The 2011 Alter Aeon "Cleric Update" is now live! This update contains a lot of changes to improve traditional cleric spells, add a new mode of casting for mages, and clean up other spells and skills that have traditionally not been as awesome as they could be. Here's a list of the most major changes:
- Mages now have the ability to 'channelcast' (ccast) certain elemental spells in combat. Channelcasting takes longer than regular casting, but is interruptible and costs substantially less mana. This feature allows mages to become a true 'blaster' class without compromising healing mana.
The channel casting skills are 'fire focusing', 'ice focusing', 'lightning focusing' and 'crystal focusin'. The fire plane is easiest to reach, and hence it's the lowest level and easiest to channel. The crystal plane is much harder to reach and only high level mages will be able to channel from it.
- Added a necromancer spell 'bone dragon', which allows you to fly around over the landscape.
- Ice imprison and crystal prison have been updated.
- Ward good and ward evil are now more powerful.
- The charm spell has been updated to make it easier to land and to use control points similar to controlled necromancer minions.
- The peace spell has been improved.
- A level 19 curse, 'overconfidence', has been added.
- A level 19 spell, 'hold undead', has been added.
- A level 28 spell, 'sacred touch', has been added.
- A level 29 spell, 'solace', has been added.
As always, you can use the 'spell find' commands to find the teachers or trainers for new spells and skills.
For those of you who don't know anything about us, Alter Aeon is a multiplayer text-based game with a lot of features and settings to help make it blind-friendly. Over half our playerbase is blind or visually impaired, and we have blind builders and staff helping to expand and improve the game.
Everyone is welcome to play, so if you're new to the game feel free to stop by and check us out. For more information and soundpack downloads, see our web site at:
http://www.alteraeon.com
Happy hunting!
Showing posts with label pr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pr. Show all posts
Monday, September 19, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
We're famous! (Again!)
If you've ever tried to get attention in the gaming world, you know how well-neigh impossible it is. There are literally tens of thousands of game developers of every budget category, from the smallest single-person outfits to kings like Blizzard and CCP. Even getting someone to review your game can sometimes be a lost cause.
With that as a backdrop, Alter Aeon this weekend got a spontaneous review on the GamingHUD web site. This is a pretty big website that reviews a lot of mainstream games. For AA to even be seen by fish of this size is pretty amazing.
The review also isn't some slapdash piece of filler material. The reviewer spent a lot of time on the game and even emailed me for additional information. The final article came out very positive and very long.
The link is:
Alter Aeon MUD - A World of Infinite Possibilities
Feel free to check it out and maybe drop a thank you to the author for their hard work.
With that as a backdrop, Alter Aeon this weekend got a spontaneous review on the GamingHUD web site. This is a pretty big website that reviews a lot of mainstream games. For AA to even be seen by fish of this size is pretty amazing.
The review also isn't some slapdash piece of filler material. The reviewer spent a lot of time on the game and even emailed me for additional information. The final article came out very positive and very long.
The link is:
Alter Aeon MUD - A World of Infinite Possibilities
Feel free to check it out and maybe drop a thank you to the author for their hard work.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
We're Famous!
Ok, not entirely famous, but it's a start. We have our first reviewed and edited article on an external web site:
Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon
The site BrightHub is a large site with articles about nearly everything, and people who act as dedicated editors to make sure that articles pass a minimum sanity check before being posted.
This is important because articles like this can be used to bolster notability in Wikipedia, and get AA out there to a much larger audience. Stop by and take a look, and spread the word if you've got any friends that might be interested!
Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon
The site BrightHub is a large site with articles about nearly everything, and people who act as dedicated editors to make sure that articles pass a minimum sanity check before being posted.
This is important because articles like this can be used to bolster notability in Wikipedia, and get AA out there to a much larger audience. Stop by and take a look, and spread the word if you've got any friends that might be interested!
Friday, April 16, 2010
Myspace
Today, I did the unthinkable: I constructed a myspace page. I suppose technically, I had already done that with my personal page last year; but in reality it was simply the bare minimum login and I had done nothing at all to it since it was created.
I really have to hand it to the myspace developers; they've created one of the single most dysfunctional, hard to use, and unconfigurable interfaces I've ever seen that still happens to mostly work. It reminds me a lot of Gimp.
Actually, Gimp is worse. But not by much.
