Feedback for Curse-Gaming?
By
Blood_Wolffe,
Posted on: 2007-03-26 13:09 in Multi-Media Fan Creations
I don't have any complaints, the site is really comprehensive.
The Story of a Petless MM with a dream
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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
This entire post should receive some kind of award for being both hysterical and fantastic.
Well done. |
1. Registration and uploading issues. See the other thread. I don't really have things to *upload* right now, just pointing otu what was said.
2. Everything seems to just go into "Ye Olde Pile of Fanart." Categorization beyond "Screenshots" "Renders" "Fanart" and "Wallapper" would be one place to start, namely having sections by game. (I have no interest in WoW.)
3. I don't *see* a space for any sort of commenting, by the artist at least, or most have not chosen to take advantage of it. Keywords are not comments.
4. Don't take this as snark, but... "Curse Gaming?" What's with the name? Is the founder's name Curse? Are they mostly involved with a game with curses? (As in "Magic with a negative effect," not "Swearing.") Are they calling gaming a curse, or cursing gaming? Admittedly the same could, to a point, be said for "Deviant Art," but given how many people would call anything the slightest bit non-mainstream "deviant," there's reasoning there. The CG name *does* throw me a bit, but if there's reason for it - even if it's just "We're being smartalecs," say it somewhere.
Well, I'm not an artist really, but here's some things that jump out at me just looking at the page and reading the thread:
Look at this page - it looks like a slapped-together afterthought. There's no listing by artist, there's no categories, it doesn't even sort the fan art by game! People who are serious professional artists and do this for a living probably would prefer not to have their stuff lumped in with this.
There are issues people are having with making accounts.
And of course the big thing... why Curse-Gaming?
EDIT: Memphis_Bill's point on a lack of space for artist comments is a good one, too, and one that I hadn't even considered.
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1. Registration and uploading issues. See the other thread. I don't really have things to *upload* right now, just pointing otu what was said.
2. Everything seems to just go into "Ye Olde Pile of Fanart." Categorization beyond "Screenshots" "Renders" "Fanart" and "Wallapper" would be one place to start, namely having sections by game. (I have no interest in WoW.)
3. I don't *see* a space for any sort of commenting, by the artist at least, or most have not chosen to take advantage of it. Keywords are not comments.
4. Don't take this as snark, but... "Curse Gaming?" What's with the name? Is the founder's name Curse? Are they mostly involved with a game with curses? (As in "Magic with a negative effect," not "Swearing.") Are they calling gaming a curse, or cursing gaming? Admittedly the same could, to a point, be said for "Deviant Art," but given how many people would call anything the slightest bit non-mainstream "deviant," there's reasoning there. The CG name *does* throw me a bit, but if there's reason for it - even if it's just "We're being smartalecs," say it somewhere.
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1) Registration was (untimely) broken when we implemented some anti spam-bot code last week. Our appologies for that.
2) Categorization beyond the standard is something I can simply add in the admin panel and have it available within 15 minutes. Key point for now is we haven't had a need for it yet so it hasnt been put up! 
3) Commenting is possible on just about everything. This Image has some commentry done by myself as an example. You will also notice that the background of the comments area varies in color, where blue background = author / owner of image, orange = Curse admins, white = everyone else.
As for sorting images by game, this is already implemented, but perhaps not fully as visible as I'd wish it is. Allow me to explain; Curse has a database listing games. Some of these games have a dedicated portal. Accessing the image gallery for that portal will only bring up images from that game. So what about other games that does not have their own portal yet, like CoH? Well, it's implemented for that too. If you select the game on the left menu, and click the images tab, you will see a list of images and a link below that says: Browse All Images. In City of Heroes' case, it takes you to a page where you can submit and browse images.
I should point out that while only one category is showing (with only listed 5 images), there is more to it than that. The way our system is designed is around very heavy traffic. Because of this, we cache almost all database queries on our website, and we don't use queries that are not needed (like showing an empty category). If, say, I now was to upload an image under the "Renders" category for City of Heroes, in a few hours when the cache rebuilds itself the category would automatically be listed.
4) I actually should respond to this in detail.
Curse-Gaming.com started out as a guild website for a DAoC / World of Warcraft guild. From there it expanded to being interface / addons website for wow (which it still is the world leader for).
