Gleemax’s Failure and other thoughts

At this point, it’s pretty old news that Wizard of the Coast‘s Gleemax is dead.  (My excuse?  I don’t do news; I do commentary.)  At least, Gleemax will be dead in September, presuming one can consider it “alive” now.  And Wizards’ publishing arm is going to be pulling back to focus on its Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons brands after the end of 2008.

There’s a lot of discussion about what exactly this means.  Randy Buehler’s post (which I thank Critical Hits for referring me to) reads, in part:

Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on other aspects of our digital initiatives, especially Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider. We continue to believe that fostering online community is an important part of taking care of our customers, but until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources. (emphasis added)

Chatty DM finds this an encouraging sign.  His is the guardedly optimistic approach:  that WotC has realized it’s overextended itself, trying to offer too much too soon, and is scaling back to concentrate on their key properties.  And, moreover, that this signifies a change in their… corporate policy, I suppose.  A redefinition of their scope of operations.  Working on doing a couple of things well, rather than a lot of things piecemeal.

I’d like to believe that.  Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I remember WotC’s earlier foray into the internet with the third-edition E-Tools.  In particular, I remember that grand promises were made, and that in the end the tools were delivered past deadline and missing promised features.  And that what features there were were not necessarily user-friendly.

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Defining the Raven Queen

In yesterday’s post, I briefly examined some mythical entities that might serve as inspirations to those who intend to give the Raven Queen a prominent role in their campaigns.  Today’s post presents a more fleshed-out, in-game model of the Raven Queen and her domain.  Almost none of this is official in any way, of course, but I hope it will prove useful, or at least interesting.

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The being now known as the Raven Queen is the second-oldest entity in the universe.  In the moment of the first entity’s creation, death became a possibility, and from that possibility the Raven Queen was born.  She became the consort of this entity, of whom little is known other than the titles found in rare and obscure texts: the King Most Ancient or the King of Moments.  And when that King died, his passing tore the universe in two, creating the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea from what had come before.  From the failing sparks of the King’s being arose the first gods and the first primordials.

It’s little known that the Raven Queen is not, properly speaking, a goddess at all.  She predates gods and primordials alike, and in many ways she possesses more in common with the latter, those creatures who arose from the Elemental Chaos.  When the primordials formed the world, the Raven Queen was among them; it was she who first began to remove the darkest areas, setting into motion the creation of the Shadowfell, the dark echo of the first world.

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Seeking the Raven Queen

The Raven Queen is one of the most mysterious deities of fourth edition, and, judging by various forum posts, one of the most popular.  This is what’s known of her:  She’s the unaligned goddess of death; she’s also the goddess of fate and winter.  She opposes Orcus and undeath in general.  Unlike most gods, she does not make her home within a dominion in the Astral Sea; instead, she rules from the palace Letherna in the Shadowfell.

And that’s about it.

There are some obvious parallels to Greek myth here.  “Letherna” suggests Lethe, the river of Hades, whose waters caused total forgetfulness in any who drank of them.  The word lethe literally means forgetfulness, but also concealment or deception — and it’s related to the Greek word often translated as truth, aletheia.  (The actual meaning is something more akin to disclosure or non-concealment, from what I understand, and connotes recognition.)

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Moving, minus the boxes.

Well, I’m back, after a couple of days wrestling with migrating my blog from wordpress.com to my new host, InMotion.  I’m reasonably happy with the service so far; the one call I had to make to tech support was answered quickly and resolved equally quickly.

Unfortunate that WordPress.com doesn’t allow for easy javascript redirection.  Or even meta redirection.  Well, at least it’s early in the life of my blog.

I expect to be playing around with my theme.  I’m pretty happy with the basic layout of this one, but there’s always tweaking to be done.  Already I’ve widened the main content panel, added a border between it and the left sidebar, and eliminated a javascript clock from the header.  I’ll need to play with colors a bit, maybe adjust the way the post category is displayed (and maybe add tags, though that might be irrelevant at this point), and otherwise tweak things to my liking.

