Orlock Perspective: Community Building

[News]

Warhammer online is certainly not lacking for fans... How do I know this? well put simply the sheer number of dedicated fan sites out there which have people visiting them on a daily basis.  I mean I have well over a dozen bookmarks that I visit daily and around the same again that I visit less frequently.
Now this is what spurred my brain into thinking about this edition of the Orlock Perspective, the area of community building.  Not the building of the community that is the role of the folks over at EA Mythic or their oversea partners, rather the way by which the community itself is building itself up through the various fan sites and blogs and other endeavours.
Now in the past with other games and hobbies I had noticed that sites seemed to be fairly isolated affairs, they would post official news and events as well as their own, but the only real place to get info on anything happening elsewhere on the web was through the various forums that sprawl across cyberspace.  Now though the situation is turning 180 degrees, it seems that the WAR community sites are very happy to be trumpeting a fan fair at any and all of the cool things that others have done.
On a side note part of the reason Svoald and myself wanted to do our very own fan site was because of this isolationism, we felt it was about time fan sites tried a different approach and thought along the lines of "lets work together to make all of us stronger", but hey as it happened the WAR community was already there with us.

Now we haven't managed to pull off a complete Community revolution here, there's still a few sites out there for WAR that are keeping to themselves (some even have a fair amount of traffic).  Now hear my cry people, let's turn our community into the strongest, the smartest, the brightest, the [insert adjective]est and spread the love.

I have a vision of one giant community living happily together among any and all the various quality sites out there!

VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

[Karl]

That is a great direction and from what I can tall also its the one that the WAR community is going into. Add to this Mythics Herald and it will be complete. I like that many of teh fan sites are working together to make sure the hoby is supported. Each site is different but I feelat home at many of them.

[snafzg]

I definitely don't see any of the sites that are coming out lately as competition so I hope it never comes across that way. I haven't made the strongest attempts to reach out lately but that's mainly due to time constraints. I went from spending about 20+ hours per week on my blog down to about 5. It's a bit harder to keep up the momentum for a game that is perpetually delayed when your site is in pure BLOG format rather than NEWS etcetera.

Not that I think a NEWS etcetera site is easy by any means! You have way more content to keep up with.

[Svoald]

Although, up to date news can be taxing sometimes lol. I think i'm done sometimes for the day and then my news searcher tells me something new just came up again...

[Romeo Knight]

Your point of view is very interesting and really reflects reality. I do agree with what has been said. Btw we will publish your article translated in French on our fansite 

[Karl]

Your point of view is very interesting and really reflects reality. I do agree with what has been said. Btw we will publish your article translated in French on our fansite 

thats awesome

One of the things making me stoked by WAR is the international appeal of the game. GW is big in Europe and big in North America and also Australia/New Zealand. I have watched stuff on French, German, Britsh and US sites and it all great information. Thats a good thing and I hope it continues in that way.

[Hellebron]

Aye, I'd like to think thats where its going. I mean, I found you guys because Waaaghead has you on their banner page, I found Snafzg's blog because it was linked on one of the other forums. It seems quite a nice community mix atm, I'm certainly happy to hop around several forums, even post on a few, and have no fear of mentioning the others because Mods don't come at you at with a ban-hammer for daring to advertise another 'rival' forum as you get with some standard GW based tabletop forums. Just another feather in WaR's communties cap I'd say.