Last year, the core team behind the website decided we wanted to do something more with both our lives and our website, as we had - up til then - been a bunch of gamers doing something as a hobby project.
Fast forward to today, we have re-built Curse CMS from scratch. Every piece of software on the website from forums, to wiki, to game databases has been built by our developers. Curse is now a funded corporation with employees and work all catered around creating a one-of-a-kind web2.0 ultimate gamers portal. We are located in San Francisco under the name Curse, Inc.
The name just has been inherited from our past, although I believe now is a good time to mention we are going to be re-branding our name around our recently aqquired Curse.com in the near future with a brand new clean and streamlined design.
Now, before I end this post, please let me point one thing out:
We (Curse) are not trying to be another deviant art. We are not trying to be a replacement to the art community you have probably been a part of for years. What Curse does, is more along the lines of free image hosting sites like imageshack. Except, everything on our site is related to gaming and the games you play. What we are offering is a place to host your files, link them out to thousands of people, plug them with embed html code, rate them and comment on them, etc.
That is not, however, to say that we won't look to improve our functionality based on your feedback. You are gamers as well as artists, and if we can offer / create / improve on our site in a manner that makes it more valuable to you, then that is what we will do. In the end, we are about strengthening a community, not ignoring it's wishes.
I will read more on the commentry on this thread later, until then -
Peace.
see if you had just popped in and explained it like that the first time
Don't take this personally Nimloth-Cu because I realize you're only a representitive of the site, and it's not actually directed at you per se.
But ... we're being directed to a site which hasn't been created for the City of Heroes populace. That's the problem. This is obvious by the reg date on the rep's profile. The people at your site, Nim - do they PLAY city of heroes?
Lighthouse: that's why I personally don't care to go there. It's not organized *in advance*. It's not *part of the City of Heroes mindset*. It is not *made by or for COH fans*.
If you'd arranged *much* earlier to have a good, well-thought-out section specifically for COH members to post, or to look for their stuff, that's one thing. Should have, could have, didn't.
I have no interest in a site that's designed for WOW or guildwars or dark age or whatnot - the mindset of the *people who usually play* those games is significantly different from that of the COH crowd, from what I've seen in nearly 3 years of play.
I don't look to fan sites to see whether there's a good artist out there for me to read. I go to Deviantart because that's where 9 out of 10 already *are*.
For the Curse-Gaming site to work for me, it'd have to have the functionality of DA plus a number of special filters (such as the ones found on Yaoi-gallery, which obviously I can't link to here) to give the artists *and* viewers things to choose to view, instead of having to click through endless screenshots of games they don't play.
The whole thing, I'm sorry to say, does reek of 'well we should have done it this way' but didn't. LH - in the future maybe you should arrange things a little more thoroughly with the 'partners' that are being talked to, so when you do make an announcement we won't break their site, or find nothing of interest appropriate to us on it.
Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
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From the brief tour I just took, I dug the site.
I liked th interface, felt clean.
For the record I do not like DA.
THAT place feels clunky and crazy slow...it's also creepy there and feels like an army of emo's will storm my house and draw depressing things on me if I don't like a picture.
then you're looking at the wrong artists.
So it's free image hosting for gamers, plain and simple. Okay well that sounds fine, can you tell us what the maximum compacity is for file size, how large can we uplink, and will you offer flash, and or video in the future?
Photobucket allows multple sizes, does the coding for us if we want to link the url, image or html itself. Would we have the ability to manage our own gallery of images, make folders within those galleries?
Congrats on the business, I'm all for gamers giving back and keeping it going. As I see it, your site is as you say, not Deviant, so as an artist I probably won't use it as much as a regular gamer wanting to share screens.
Categories and keywords you can search for for posted art would be great.
My whole issue with all this is not with CG, but with NC farming out this stuff to another site. For some reason their legal staff doesn't want anything here that is actually the property of someone else, it seems, which I guess it why Gill Bates' Cuppa piece wasn't allowed to be posted - be cause it had the name of his company, which is his art sig. That really grated on alot of people.
It seems there have been some inconsistencies over the years in how things created by players that might enhance or promote the game are allowed to be spotlighted here.