At any rate, if you still have a MySpace account, feel free to add us! Our myspace URL is:
http://www.myspace.com/alter_aeon
I really have to hand it to the myspace developers; they've created one of the single most dysfunctional, hard to use, and unconfigurable interfaces I've ever seen that still happens to mostly work. It reminds me a lot of Gimp.
Actually, Gimp is worse. But not by much.
At any rate, if you still have a MySpace account, feel free to add us! Our myspace URL is:
http://www.myspace.com/alter_aeon
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Web Page Updates
Yesterday, I spent far too much time working on changes to the Alter Aeon web site. I spent some time hacking down the menu so that there were fewer items that are better organized; I also managed to switch over the layout to a more standard looking block based design. Along with this came a number of other minor updates and improvements.
It never ceases to amaze me that you can work on a web site, get to the point where you've done the best you can, then come back a month later and improve it even more. For me, it's like my creativity is tapped out - I have to take a break to let new ideas percolate in. I think part of it might also be that I have to get used to a new design or layout before I can compare it against something else.
Regardless, of the half dozen or so people I asked, their opinions were an almost universal 'much better' for the new version. Here's to hoping that this 'much better' translates into a higher conversion into newbies!
For a look at the new layout, here's a link to the Alter Aeon Web Site.
It never ceases to amaze me that you can work on a web site, get to the point where you've done the best you can, then come back a month later and improve it even more. For me, it's like my creativity is tapped out - I have to take a break to let new ideas percolate in. I think part of it might also be that I have to get used to a new design or layout before I can compare it against something else.
Regardless, of the half dozen or so people I asked, their opinions were an almost universal 'much better' for the new version. Here's to hoping that this 'much better' translates into a higher conversion into newbies!
For a look at the new layout, here's a link to the Alter Aeon Web Site.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Where do we go?
I've been doing some serious thinking about the game, the market, and the business model I'm trying to work with. I still think the business model is sound; I've been able to pay most expenses and use the remainder for (admittedly ineffective) advertising for years. This year will be different, as I'm dumping some of my personal money into it, but even so the numbers have risen and will compensate somewhat for that increased outflow.
The biggest problem I see with regard to expansion right now is, unfortunately, market based. If you go out to any gaming news site, it's not just that there's a handful of games being advertised - it's that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of games being advertised. It's reached the point where you're lucky if you can even find a WoW ad amidst the piles of other crap.
The gaming market right now is, as near as I can tell, in the middle of a huge investment bubble. Hundreds of companies have come on line with venture or public funding to be the next 'WoW killer'. These startup companies are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising for a limited number of players; several new cookie-cutter MMOs come out every week.
On the plus side, most of these will fail. As with all bubbles, this one will collapse, and most games will go under. There's simply not enough players right now, and once you've seen one cookie cutter game, you've seen them all. In some ways, being a text based game protects us, as we have a limited niche that isn't facing ridiculous competition.
So what do we do about it? In the immediate short term, scale back plans of massive growth, and wait for the bubble to pop. But we can't just rest on our laurels either; we should be doing something. What best to do?
Make the game the best game it can be, that's what. Most of the games that will fail, will fail precisely because they -are- cookie cutter games. Do you not think that the players on WoW would pay $5 more for a game that was $5 better than WoW? The reason that they don't is because there aren't any games $5 better than WoW.
I currently have two projects in various stages to this end. The first is the ongoing upgrade to the client, which is coming along slowly but steadily; I probably won't have a new release this weekend, but should have one soon. I think with that release I'll start looking for a graphic designer or other artistic input to make the interface pretty.
The other project is only in the planning stages: add more classes to the game. I get a lot of comments from newer players that the limited class selection looks strange and seems thin compared to other games. It also has issues (which some players call features), such as limited room for long term expansion, high level characters all being the same or very similar, a small number of high-end playing styles, and what I would consider bogus skill groupings.
I think I have a rough model of how to do class expansions now, but it will probably be several weeks before we have enough detail fleshed out to really start implementing it.
The biggest problem I see with regard to expansion right now is, unfortunately, market based. If you go out to any gaming news site, it's not just that there's a handful of games being advertised - it's that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of games being advertised. It's reached the point where you're lucky if you can even find a WoW ad amidst the piles of other crap.
The gaming market right now is, as near as I can tell, in the middle of a huge investment bubble. Hundreds of companies have come on line with venture or public funding to be the next 'WoW killer'. These startup companies are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into advertising for a limited number of players; several new cookie-cutter MMOs come out every week.
