Announcements
An open discussion about the server's future - July 14th, 2009
Is the WCS/ZM server a sinking ship? Has it already sunk? What will it take to save/restore it (assuming it is worth saving/restoring)? What other avenues, if any, should Team LA consider exploring?
Brutal honesty only.
It's that time of year again... - June 9th, 2009
Another year has gone by and we're still around to celebrate our second anniversary! Reiterating something I said last year, it truly is a great feeling seeing something that you have put a lot of hard work into still around after two years providing fun and excitement for everyone. Incredible thanks and appreciation go out to the players and community members who have made this past year memorable and a lot of fun.
We have been blessed with the amount of people who frequented the server in the past years, but recently the server has been experiencing its worst period of inactivity in 24 months. Although it is not certain when this period of inactivity will be over, we are hopeful that more people will start reappearing as summer rolls in and everyone can get back to enjoying the company of each other. When the server is not the most active, I strongly urge everyone to at least be active on the forums. Sporadic posts on the forums are still better than losing all connection with each other by not playing in the server anymore.
For a long while now I've mentioned how I would like to have a new website design, but nothing ever came out of it. However, in the past two months the idea really took off and the idea of a new website design was feasible thanks to the hard work of everyone's favorite female player and graphic designer extraordinaire: deliciouslydown! I hope to have a full integration of the forums with that look in the future, but right now what you see is what you get. If you were linked to this post via the forums, head over to our main home page at http://www.cssteamla.com to see our new home page in action. Next time you see down, make sure you tell her how awesome it looks!
I hope to make changes to Team LA's member structure to accommodate more people, delegate some responsibilities, and promote community involvement. Though until Tez and I go over our ideas together and decide what is acceptable, I can't share all hopes or ideas we have yet. If you have any ideas that you think would benefit and are worth mentioning (no map/race/skills ideas) then shoot me a PM and I'll include it to the outline that Tez and I will discuss later this week. I really hope to share some hopefully new and exciting ideas when this happens!
I am sorry that we are not able to announce anything more than our totally awesome new website on our two year anniversary. Regardless, I would like to express my thanks again to everyone who has stuck around this second year. It's really great to see people who were around for our first year still around to celebrate today. Thank you all, and happy birthday Team [LA]!
Also, everyone swing by the contests and events forum for info about our new Tetris contest!
Game Changing Insight from Ze Frank - May 19th, 2009
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“Oh you want to trade in letters? That’s easy. Place your unwanted tiles face down, then select your new tiles from the bag, and then place your unwanted tiles back in the bag.”
As you can imagine, I was pretty annoying, and I’d get frustrated easily when people take too long for their turn, or started chit-chatting on the side, or when they would inevitably gang up on me. When I’d get frustrated, I’d leave, I’d quit—which is certainly one way to change a game… if you want no one to like you.
I was a spoil-sport. The game theorists say that we dislike spoil-sports even more than we dislike cheaters, because at least cheaters are still in the game, they still pretend the boundaries of the game are real by trying to hide their cheating.
I would leave because I was focused on the wrong thing. These games were social, and because I was bad at being social, I thought that by knowing the rules really well I could level the social playing field. Knowing the correct way to trade in your tiles is infinitely easier than making the girl next to you laugh, but that’s why you’re playing the game, isn’t it?
That’s what I really didn’t get as a child. The rules are just there to carve out a potential space, but it’s what happens in that potential space that really matters. It’s all about the taking too long for a turn, the chit chat on the side, and the ganging up on me; it’s about what it means to be social.
Online in the past few years there’s been this explosion in social applications, platforms, and services, and each one has its own rule set and each one carves out its own potential space. … But so often when you go to these places you find people arguing about the rules of how to potentially do something. It can feel like we built a million baseball fields, and we become so obsessed in how to build them, that sometimes we forget to play the game.
When I think about game changing, I don’t really think about what I do, which is basically to build potential spaces. I think about some of the people who occupy these spaces—the people that shift the focus away from the rules and towards genuine human experience; the people who use these platforms … to keep on trying to figure out what it really means—to be social.