Time to let go?
Past
ANZGW started off as the ANZAC Guild’s forum, hosted by me. Others had delusions of grandeur, and started making ANZGW. I was ‘called in’ to help out and for the most part, supervise. We had a reasonable level of success, with most guilds at the time at least knowing the ANZAC or ANZGW name.
Following a hacking of our forums twice in one week, we moved to our own software I was developing with one of the other admins. It was about this stage that the admins associated with the site started to drop, for reasons unknown to me. Maybe I’m horrible to work with, maybe they bit off more than they can chew (anybody noticed this with a lot of PHP ‘programmers’?), but one by one all the volunteers we had stopped frequenting the site and stopped talking to the rest of us.
Sadly, this had very little impact on the progress of the site – after the hacking when we ran phpBB2, the site’s code was about 90% mine. I should correct that last statement, it had a lot of impact on the progress of the site. Seeing everybody else lose interest certainly didn’t help my interest, and I started to second guess anything I did.
ANZGW’s been through more code changes, and now it is safe to say its 100% mine (code-wise). Since I haven’t played Guild Wars for so many years, it has stopped growing in numbers, which reflects the feature I’ve been adding (or, more to the point, have not been adding)
Present
The idea of ANZGW wasn’t mine, but it became mine as I was the last standing. I’ve been thinking more and more, contemplating what could get me into the site more, as well as what sort of service/site there is a need for. From that the idea of ANZGN, or the Aus/New Zealand Gaming Network, was born.
It would be somewhat like an Aus/NZ based “myspace/facebook” site, but focusing on gaming. Add that to some decent forum software, a (again, game focused) wiki, ladder/tournament system, gaming news written using words containing a multitude of syllables, etc, and you’ve got my idea in a nutshell. There is more to it, of course, but I don’t really feel like explaining it all, as its not the point of this post so much.
Future
Is there any point to me developing such a site? Competition-wise, Ausgamers has in recent months ramped up the news it covers, as well as starting to add their own review section, while all the others have not only several contributing members but seemingly money to back them, and pre-established relationships with publishers/developers. Certainly, this is a bummer, but I enjoy a challenge.
The real issue comes from other people, not other sites/services.
While many people have said my idea is good, there is a general lack of interest. Any support for contributors has resulted in some offering content, but no designers (during ANZGW’s days, the few designers we’ve had offer services, apart from Sev, have been hopeless) or developers popping up their hand. I don’t think I want to be stuck in this cycle of sole development, design, and management of a website that could get out of hand. Without others to discuss ideas with, to criticize my code, etc, there is no desire to continue.
This gets me to the real point of my post. Do I get over myself and create ANZGN anyway, or give it all up and let somebody take ANZGN/ANZFury/ANZGW.com domains?
The problem with the latter is I need something to do. Thanks to these sites, I’ve learnt a lot…I’m fairly comfortable with PHP/MySQL, and ASP.NET(C#)/MSSQL, AJAX (framework/less), and my CSS-fu is enough to defeat the Web1/2/3 teachers at Monash to say the least. I guess if I was capable of going out and working, it wouldn’t be such a need to do something, as (hopefully) I’d feel the creativity through coding need satisfied by commercial work.
Any ideas/suggestions (or heck, job offers where I can code from home) of what I should?