On the plus side, most of these will fail. As with all bubbles, this one will collapse, and most games will go under. There's simply not enough players right now, and once you've seen one cookie cutter game, you've seen them all. In some ways, being a text based game protects us, as we have a limited niche that isn't facing ridiculous competition.
So what do we do about it? In the immediate short term, scale back plans of massive growth, and wait for the bubble to pop. But we can't just rest on our laurels either; we should be doing something. What best to do?
Make the game the best game it can be, that's what. Most of the games that will fail, will fail precisely because they -are- cookie cutter games. Do you not think that the players on WoW would pay $5 more for a game that was $5 better than WoW? The reason that they don't is because there aren't any games $5 better than WoW.
I currently have two projects in various stages to this end. The first is the ongoing upgrade to the client, which is coming along slowly but steadily; I probably won't have a new release this weekend, but should have one soon. I think with that release I'll start looking for a graphic designer or other artistic input to make the interface pretty.
The other project is only in the planning stages: add more classes to the game. I get a lot of comments from newer players that the limited class selection looks strange and seems thin compared to other games. It also has issues (which some players call features), such as limited room for long term expansion, high level characters all being the same or very similar, a small number of high-end playing styles, and what I would consider bogus skill groupings.
I think I have a rough model of how to do class expansions now, but it will probably be several weeks before we have enough detail fleshed out to really start implementing it.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Advertising/Public Relations
Last night on a whim, I searched for the mud Dragon Realms just before I went to bed. DR is arguably one of the biggest and most successful muds of all time; they are fully commercial, with accounts going for as much as WOW accounts. They regularly top 700 concurrent users, and that's just for the one server. They have at least one additional.
An hour later, it was way past my bedtime and I must have had over 50 browser tabs open. This sort of thing is an amazing way to get ideas of where to post and link to Alter Aeon; they've already done most of the hard work, and Google has made it accessible.
Today, I began trimming tabs. I'm down to probably only 15 or so, most of which are waiting for some event to occur. I know I can repeat this process for a handful of other large games easily enough. I'm about 90% certain that the main AA pages can breach Google Page Rank 5 by the end of the year, possibly sooner.
While copying isn't a great way to be a leader, it can at least get you into second or third position. Given that we're in about 30th place right now, I'm totally up for doing some copying.
An hour later, it was way past my bedtime and I must have had over 50 browser tabs open. This sort of thing is an amazing way to get ideas of where to post and link to Alter Aeon; they've already done most of the hard work, and Google has made it accessible.
Today, I began trimming tabs. I'm down to probably only 15 or so, most of which are waiting for some event to occur. I know I can repeat this process for a handful of other large games easily enough. I'm about 90% certain that the main AA pages can breach Google Page Rank 5 by the end of the year, possibly sooner.
While copying isn't a great way to be a leader, it can at least get you into second or third position. Given that we're in about 30th place right now, I'm totally up for doing some copying.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
MishMash
A quick note - I built up a Muds and Mudding lens over at Squidoo. Squidoo is one of those new things which I don't entirely understand, like I don't understand Facebook or Myspace. But other people do, so perhaps it's not such a bad idea. The url is:
http://www.squidoo.com/mudding
I've been thinking about and doing a bit of work on the client recently. One of the newer changes was the addition of an enemy hitpoint bar; the current release client has this bar between the automap and the buttons. I moved it to be in the regular prompt bar, and this serves to make the screen a lot less 'busy'.
All this has got me thinking about what to do next. I really should allow for an unhooked/floating automap, so users can position it wherever they want. I've also been thinking about having a sort of 'list window' where people can perform actions on list items, such as looking in containers, getting things from containers, etc.
Until recently, the mechanics of how to do this in the code have been somewhat questionable. As usual, talking to my girlfriend about it generated a solution: uuid strings for objects and characters, that you can always use to get an exact command reference to that object or character.
I started on the first stage of this process last night, with infrastructure. The game has had a really, really bad PRNG for years; I threw something together with basically no experience about ten years ago and we've been using it ever since. Looking at the code, I'm actually somewhat surprised it didn't cause a lot of visible trouble over the years.
We now have a brand new, 10-register lagged fibbonacci PRNG driving the game. Not only is it faster, but it actually produces reasonably high quality random numbers to drive the game mechanics. Using this, im now generating proper UUIDs that I can have some amount of confidence in.
