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Announcement: The end and the new beginning

By Phil | July 5, 2007 at 10:13 pm

Several of us have a lot of experience with so-called ?video games journalism.? I myself have been writing about games since 2004. Heath? Orie? Janelle? The dates vary, but it?s the same deal, more or less. A large number of us have been doing this for years. Hey, we like shouting ?WE ARE HUGE FREAKING NERDS? in the public domain. What can we say?

Those of us who have been doing this for a long time all have one thing in common: we?ve all burned ourselves out in the past. Thus, when we all began writing at RPG Land, our number 1 rule was ?whatever you do, don?t stress yourself out over the site.? Subsequently, RPG Land wasn?t updated too often. The content was good for the most part (our traffic wouldn?t have surpassed sites that update more often if it wasn?t), but conversely, it was not uncommon to see the front page go untouched for weeks at a time.

Change is in the air.

We?re not going to get rid of the ?don?t stress out? rule, no. We all have lives, and we all know what it?s like to put too much effort into something you?re not getting paid for. But this post marks the beginning of a change of course. ?We can do better,? we tell ourselves. ?And we can do it with comparatively little effort.?

Thanks to our friend Tim Maus, changes behind the scenes will allow us to update while not even putting out half as much effort as we have been required to in the past. Updates to the index will come near-daily, instead of near-weekly.

Additionally, new features have been rolled out, as you?ve probably noticed. Among those are:

Some other features aren’t out yet, but they will be rolled out in the coming days.

The changes that we rolled out today are improvements for sure, but fear not, faithful reader, for much bigger and better things are coming down the pipeline.

As these changes are rolled out, we?re expecting our traffic to steadily increase. This increase will also put a bigger strain on our server?s resources, which will in turn put a bigger strain on our pocketbooks. We would like nothing more than to keep RPG Land ad free, however, if traffic increases as much as we?re projecting, ads might become a necessity; none of us are wealthy. The ads will be small and unobtrusive (we?ll shut down before we have to implement super-annoying ads), small in number, and relevant to RPGs. To help us keep RPG Land ad free for as long as possible, we might run donation campaigns in the future (better to go that route first if you like the site and want to keep it ad free, eh?), but whether we like it or not, ads might have to be placed on the site at some time in the indefinite future.

What you are looking at is the first step of a process that?s been in planning since last year. When all the i?s are dotted and the t?s are crossed, RPG Land will become a website unlike any other video game website in the world. Whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing is your decision to make. However, the staff are all very excited for the future, and when the future comes, we?re certain that you will be excited too.

There is one thing that will never change, though: we will always and forever keep it real.

Special thanks to?

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