AlphaZealot’s post is wonderful (no surprise), though I have reservations comparing the plight of Smash (which has huge immediate exposure and inherent staying power due to brand recognition; I could go on) to Skullgirls. That complaint aside, everything he said is extremely important as it pertains to Skullgirls’ future as a community.
For one thing, a standalone site would be mind-blowingly fantastic. I desperately want to see this happen, actually-- and not just a forum, but an actual full-blown central hub of community-provided news and information. There’s a lot that can be gained just from having a nice, clean, centralized place where people can have easy access to, say, Duckator’s match videos, or character guides or whatever. That’s especially true for a community as decentralized as we are right now.
There’s also the matter of leveraging one of Skullgirls’ greatest strengths-- its online. Right now, we have one weekly tournament that’s relegated to a single thread that people can only find by clicking through SRK’s front page to its forums, scrolling past a huge list of other games to find Skullgirls, and then scrolling down a list of other threads to finally find Skullbats. This is a terrible way to attract uninitiated players, but you know what would alleviate that situation? Yep, a standalone website.
For example, Allisbrawl has a dedicated ladder section. That’s for Super Smash Bros. Brawl, whose online play is laughably bad-- imagine what it could do for Skullgirls, whose online is so good that Salty Cupcakes, a live tournament, actually allows online entrants.
I don’t see any reason to wait for “official” forums or whatever. There’s so much more potential than that.
Just for the record (because my last post wasn’t entirely clear), I’d be happy to set the site up if people want to do it, though I’d like to at least get the blessing of Mike/Alex/etc. first, if not acknowledgment of the official forums not going ahead.
Kristoph has some good points, but it would be very easy to bite off more than you could chew to begin with, so I’d suggest going for forums first, and then people can make suggestions for more features there.
Alright, who wants to plunk down $10/month for www.canopy-kingdom.org ? It’s available! (without the dash it’s not because that for some reason belongs to godaddy…)
I don’t mind having a forum here as well. More exposure is always good.
there’s already masterchibi’s “canopy kingdom” wordpress. a different name, with a .com domain would be ideal. like skullheart.com or something i don’t know, someone check that or something
like, this shouldn’t be halfassed in any way, right?
I just went ahead registered skullheart.com (I get a nice discount because of the other sites I run - registration was only $2 lol). It seemed the best of the options you gave and we can make endless puns about it being the *heart *of the community.
EDIT: The next step will be raising money for hosting. Unfortunately I’m pretty broke at the moment, but I’ll see what I can do.
EDIT2: Also what features do people actually want in the forum? Personally I’d be inclined to go with a vBulletin setup because it is relatively lightweight (think smashboards), but doesn’t have some of the features that are on SRK (e.g. liking posts, etc.)
Just tossing names around here: The New Meridian Connection (catchy, plus it sounds noir-ish and stuff) Uh… Tales from Lil’ Innsmouth (goes pretty well with a discussion based angle…) The Annie: GotS Fan Club…
Skullgirls needs to be at Genesis 3, you guys definitely proved to be as passionate for your game as us fans of Melee if not more, I admire that.
I do have skullgirls personally on my PS3 I just haven’t played it much, but I guess it’s time for me to get back into it because you guys showed me that there’s quite a lot of people that actually play and love this game.
I’m all for SG community migrating to its own website/forum. I don’t see why we need to have an “official” one since the Main Website rarely updates and Lab Zero have other things to take care of anyway. It would get Online Tourneys much more easier to setup as well.
I Personally like the sound of “skullheart.com” ,its short and sweet. Has the “heart” angle to play at as well.
About the Funding, I can also try things on my end if need be. Have a friend who would probably interested in this sort of project for his debut. I’ll make an update about this within 24 hours
I Prefer the Lighter package Layout. Stuff such as “Likes” and “Points” is nothing to fret about if its gonna require more work then its worth. I mean as long as we can have the important foundations of a Forum then things should be fine
Just popping in to say SG doesn’t need its own forum. If yall are still so excited from last night, put that effort towards introducing or organizing SG at your local scene. What the game needs most of all is just exposure. Specifically, exposure to casual gamers and other tournament goers. A new website means nothing if theres no new blood interested enough to look for it.
The smash scene, and by extension smashboards, has grown so big mostly due to the massive player base of the smash franchise. Every game in the series has done extremely well in the casual gamer market. This exposure allows smashers to recruit new blood from outside the established fighting game community. Of course there are some folks who were introduced to competitive smash directly, but most of yall trickled into the competitive scene by osmosis.
SG on the other hand is a game made by FGC folk for FGC folk. Most of the people who play SG didn’t see it on store shelves or were introduced to the game at a friend’s house. Our player base is composed of people who were already interested in competitive fighting games and saw something special in SG. We discovered the game from either direct tournament exposure or fighting game news sources.
I think this donation drive has done a great job so far by reintroducing the entire FGC to skullgirls. I’m hopeful we’ll see more attention to SG in the coming months. In that time we’ll need forums that people can find very easily. SRK serves us well in that regard. Its functional, user friendly, and most importantly is the first result from google if you type ‘skullgirls forum’
Anyway, save your money for now.
Its a nice gesture, but you might not see local SG players come out and just one troll could start a whole mess of drama. I can’t imagine that just including SG as a goodwill gesture will get the turnout yall are hoping for. I suggest smashers take such an opportunity to try the game out for themselves.
Skullheart works for me too. It’s fun to get all clever with names, but it’s a good idea to choose a name that people will actually remember.
I think a lighter package works; likes are just kinda fluff anyway, and anything’s better than the monstrously slow Shoryuken forum loading times.
And I need to buy a PS3; I don’t even have my 360 here to play Skullgirls (:(), I’m giving my 360 to a friend soon anyway, and I’ve always wanted to play Demon’s Souls.
You raise a valid point but our own forum is still a good option because SRK is only ok at being our forum. Our forum is small, isolated and threads for finding tournaments is cluttered with general discussion posts or tournaments for every other fighting game but also SRK is slow and crashes a lot making it a pain to for anything, even not SG related.
Having our own forum will solve that. We can have separate sub forums for general discussion, strategy, and tournament finder. Plus we can just put our forum link here so that people find SRK can go to it until our forum does become first on google search.
But you are right, the most useful thing the community can do is get more tournaments out there so that people can get playing (and getting SG at Genesis 3 wouldn’t be a loss as far as im concerned)
I will happily run the news portion of canopy-kingdom.org if you’ll let me.
My wordpress blog is a drop in the pond (that is sparsely updated recently thanks to school / work) but I would be more than happy to be the editor of the front page or whatever you want.
As much as it is important to get tournament scenes going on around, I still feel that making a website first would be incredibly beneficial in so many ways to develop that scene. I’m not saying give up SRK completely, but saying that SRK is functional is completely laughable. thing is if we make our own forum, then we can just advertise it here on SRK.
It would also be much easier to organize possible tournaments by having it in it’s own section. All I’m saying is, SRK is a crutch right now.
A lot of other fighting games have their own websites, that’s how they are going strong. SRK is more of a forum for SF/Marvel personally.