And maybe find an artist to make a banner for me.  My graphical design skills are less than impressive.

I plan to get into some game-related content soon, though.  I’ve been considering my favorite new 4th-edition goddess, the Raven Queen, and just how little is known about her.  Seems like it’s about time to fill in those holes for my next game.  And probably for Skybreaker, too, unless our GM already has something in mind for her.

Looking for web hosting?

Chatty DM’s running a series on starting an RPG blog.  So far, it’s covered three questions: Why?, How?, and What?.  Or more verbosely, Why should I start a blog?, How do I start a blog?, and What should I blog about?.  The series is full of good advice so far, and so are some of the comments.  There’s more to come in the near future, too.  I’m finding it very helpful.

This post was originally a comment I made to the How? article.  I think perhaps it deserves its own space, if for nothing else than my own future ease of reference.  It’s regarding searching for a web hosting provider for a blog — though it applies equally well if you want to find hosting for another sort of site.

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For anyone in the position of looking for hosting who’s not familiar with the search, I offer the following advice. In a way it’s tangential to the blog itself, but it’s also probably the single most important decision you’ll make. Awful hosting can torpedo a blog.

1. Ignore hosting-company rating sites, especially “top 10? sites. Many of them are biased either through payola-style schemes or through artificial positive reviews planted by hosting company employees.

2. Do research, though. Look for forums or other discussion sites. Ask people you know. Do a Google search for the name of the prospective hosting company +”downtime” or +”problems” or +”complaints”. Check the company’s website; you want one that’s written in a professional manner, not littered with mistakes, and that’s laid out clearly and cleanly, not confusing or overwhelmingly flashy. Find out how long the company’s been in business. Check WHOIS; if the company’s domain name was registered more recently than they claim to have been in business, that’s a red flag. If contact info in WHOIS doesn’t match what’s on the company’s site, that’s not good either. If the company gives no contact info other than a single email address, that’s probably not a good sign.

3. Be wary of providers that offer “unlimited” bandwidth or storage. They cannot provide it. Check the Terms of Service and the Acceptable Use Policy; these will usually reveal that if you use too many resources, you’ll have to either scale back or upgrade to a private server. This is not necessarily bad if numbers are provided — but those numbers are the actual bandwidth/storage you’re getting. If numbers aren’t provided, then it’s at the host’s discretion, so make sure you’re okay with that before signing up.

4. Actually, make sure you read the TOS and AUP before signing up anyway. Yeah, those things people never read. You don’t want a surprise in the form of waking up to find your account suspended.

5. Send a ticket in via their listed support address, if it’s feasible. You might ask, for instance, whether the uptime rate they claim (usually over 99%) is based on server uptime or network uptime, and whether they can provide you with independent corroboration of that statistic. This is not only to get more information — it’s also to see how their response time is. If you wait three days for a reply, then you can expect that their technical support will be lacking when your site goes down or you have problems getting your script to load. (On the other hand, remember that some providers might treat you better as a prospective customer than they might as an actual customer… so a lightning-quick response time, while a good sign, is not necessarily indicative.)

6. Remember that price isn’t everything. The cheapest hosts probably don’t provide the best service. (Good tech support costs money.) On the other hand, the most expensive host doesn’t necessarily provide the best service, either. Figure out a price range your budget can bear, and go looking within that range.

7. If your prospective host offers a “free” domain name with their hosting plan, look into it carefully before you decide to register your domain name that way. Make sure that it will be registered in your name, rather than the host’s. Otherwise you could run into problems if you need to change hosts for whatever reason.

8. If your prospective host doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee, think very carefully before signing on. Most hosts do. Along the same lines, though less commonly, some hosts will offer monthly service. It’s typically more expensive in the long run, but might be very worthwhile to test out a new host before committing to a year or more of service.

I realize a lot of that sounds pretty basic, but they’re the kind of things I’ve seen overlooked — it can be easy to do when your mind is focused on the blog itself, and it can be rather detrimental in the long run.