Anarchy Online: Update from ARK Xnemth on the Reporters Project

Update from ARK Xnemth on the Reporters Project (OOC)
Hey all!

I figured it was time for yet another *booming voice* UPDATE FROM XNEEEEEEEEEEEEMTH!

What's been happening with ARK Reporters you ask? A LOT!

To sum up everything that's happening would be impossible, so I'll say simply "OMGWEEE!". I'll start with the bad news, cause I like ending with the good stuff.

The Ugly/Bad/Nasty Stuff
1. Staffing turnover. Oh my gawd.
I never really thought about this beforehand. Lesson learned! Volunteer programs are in a constant state of change. People leaving, joining, washing cars, all at random it seems. Some people burnout on reporting, others simply loose interest, and others still find new things that interest them in ARK and leave for those.

The end result is that the program is not growing, but just shifting staff frequently. Luckily we've been able to maintain quality standards, and many of the former reporters still work with us on editing as needed. I'm working on finding more staff for this group constantly, and I'm sure that sooner or later we'll have a massive group of editors (those that still help us though they aren't in this program anymore) and a solid core of reporters. Time will tell.

Aside from staffing, the other few issues are minor, and really not worth going into here as they'll be solved shortly.

Now, onward to 'the gud stuf (TM)'!

Things that are good! Yip yip ole!

1. IRRK News Wire
It's FINALLY working! h00T! MANY thanks go to ARK-Kaetan for his work in converting the bot that runs this and making the needed alterations for me. /applause!

Thanks also go to Lucien, the ARK Manager for his assistance for A. Supporting this idea when I came to him with it B. Getting the channel IN game and C. Getting the bot and other tools setup on all the servers. /applause x2

Thanks also to the Devs at FC that actually added this to the game for us! Whoever you are, much thanks!

Ok, now WHAT is the IRRK News Wire?

When I first started playing AO there were several news channels. My first thought was "WOW! That's awesome, that adds SO much to the texture of the world!" In my time playing AO, I only saw one or two messages on those channels.

AO is a gorgeous world, with a lot to it. But it lacks a bit of that "busy" feel of real life. So the IRRK channel is designed to report news and give the world a more realistic feel. It will be used to report news topics and threads here on the forums (player as well as ark), sometimes it will report about in game events happening THEN or that have just happened, and it will also report fictitious news (traffic advisories, stock market info, off world news, sports etc.) and my favorite... tabloid 'rumor' news. (thanks to falikos of Rimor for that suggestion)

The end goal is to make Rubi-ka feel more alive and give it back some of the texture and richness it once had. Why a neutral news channel? Well, the objective of most reporters is to report the news accurately, so neutral is good for that, and also it reduces the number of bots, and channels and work etc it takes for us to make this happen.

How often will news go across this channel? At the moment I have to input everything manually for each server. So it'll happen "As often as I can make it happen". But the bot we're using is evolving continuously, and we plan to have it post news on a regular timetable while selecting from a DB of news topics. In addition, news flashes etc will augment that with specific info.

There are two types of posts, I call them SPAM and Unspam. Spam posts will display the entire message at once (spans several lines normally) this is probably what you'll see for breaking news. The other shows a short topic, click it and it shows you the full post. *waves a banner that says "ARK cares about your text spam"*

So, end result, IRRK News Wire = Good thing(tm) -at least in my opinion.

2. Next evolution of articles!
The plan is to continue posting news in threads here and sending these threads to fansites such as Stratics, AOVault, and AO Warcry (note, if you run a fan site and would like updates on new posts etc, email crsubmission@ark.anarchy-online.com and let me know).

While this will continue, I'm itching to try something more ambitious. The plan is a bi-weekly ezine for each faction that will be made public for download.

I LOVE this idea, but naturally there are obstacles to overcome. I need staff familiar with DHTML, and staff that are solid artists in Photoshop etc for the production end. Then I need more staff to produce the articles.

So, that's the direction we're headed with things. We have a VERY enthusiastic (though small) staff working on this presently, and once we have more people with the required skills, we'll be rollin.

Ok, that's my update for now. As always, you can PM me here on the forums with questions, or you can contact us via email at crsubmissions@ark.anarchy-online.com

Yours respectfully,

Xnemth
Director, Community Relations Department
Advisors of Rubi-Ka