Your solution for problem number 2 is what in my opinion needs to be done!

To me you guys are making yourselves do more work than you should. HG isn’t a single game type site anymore, you guys don’t play most of the games on it anymore, why is it that I find the Exco making 80% of site-wide decisions? The Exco should focus on saving and investing HG’s resources so we can build more sites, improve the ones we already have (not manage it directly!!) and have a sustainable growth. You guys already did what you should have done, you guys hired webmasters to care for the site, you’ve (hopefully) given him good training and resources to START with, let him/her take care of his/her community now!

It’s really my major complaint - Seraphs are working as lead content managers now, nothing else (course there are exceptions). Remember the time where the Seraph did the site’s coding, layout, features, etc? Nowadays it’s all in Zen’s queue of to-dos, why is that so? Train/hire Seraphs to act like it’s THEIR site, THEIR responsibility, THEIR community to lead! To me, there are two things Seraphs have to depend on Zen for, and that’s forum updates and the Downloads Section (that last one not too much though).

Seraphs don’t go looking for staff, don’t look into learning web-languages to try and program their community wants, don’t try to improve their layout without Zen doing it, some never even post outside of HG to “advertise” their site, they just mod the forums, manage content and post news that were most likely already posted on some big site.

What happened to the days where Seraphs would have direct contact with community managers/playtesters/programmers/designers of their games? Where we would be the ones breaking the news and not just copying some IGN article. What happened to the time where if the editor wasn’t good enough, the Seraph would find someone to fix it so the community would be able to use it? There are tons of things I pain myself watching go by the Seraph’s eyes and all they can do is blame the Exco for not improving this software, that section, this other crap. Can you start to emphasize that it’s THEIR site and THEY are responsible for it?

I’m not saying I was a great Seraph when I was, but honest to you I tried my best to do 100% for the site, with as much internet access as I could get. When I realized I couldn’t do 100%, I stepped down and gave it to someone who I was most confident could.

Now of course a lot of Seraphs don’t fit into the above set, when they are TRULY not at fault for their site’s shortcomings (forums, downloads). Some even try to do the above, but stuff when the rec sections at Age3H was going to be done, we (Stoney and myself) went out, got ourselves a lot of the hard code required to have it in our downloads section. We tempted the community about it, we hired new staff to take care of it and help make it grow, and then since we can’t modify our Downloads Section ourselves, it got added into Zen’s to-do list. We all know how long that list is, I don’t think I need to say how that’s going

And that’s where I think the Exco should REALLY come in - managing the resources better. That’s ALL you should do for these current sites IMO, is HELP the Seraphs get their sites improved to their needs by managing the tech staff, HG’s money, etc. So that when a Seraph needs an improvement to the Downloads Section, you guys can find someone cheap to do it (but do it good of course), or if Zen is not busy, get him to do it.

I heard some talks (people were asking my opinion about these) only focusing on Scenario Design. Well, if you want to turn into fileplanet, sure? But there are 1000 “temporary” online players that go away in a month to 10 designers, in which 2 finish projects. So if you want to go for that path, go ahead, but to me you guys aren’t investing on growing the site that way, you’re investing to settle down and die slowly while the internet whizzes by you. The biggest HG site (Age3H) is losing a lot of traffic due to the opening of AgeCommunity. If ES keeps up opening community sites themselves, in the end expert focusing sites will offer many tools and services, while ES provides forums, we’re off with being the fileplanet of them all. Why not just delete the rest of the site?

I hope you can use my ideas/opinions for any good, if not, at least I tried.

Good luck with HG :).