The list window however I'm less sure about. I suspect this needs a proper design.
http://www.squidoo.com/mudding
I've been thinking about and doing a bit of work on the client recently. One of the newer changes was the addition of an enemy hitpoint bar; the current release client has this bar between the automap and the buttons. I moved it to be in the regular prompt bar, and this serves to make the screen a lot less 'busy'.
All this has got me thinking about what to do next. I really should allow for an unhooked/floating automap, so users can position it wherever they want. I've also been thinking about having a sort of 'list window' where people can perform actions on list items, such as looking in containers, getting things from containers, etc.
Until recently, the mechanics of how to do this in the code have been somewhat questionable. As usual, talking to my girlfriend about it generated a solution: uuid strings for objects and characters, that you can always use to get an exact command reference to that object or character.
I started on the first stage of this process last night, with infrastructure. The game has had a really, really bad PRNG for years; I threw something together with basically no experience about ten years ago and we've been using it ever since. Looking at the code, I'm actually somewhat surprised it didn't cause a lot of visible trouble over the years.
We now have a brand new, 10-register lagged fibbonacci PRNG driving the game. Not only is it faster, but it actually produces reasonably high quality random numbers to drive the game mechanics. Using this, im now generating proper UUIDs that I can have some amount of confidence in.
The list window however I'm less sure about. I suspect this needs a proper design.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
More PR
Over time, you tend to run out of things to say on blogs, and I think I'm hitting that wall. It's not so much that you run out of stuff entirely, it's that you tend to repeat the same things over and over.
I'm rapidly finding out that running the game as a business very much falls into this category. You're never done with PR, web page improvements, enhancements to the newbie experience, game additions, etc, but there's only so many ways you can say "I worked on the web pages today." I suppose such is the drudgery associated with a business.
This pretty well explains what I've got to look forward for the next few weeks. I've found some new avenues to pursue regarding getting traffic to the site, and as usual there are articles to post and other PR work to be done. This is all slowly paying off, but it's definitely slow - I suppose like guitar, if everyone could learn it in two weeks, it wouldn't be impressive. The PR:4 thing is a real boost however, in that it shows that it's actually possible to improve things. I hope to hit PR:5 by the end of the year, but I suspect we're a long way away from that.
I just got more advertising set up for Alter Aeon on Top Mud Sites, though I suspect it will drive the same type of people as the Mud Connector. This market for players is really limited, but in the short term it's going to have to be our bread and butter.
(Another neat web site I stumbled across is Mud Stats, which collects periodic statistics from games and sorts them. Stats collection appears to be every few hours, so it's pretty up to date.)
On a somewhat depressing note, I shut off the Google ads completely and the overall newbie load does not appear to have changed by any noticeable amount. It's only been a few days so far and the stats may yet be bogus, but if it's really that hard to pull in true newbies the future of the game could be very questionable. I need to look at this a lot harder I suspect.
I'm rapidly finding out that running the game as a business very much falls into this category. You're never done with PR, web page improvements, enhancements to the newbie experience, game additions, etc, but there's only so many ways you can say "I worked on the web pages today." I suppose such is the drudgery associated with a business.
This pretty well explains what I've got to look forward for the next few weeks. I've found some new avenues to pursue regarding getting traffic to the site, and as usual there are articles to post and other PR work to be done. This is all slowly paying off, but it's definitely slow - I suppose like guitar, if everyone could learn it in two weeks, it wouldn't be impressive. The PR:4 thing is a real boost however, in that it shows that it's actually possible to improve things. I hope to hit PR:5 by the end of the year, but I suspect we're a long way away from that.
I just got more advertising set up for Alter Aeon on Top Mud Sites, though I suspect it will drive the same type of people as the Mud Connector. This market for players is really limited, but in the short term it's going to have to be our bread and butter.
(Another neat web site I stumbled across is Mud Stats, which collects periodic statistics from games and sorts them. Stats collection appears to be every few hours, so it's pretty up to date.)
On a somewhat depressing note, I shut off the Google ads completely and the overall newbie load does not appear to have changed by any noticeable amount. It's only been a few days so far and the stats may yet be bogus, but if it's really that hard to pull in true newbies the future of the game could be very questionable. I need to look at this a lot harder I suspect.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Setting Priorities in a Business
Something I need to constantly remind myself about is prioritization. There's only one of me, and there's way more things that need to be done than I have time for. One has to prioritize. You're not choosing between things that are right and things that are wrong; you're optimizing to get the most out of your time.
