A smoke signal in the Skies over Atlas

Hello, everyone! Just wanted to let people know about the City of Heroes site I've been working on since mid-June, called Skies over Atlas. (http://coh.withinmyworld.org/ is the address.)

Skies over Atlas is not about the technical side of CoH (like character building, power stats, etc)--I know that there are other CoH sites out there that do a wonderful job of covering these aspects of the game. What my site does is to tackle the oft-forgotten social aspect of the game. Articles on how to chat politely and positively with people, lead teams and supergroups, and how the Chatbox can be used to do different tasks in-game are just some of the selection.

Skies over Atlas also includes a large "new-player" section, dedicated to helping new heroes get their footing and learn some of the veteran players' tips and tricks. The site also has information and advice on lots of other topics, such as building Invented Enhancements, finding a good name for your hero, choosing generic powers, how to make influence, what veteran rewards are available, and many more.

I created this site because I want to help new players with some insiders' secrets, but I also want to help all players communicate with each other more effectively as well. CoH is such a social game that it is a shame to see players' gaming experiences wrecked by insulting chat and immature behavior. I want to offer players new ways to tackle difficult situations like these. (Once an English major, always an English major, I suppose!)

Check out the site, and if you're on Facebook, become a fan of Skies Over Atlas (search for "Skies Over Atlas") to learn about new updates! Also, if you're on Twitter, @skiesoveratlas will also have the latest updates. (A Myspace page is in the works, but not yet live.) Leave your thoughts in the Guestbook, available under Site Info and Links.

I hate to be a downer but your "Things to do in Atlas" in your humor section has nothing funny in it.

That's a nice site overall. I enjoyed it looking through it quite a bit.

Well done.

The "Things to Do in Atlas Park" page is a personal favorite of mine, mainly because every suggestion came from experiences. Part of the page does deal with legit things you can do to help new heroes, and part of it's just screwing around.

By the way, is the humor section detracting from the overall value of the rest of the site? It's somehow difficult to write good humor for CoH, even though I've done tons of fansites before and haven't had a problem with humor sections. Just want to be sure that I'm including content that is worth the time it takes to read.

A big thank you to Diggis, Aisynia, Useless_Fiend, and Mr. NoPants for their input so far! (Yes, even the more negative posts are helpful for the further development of the site. Also, Aisynia, the alternative breakfast option made me snicker.) I welcome more opinions on how I can improve and add to the content of the site!

Your site looks good, I'm not a fan of the particular font you're using but other than that the graphics and content I gave a once over looks as if it will be helpful to new players and give some of us vets some new perspective on social interaction in Co*.

Keep it up!

Great site! Keep it up!

Try posting this in the Player Help section of the forums, it'll get more effect there

Bravo! Vivots!

Cal

I logged on, saw that there were more replies to this thread, and my heart rejoiced. ^o^ A big "thank-you" to The_Killbot_5000, ReclusesPhantom, and Calibre for posting opinions!

Also, I do want to address the point about the site font that The_Killbot_5000 brought up: is it a personal preference issue, or a readability issue? Though I have tested the site design on every browser available to PCs, I have not tested it on a Mac, and thus was unsure of how the font choice might translate on a different operating system with different default fonts. Don't want all the cool content translating into random symbols and such!

I agree that this post would likely be better suited for the Player Help forum, ReclusesPhantom; unfortunately, I've been trying to post there about Skies over Atlas for about six months, and after about three months the conversation just died and I couldn't revive it, it seemed (no matter how often I posted about updates to the site). Thus, I came to a part of the forums that I knew people would read to re-advertise about the site. ^_^

I haven't gone through everything. But the only thing I don't like is the sub-menus in the navigation. The soft blueish text over the white background is a little hard to read.

@Greenykins: Thank you for letting me know about the color visibility issue--I have a darker color blue I can use in place of the lighter shade, so I'll fix that ASAP.

@The_Killbot_5000: Thank you for clarifying about the font. What I may do is experiment with using a sans-serif font on the main body text instead of the serif font I've got in place now--I just noticed that the serif font seems to render numbers and some letters a little oddly. Well, Paragon City wasn't built in a day, lol!

I'm glad to hear from people about things I can improve on the site as well as things that are going correctly--I'm glad that this project, which started out so little, expanded into the kind of resource that it is.

By the way, does anyone know where I can get images of the different Invented Enhancements? A visitor had mentioned adding images to the Invented Enhancements page (under "Game Items") a long time ago, and I definitely agreed, but I couldn't figure out how to get screenshots of them in-game. Thank you in advance!

Cool site! Keep up the good work!

Thank you! Going to add info about the newest booster pack to my Editions and Packs page later today.

Thank you for that tip! I'll try both options and see which one offers the better pictures.