When it seemed obvious that there would be no place for artists to show off here, they went looking for another place, and many have since settled on DA. It could have been CG or anyplace else, but that kinda caught on, IMO because of the presence of artists and fans already there.
I don't think anyone has anything against CG or any place else, but since a ton of stuff is already at DA, I would imagine there will be many who won't want to move house.
I'm sure CG will see some uploads, especially when/if the categories/search keywords are there.
My Deviant Art page link-link
CoH/V Fan Videos
*Wanders in and looks at Zekiran with big curious innocent eyes*
What's a Yaoi?
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*Wanders in and looks at Zekiran with big curious innocent eyes*
What's a Yaoi?
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In this case, google is most certainly NOT your friend
And I agree with the ^^^ poster above this, that this isn't *because* or *due to* Curse-Gaming. I don't honestly think they had anything to do with this choice, but that's just my opinion.
There are some artists, creators, companies and publishers out there who are *absolutely* on the ball when it comes to fan items. WARP graphics, publishers of Elfquest for instance, has a huge database of their fans sites, images, stories and the like on their own *actual* site. They know that fans run the business.
The guy who created the Redwall series (I haven't read it and can't recall the name off the top of my head) is very pro-fan, as well, and essentially his whole website is fan-created.
Obviously other game companies to a smaller or greater amount have fan-pieces on their sites and *approve* of them so long as they're not actually offensive to people. (and even then...)
This isn't an issue of "not" wanting to choose Curse Gaming or any other site... It's an issue of the publishers of this game site - here in the USA because this is not the case in the Euro version - being bound by whatever legal 'eagles' they have working over time to decide what's "best" for them.
Best and "best" - being very different things....
My advice: fire the lawyers. Hire php coders and give us fan stuff available right here where we'll all already be to use it.
Please read my FEAR/Portal/HalfLife Fan Fiction!
Repurposed
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So it's free image hosting for gamers, plain and simple. Okay well that sounds fine, can you tell us what the maximum compacity is for file size, how large can we uplink, and will you offer flash, and or video in the future?
Photobucket allows multple sizes, does the coding for us if we want to link the url, image or html itself. Would we have the ability to manage our own gallery of images, make folders within those galleries?
Congrats on the business, I'm all for gamers giving back and keeping it going. As I see it, your site is as you say, not Deviant, so as an artist I probably won't use it as much as a regular gamer wanting to share screens.
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Video is already supported but is in Beta, hense the no link to it. If you visit Video section BETA you will be able to upload and view videos just like with images. Specially to be noted is that when you do upload a video, it is compressed twice in two versions, one very high quality / resolution, and one "above standard" quality/resolution. The HQ version of video's is something that is a part of a feature we plan to release down the line.
There is NO LIMIT for filesize or bandwidth, at all. Upload a 5mb .BMP if you wish, it won't be taken down or get disabled from bandwidth use. The same goes for videos, there is no limit to the length or size of a video you should chose to upload.
As for actual image sizes, when you upload the file gets saved in 3 different versions. 1: Thumbnail size. 2: Preview / embed in page size. 3: Download size which is the original resolution of the image you uploaded.
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Categories and keywords you can search for for posted art would be great.
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This functionality is already implemented backend, all we need to do is make a page template for it. It will be up relatively shortly.
So that is some suggestions that we will be adding. As for Fan-Art sub-categories, could you make me a list of what to add and I will get that done a.s.a.p. Please feel free to come with more suggestions, prefrably as bulletpoint list so I can easily forward it to our developers!
I'm still confused. What is Curse-Gaming.com's official relationship to Cryptic and NCSoft. What part of this is supposed to draw my attention, as a casual community person, to your website. Why? To put it bluntly...anyone can see that you have a unique forum title, Nimloth...but you're not a redname. I'm not upset, I'm just confused. Cheers!
There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.
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I'm still confused. What is Curse-Gaming.com's official relationship to Cryptic and NCSoft. What part of this is supposed to draw my attention, as a casual community person, to your website. Why? To put it bluntly...anyone can see that you have a unique forum title, Nimloth...but you're not a redname. I'm not upset, I'm just confused. Cheers!