Here's what I'd consider a rough priority list, not necessarily in any order:
- Improve the Mud Connector banner ad to drive more traffic
- Improve the main AA pages - add a couple of images, some player quotes
- Release another client version with true non-mudder additions
- Improve level 5-29 experience, especially in groups
Some of these are easier than others, but of all four of these, I note that none of them are on my board. Not that the things on my board aren't important, but somehow, these irritating bottlenecks have managed to avoid being written there.
How exactly do the four most important bottlenecks not get placed on the todo list? There are multiple reasons; first and foremost, these bottlenecks are continuous, persistent things. They almost always require improvement, and focusing on them exclusively would mean nothing else gets done.
It could also be that they are too obvious - of course that needs to be done! Or it could simply be that I lack the incentive to work on them. I find incentive to be in short supply these days.
With the influx of newbies from the Mud Connector and other sites, things appear to be going reasonably well. But as I've told others, the Mud Connector is a limited market that will saturate in just a few short years, if not sooner. We have to work on other things as well.
Here's what I'd consider a rough priority list, not necessarily in any order:
- Improve the Mud Connector banner ad to drive more traffic
- Improve the main AA pages - add a couple of images, some player quotes
- Release another client version with true non-mudder additions
- Improve level 5-29 experience, especially in groups
Some of these are easier than others, but of all four of these, I note that none of them are on my board. Not that the things on my board aren't important, but somehow, these irritating bottlenecks have managed to avoid being written there.
How exactly do the four most important bottlenecks not get placed on the todo list? There are multiple reasons; first and foremost, these bottlenecks are continuous, persistent things. They almost always require improvement, and focusing on them exclusively would mean nothing else gets done.
It could also be that they are too obvious - of course that needs to be done! Or it could simply be that I lack the incentive to work on them. I find incentive to be in short supply these days.
With the influx of newbies from the Mud Connector and other sites, things appear to be going reasonably well. But as I've told others, the Mud Connector is a limited market that will saturate in just a few short years, if not sooner. We have to work on other things as well.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Improving Google PageRank
In a totally unexpected twist of fate, the main Alter Aeon web pages breached PR:4 over the weekend. I was actually not expecting this at all; it's only been 3 months since we went from 2 to 3, and I figured we were well below the required popularity for this jump. If this increase is anything like the last one, our traffic and the quality of our web hits should increase substantially. In fact I only noticed it because the web hits were abnormally high today.
This leaves the very open question of how to get to PR:5 though. I haven't submitted links or done link propaganda in a while, mostly because I was running low on quality sites to hook up to. I'm pretty sure getting PR:5 is going to be a lot harder than 4.
Also related to this, I've been setting up ad campaigns at a few other sites. These should be coming on-line in the next few days.
All this advertising is actually paying off (though in a limited, short term kind of way. More on that later.) The rate of verified, saved unique newbies has doubled since November; the actual number of logins has tripled. Pretty much all of the stats agree on the relative increases, so I know that I'm seeing something legitimate. How long it will take for that to push up the average userload is an open question however.
One unfortunate aspect is that these logins are fairly expensive. I'm not tremendously over budget with ads, but I'm not breaking even either. I need the userload (and associated purchases) to increase between 50 and 100% in the next few months for things to work out.
Now, the short term aspect of things: nearly all of the new advertising is on mud lists and other mudding related sites. This is a problem, as the total pool of mudders is small, and the pool size is shrinking. I saw a statistic somewhere that the total number of mudders is only on the order of a hundred thousand; if things go well this advertising market will saturate quickly.
The only real answer to this that I've been able to come up with is to focus more on the custom AA client. To get a million accounts, I'll need to pull from the global pool of ordinary, non-mudding gamers. In order to do that, I need to get away from text-only interfaces and complex clients.
There's enough web work to keep me busy for a while, and I have to get the game's taxes done this week, so I won't be improving the client for a while. But it's becoming clear that the client is very, very high priority.
This leaves the very open question of how to get to PR:5 though. I haven't submitted links or done link propaganda in a while, mostly because I was running low on quality sites to hook up to. I'm pretty sure getting PR:5 is going to be a lot harder than 4.
