Battlemaster Newspaper (Oracle?)

[Perth]

The players that used to have the time to dedicate to them have decidedly less time, and no one else has really stepped up to run any.

That and I suppose the Forums now give a lot of people their fill of commentary on in-game events. Not that it's necessarily the same, though.

[Indirik]

Personally, I really enjoy the Wiki newspapers people run. I don't know why they've gone so out of fashion.

Well, if anyone cares, I have quite a lot of experience running wiki-papers for the game. I ran The Rampant Lion for Perdan, which developed the format that most newspapers changed over to for quite some time. I ran the TattleMaster, an OOC-based paper about the game itself, including various changes, bugs, bugfixes, etc. And I ran the Dwilight Daily for a few years. It was fun for quite a while. As for why they all burned out, well, I can speculate based on my own experiences.

1) It gets repetitive. There are only so many things you can write about, and only so many ways to keep telling the same story over and over.
2) You get very little feedback. Almost no one ever comments about it. Is anyone reading it? Does anyone care? The people in your realm probably won't. Most attempts to get the realm involved are met with silence.
3) You get zero help. Or so close to zero as doesn't matter. You may occasionally get someone to help contribute. But beyond that, it's a really lonely undertaking. I had the best success with the Dwilight Daily in getting more people involved. Eventually, though, they trickle away, and you're left doing it yourself.
4) It's all propaganda, and everyone knows it. Chances are that everyone already knows all about what you're going to write about. You're not writing anything new or surprising. And if you are, then chances are that it's secret information that people don't want you telling. And if you do tell, then they will stop telling you in the first place.
5) It feels 'weird', I guess, writing a modern-style newspaper for a medieval environment. Newstickers, interviews, headlines, etc. It doesn't feel right.

Anyway, those are my views, based on my few years running various wiki-based papers.

[Foundation]

Hmm, OOC newspaper.  I wish someone still ran the TattleMaster.

[Indirik]

Help yourself. I'll help you update it, if you'd like, to make it more user-friendly. We can convert it to an easier-to-use system like the Dwilight Daily.

Or, if anyone else wants to take over The TattleMaster, feel free. I'd be happy to help you get started. It's a bit of a mess right now. I was trying to convert it over to a semantic tagged format that, if it worked, would make the whole thing a snap to run.

[Indirik]

For those interested, I ran the TattleMaster for about 3.5 years. Here is the last archive page: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/The_TattleMaster/Archives/Issue_19, dating to late 2010.

[egamma]

I loved the Tattlemaster. The development/feature request forums make it less useful, but it was still nice.

[Perth]

I really enjoyed both The Tattlemaster as well as this guy's short lived OOC paper "The Journal."

Perhaps the forum community could be taken advantage of by someone who runs an OOC paper now? Seems like it would be easier to reach ouch for contributions from different and specific people. And if you make it OOC commentary on stuff and make your scope all of the islands, seems like you would have a good amount of material to pull from for some regular issues. Maybe every other month, or every third month?

[Azerax]

So this seems to have generated some interest.  Should I put a feature request in to have the current world news add more details to it?  I don't think anyone is going to start up another paper, but for the sake of recording history it will help.

[Indirik]

You would also need to make it persistent if you wanted make it a permanent record.

[egamma]

You would also need to make it persistent if you wanted make it a permanent record.

Auto-tweet world news?

*Tom's head explodes*

[Tom]

Auto-tweet world news?

*Tom's head explodes*

I will NOT submit BattleMaster event messages to a ridiculous 140 character limit. In order to still transport meaning, we would have to introduce shortcuts to the language used in the game that just don't fit the atmosphere.

[Gustav Kuriga]

Arcaea declares war on Principality of Zonasa.



I'm quiet certain the above has plenty enough meaning.

[Indirik]

The only problem you would get into is when you start having very long names of things to convey. Like two long realm names swapping a region. Or someone with lots of titles dying in a battle. Or think of how long even the huge battle reports get if you only list the realms participating, and the army sizes.

A twitter-style feed would be very interesting for its archival capability. You would probably have to break down a lot of things into multiple messages.

[Tom]

Arcaea declares war on Principality of Zonasa.



I'm quiet certain the above has plenty enough meaning.

Sure, you can always find counter-examples. Most of the World News are, in fact, 140 or less characters. But there is no guarantee that they always will nor is there a way to automatically create one.

[Revan]

Ahh, I had all but forgotten about the Journal. That was good fun. I actually had plans of doing much more with it but the last few years I've had a lot, if not all my characters paused at one time or another. If you're struggling to participate consistently in the main game, it's even harder to engage in meta-game stuff like writing BattleMaster newspapers. Of course, the chances are if you were involved with one newspaper, you probably had a hand in others (I've certainly done my fair share over the years!) so I dare say it didn't take many players to bow out for all the newspapers to go idle.

I think the biggest thing to have halted the presses though is the advent of the forum. The forum leaves no secrets. We now live in the era of the multiple page war threads where you will have rulers and generals casually letting slip information that you would never ever have had the slightest inkling of in the past even as a member of those realms, nevermind others. I long since exchanged near-daily checks of the Recent Changes page on the wiki for near-daily checks of the Locals section of these forums. It's easier to learn about things on the forum from a meta standpoint, even if it's just someone saying 'Keplerville sucks '

It is a real loss though. Newspapers might give you news with a certain realm based skew or with a nice dollop of propaganda, but it was a way to write vaguely in character narrative pieces that would be seen beyond the boundaries of your own realm. A chance for players who had absolutely nothing to do with shaping the war effort or leading a realm to support their home in another way. To show their realm had a bit of colour, a bit of life and a chance to showcase that. It was also a fantastic way of recording history, giving all the context, detail and spin a news ticker could never give.

I hope there's still an audience for newspapers out there, but it all comes down to the nature of the wiki really. People have to volunteer and get involved. Hopefully the founding of the White Tree Times will help to get people interested again.