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The City of Heroes Community and PR teams maintain a number of relationships with fan, community and gaming web sites. Sure, there are things we can do on our own sites, but it is part of our philosophy to support fan initiatives as we can. The bottom line is that we won't always be in a position to do everything we want (after all, who is)? By leveraging the capabilities of other interested parties and sites we endeavor to build and maintain our community.
This relationship with Curse-Gaming is one example. If you are not interested in taking part; no worries. If you are aware of interesting things happening in the community then by all means, please let us know so we can do what we can to support it.
Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager
If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.
Personally, one of the things I like most about Deviant Art, and not to say that Curse should do things 'exactly like DA' but to highlight some of the features that has drawn most of there, is the 'Blog' type atmosphere that is present. The ability to 'watch' other artists whenever they submit a journal or art pieces, a 'scrap' section that is just hubbub that artists don't want going into their 'for display' gallery. The ability to link back to other artists very easily (i.e. their DA Icon's and such).
Little 'community' features like that really help to build a community. If it's just a screenshot dump, it probably wouldn't be any more useful than something like Photobucket set to public viewing. It would be relegated to a sig link for someone to click on when they want some references or something.
With DA and the journal and gallery and friends features, it becomes more 'alive'. A 'MySpace' for artists, if you will. As much as I just shuddered saying that :P
Oh and it must be SUPER easy to use. Especially for people who don't know any HTML or how to code, but with advanced features for those who DO know how to code.
That's just my thoughts for now, I'm sure I'll add more later.
Thanks for allowing the feedback and I have to admit, Curse seems to be something to watch in the future, thanks for taking our advice and listening to our concerns.
While I still want the homepage to support Fan Art, if this is the best we can get at least the people over at CG are willing to listen to us.
Once I get some more CoH related work done, I might look at posting some over at Curse, but while the site looks good (to me), I'm not certain how much time I have to devote to it. Between DA, CoH, the Envisionaries, and Reapermini, I'm already spread pretty thin, and I've been ignoring Reaper far too long for the fangirl I am.
I am a gamer, but more tabletop than MMO. CoH is the first and only online RPG I've played/do play, and I seriously doubt anything else will grab my attention. WoW holds zero interest for me, as do the other fantasy online RPGs. I'd rather sit around a table with my best friends to play fantasy. I'm also not a PvPer, which is probably the biggest draw of CoH to me.
While I like DA for the abilities mentioned previously (watching other people, friend lists, blogging), I do think it is slow and clunky at times. Not being able to edit your comments for things like spelling errors (I tend to try to keep my typing speed up with my thoughts, so I sometimes skip whole words) is a major gripe I have with DA. I'll look around Curse some more, and see more of what it has to offer, but right now it seems a little "busy" with how it's laid out. I like simple interfaces. It keeps me focused.
"If I fail, they write me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart." --- George A. Romero
"If I had any dignity, that would have been humiliating" --- Adam Savage
Virtue Server: Kheprera, Malefic Elf, Lady Omen, Night Rune, La Muerte Roja, Scarab Lafayette, Serena Ravensong, Kyrse, and Arachnavoodoo among others.
I get a server error every. single. time. I've tried to go to curse gaming, even with using the links people have posted here as examples. I think it's a hint for me =/
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I'm still confused. What is Curse-Gaming.com's official relationship to Cryptic and NCSoft. What part of this is supposed to draw my attention, as a casual community person, to your website. Why? To put it bluntly...anyone can see that you have a unique forum title, Nimloth...but you're not a redname. I'm not upset, I'm just confused. Cheers!
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The City of Heroes Community and PR teams maintain a number of relationships with fan, community and gaming web sites. Sure, there are things we can do on our own sites, but it is part of our philosophy to support fan initiatives as we can. The bottom line is that we won't always be in a position to do everything we want (after all, who is)? By leveraging the capabilities of other interested parties and sites we endeavor to build and maintain our community.
This relationship with Curse-Gaming is one example. If you are not interested in taking part; no worries. If you are aware of interesting things happening in the community then by all means, please let us know so we can do what we can to support it.
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Thank you for clearing that up. And thank you Nimloth for posting the info you did - it's good to know.
I don't think I'll be using your site right now... but I'll be sure to check back every once in awhile.
I found the Curse-Gaming site to be rather buggy. What's more, I don't see a reason to use it unless Curse-Gaming and the official CoH/V site are going to support each other in some way.
