we are gonna have to have someone, because I just can't bare that burden along with administration :smokin:

Sooo, if I do manage to get him to drag his sorry ass back in here... please show him some serious appreciation ok! He's very temperamental unfortunately... like our own little Akira-cum-Amon I guess :rolleyes:

Alright then. So the one pending review now is all set unless you need to edit it. The others will be half combined since I see what you are saying about repeating some information. As for pictures I have found two and added them, the site may already have them but for what the articles are about they are the most fitting I could find. Let me know if you need different or smaller pictures though.

Actually it seemed to me like at least in one of your posts you were repeating information within the same post (in different sentences)

It's less of a prob if different posts repeat information, especially depending on context... or if one was a post and one a page for example.

I gave you a headline and a graphic for your first post. Try to fill the post in a good bit more, and add some information about Aeria Games, including their Free to Play business model, and some links to their announcement in the forums. You can use <blockquote> and <cite> to quote some snippets of statements during the period (because the setup for the announcement was so non-traditional. Really we need a lot more body to this article given it's significance. You could also mention some of Aeria's most popular games, as they've never handled Megaten before. Also mention Aeria is calling the game MegaTen. At the time this post should've been written I think there were no plans to refer to it as it's original title (Aeria still uses MegaTen for most of it's publicity, though the full title is found on promotional graphics)

You can make a new post if you want so you can retain your "First Month" post to put in a page. But if this is to be the first post on Imagine it needs more background info.

PS: Ignore the "Retro-posted September 9, 2008" bit. I just stuck that date there to remember it. You don't have to mention it in the article, as that will be the publishing date (the retro date will be the day it's actually published)

Added a little about Aeria but there's a problem. Seems that they've purged some of the early topics relating to what the article would be about. Also in quicking editing I deleted part of the picture link so you might need to fix that,sorry :doh: 

Here is the original announcement/poll. I don't know if it's still available from the forums, but it was the first url matching Aeria Firefox pulled up from my address bar's history :biggrin:

http://forums.aeriagames.com/viewtopic.php?t=165381

If you think it will be merged, please save some of the pages for us. I think in the future I will make it possible to upload webpage backups to our Media Library as well.

PS: If you need help finding other urls let me know ok.

Woops, forgot the link:

http://forums.aeriagames.com/viewtopic.php?t=165381

Looking better...

You could mention this post and the results of the poll:

http://forums.aeriagames.com/viewtopic.php?t=165381

Any final statements at the end of hte poll in quotes.



Perhaps a prior news post should be retro-added about this poll someday. The mission of dddb.com is really more historical than news-breaking, so we'd like to preserve as much info as possible in one place I think.

As for when you lost the image. You can use the Revision tab at the bottom of the page to find anything from old versions of the post.


I'll try to give this post a good looking over soon before publishing, but I want you to try to improve upon it as much as you can in the meantime. I have a feeling the post might be edited a few times after publishing, but we should try to push to get more Imagine stuff up asap :sweatdrop:

Added info on poll. Seems to be a problem with the picture showing up though and I've no clue how to fix it.

Probably has something to do with your likely using the Visual Editor system. I recommend you learn to work without it :rolleyes:

Ok, here is what I got for the IMAGINE post....

Again I spent a ridiculous amount of time and edits on the graphic frame, so if this looks cool, I'd like to delete the revisions (which means I might accidentally delete some of your revisions Aren, if I get the query wrong)

Currently it's set to publish in a few days. I don't know if you can edit it or not in that status. I put it in that status actually so you wouldn't try to edit it while I was. At any rate, let me know if this is cool...

Some minor edits will likely follow :sweatdrop:

Fixed "it's" => its, and fixed the misaligned table in the quote... and some esthetic stuff.

Looks good to me.

OK, will print it then I guess :smokin:

Btw, no huge deal, but there are two untranslated posts on the Spanish front page now :tongue:

http://www.digitaldevildb.com/es/

So do you have anything else for us in the pipeline Aren?