Also related to this, I've been setting up ad campaigns at a few other sites. These should be coming on-line in the next few days.
All this advertising is actually paying off (though in a limited, short term kind of way. More on that later.) The rate of verified, saved unique newbies has doubled since November; the actual number of logins has tripled. Pretty much all of the stats agree on the relative increases, so I know that I'm seeing something legitimate. How long it will take for that to push up the average userload is an open question however.
One unfortunate aspect is that these logins are fairly expensive. I'm not tremendously over budget with ads, but I'm not breaking even either. I need the userload (and associated purchases) to increase between 50 and 100% in the next few months for things to work out.
Now, the short term aspect of things: nearly all of the new advertising is on mud lists and other mudding related sites. This is a problem, as the total pool of mudders is small, and the pool size is shrinking. I saw a statistic somewhere that the total number of mudders is only on the order of a hundred thousand; if things go well this advertising market will saturate quickly.
The only real answer to this that I've been able to come up with is to focus more on the custom AA client. To get a million accounts, I'll need to pull from the global pool of ordinary, non-mudding gamers. In order to do that, I need to get away from text-only interfaces and complex clients.
There's enough web work to keep me busy for a while, and I have to get the game's taxes done this week, so I won't be improving the client for a while. But it's becoming clear that the client is very, very high priority.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Web 2.0
Begrudgingly, I am being dragged into the 21st century. First it was XML formatted output of various pieces of data; now it's XML RSS feeds.
That's right! Alter Aeon now has its first RSS feed on the changelog page:
Alter Aeon Changes and Updates Page
It just so happens that I have a player that's a web developer for a living, which is really nice - he helps me work through protocol and presentation issues that otherwise would take me quite a while to figure out. He tells me that I've not quite got the right idea for the descriptions in the current feed, but I should have that fixed in the next day or two.
I'm also planning on having the player boards in both XML and RSS formats by tomorrow, now that most of the infrastructure is in place. One of the big showstoppers for doing work on the boards (which are the logical place for an RSS feed anyway) was the lack of unique message IDs. As of yesterday, this is no longer an issue.
Honestly though, I'm not sure how much of this is relevant or useful. How many people will use the feeds? Will anyone other than my resident web guru bother to use the XML output?
Either way, Alter Aeon is rapidly heading into the world of new media, and it's really hard to tell where we're going to make the most gain. An excellent example of this is my recent experiment with Twitter.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a Twitter just for the hell of it and linked it up to the main web pages. I've been using it to just drop periodic status reports about what I'm working on, and hooked up the game to post reboot notifications there. In virtually no time, I have 8 followers there, while this blog currently has only one, despite being active for months. Additionally, I've received quite a few web hits from new people through Twitter, also more than from here.
You never know what's going to work, and just to make things complicated, things work differently for different numbers of users. As the game grows, I'll have to constantly be adding and reorganizing. At least it'll be fun.
That's right! Alter Aeon now has its first RSS feed on the changelog page:
Alter Aeon Changes and Updates Page
It just so happens that I have a player that's a web developer for a living, which is really nice - he helps me work through protocol and presentation issues that otherwise would take me quite a while to figure out. He tells me that I've not quite got the right idea for the descriptions in the current feed, but I should have that fixed in the next day or two.
I'm also planning on having the player boards in both XML and RSS formats by tomorrow, now that most of the infrastructure is in place. One of the big showstoppers for doing work on the boards (which are the logical place for an RSS feed anyway) was the lack of unique message IDs. As of yesterday, this is no longer an issue.
Honestly though, I'm not sure how much of this is relevant or useful. How many people will use the feeds? Will anyone other than my resident web guru bother to use the XML output?
Either way, Alter Aeon is rapidly heading into the world of new media, and it's really hard to tell where we're going to make the most gain. An excellent example of this is my recent experiment with Twitter.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a Twitter just for the hell of it and linked it up to the main web pages. I've been using it to just drop periodic status reports about what I'm working on, and hooked up the game to post reboot notifications there. In virtually no time, I have 8 followers there, while this blog currently has only one, despite being active for months. Additionally, I've received quite a few web hits from new people through Twitter, also more than from here.
You never know what's going to work, and just to make things complicated, things work differently for different numbers of users. As the game grows, I'll have to constantly be adding and reorganizing. At least it'll be fun.
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