I read the previous thread and the original announcement read to me as, "We will never have fan art here. Go away." All around that was a plug for a buggy community site that no one had heard of. It was like Curse-Gaming was getting used to bury the announcement as opposed to actually being a place to bring the community closer together.
I would not personally be opposed to using a service like Curse-Gaming. I could even put up with the various errors. I would only do so however if I actually felt like it would bring the community together in some way. The community has been in a steady decline from my perspective for a while now. I don't see splintering sections of it off as helping to strengthen it either.
If NCSoft and Curse-Gaming were to work together then that would be a different story. I never saw any indication of that before however. City of isn't one of the main games they cover, and aside from an interview I haven't seen any other association between the two.
There are many services out there that offer very similar things. I mean gaming sites with fan art sections. None of them really flourish in this area because there is no real bond between them and the game in question. People tend to go to these types of sites to use their forums and other services when they have become disenfranchised with the main community. They tend to be less buggy from running longer, but without the ties to the main community they never do very well.
Basically, I would jump on if I believed NCSoft would be working side by side of Curse Gaming. I have had some problems with the site, but most of them are fixable. I wouldn't be uploading all of my art there, but I would put up a few pieces. I don't understand the need to use them without NCSoft there to partner with them however.
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I'm still confused. What is Curse-Gaming.com's official relationship to Cryptic and NCSoft. What part of this is supposed to draw my attention, as a casual community person, to your website. Why? To put it bluntly...anyone can see that you have a unique forum title, Nimloth...but you're not a redname. I'm not upset, I'm just confused. Cheers!
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The City of Heroes Community and PR teams maintain a number of relationships with fan, community and gaming web sites. Sure, there are things we can do on our own sites, but it is part of our philosophy to support fan initiatives as we can. The bottom line is that we won't always be in a position to do everything we want (after all, who is)? By leveraging the capabilities of other interested parties and sites we endeavor to build and maintain our community.
This relationship with Curse-Gaming is one example. If you are not interested in taking part; no worries. If you are aware of interesting things happening in the community then by all means, please let us know so we can do what we can to support it.
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With all due respect, what exactly do you do with this site? as pointed out in many recent threads, this site os so out of date in most areas, it's like the game isn't even in business anymore.
Saying you aren't in a position to do everything you want is a misnomer. I don't see much of anything, much less not-quite-everything. "Leveraging" other sites means 'get them to do the work for you'.
Why not 'leverage' the NC/Cryptic staff to do something, or leverage their butts to the unemployment line.
I assume the reason for pushing that site is as a low cost marketing tool. It is a site where lots of online games apparently have screenshot collections. By keeping CoX "on the raidar" as it were, on sites like that, it helps keep the numbers up and promotes a healthy game.
Spending NC/Cryptic staff time on programming or website design for a fan art/screen section at this point probably isn't going to happen. Setting up a section on a site that is frequented by many online game players is easy, and helps keep images from CoH in the mainstream.
Take part, or don't, as you like. But, I wouldn't give Lighthouse a hard time just for pointing this out and asking for feedback.
Thanks for the explanation, LH, and the support and continuing questions from the rest of y'all. I'm still trying to figure out what Curse Gaming actually...does. Is it supposed to be the unofficial home of image hosting for CoX? Will they host a version-appropriate CoX download? Will they be the lead news agency for CoX news?
I'm there right now. Besides being hard to find behind all the other game and game information stuff on the website, there doesn't seem to be any reason I should be interested. 
There's no information...the only article is the Hami Redesign...the forums are down...as are the downloads and links.
Frankly, I'm not picking up any 'player initiative' vibes here. So...again--I'm not trying to be inflammatory or unfairly critical--I'm just really confused.
D
There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.
Ok, I know I sparked a bit of controversy in my recent plug of Curse-Gaming.com as a destination to host your fan art.
Without going into all the "why" and "wherefore" behind that, I did want to start another thread to ask for your feedback on the Curse site. They would be interested to hear what you have to say. If you were to use Curse as an image gallery, what kind of functionality would you like to see?
Try to keep feedback to pointed lists or detailed, but brief, descriptions. They plan to look at this thread, take the best and put in their "to do" tracker for their web devs. So, here's your chance to help shape their offerings!
Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager
If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.