You’ll find my official campaign thread on the Eve forums here and my general campaign site is here.

Vote early, vote often and tell your friends. Voting is open from today through to the 19th of May.

Thank you for your support.

Now clearly I have a horse in this race as a games designer who blogs and so you should definitely be listening to me. It’s posited that there are 3 kinds of design blog (Scott Jennings adds a fourth in the comments):

1. Ivory tower theoreticians
2. Enthusiastic amateurs
3. Guys who know what they’re doing and show a good example

(Scott’s fourth category was ‘Guys who know what they’re doing but prefer to spew bile becasue it’s more entertaining than playing nicely”).

For what it’s worth the blogs I read regularly are all linked in the sidebar to the right and the vast majority of them are in category 3 with a few of Lum’s category 4s for the slow news days and you should read them too.

Once you’ve visited here of course.

So as you all know by now, I’m off to pastures new. I’ll be leaving GOA on Friday and getting everything packed up to go to Germany next week. Over the past five years at GOA, I’ve filled a variety of roles and experienced some real highs and lows along the way. There have been disasters and triumphs and each of them has taught me something new and important. I would have learned a lot of those lessons in a different way if I’d had the choice but, you take what you’re given and make the best of it.

A lot of people have asked me for inside dirt and, while there are a lot of bodies buried in the past, I’m going to leave them there. There are times and places for that kind of thing and unless you’re buying the drinks you probably won’t get to hear about it.

There is something that I do want to air in public however and that is a heartfelt shout-out to some of the people who really deserve a lot of credit for the roles they played in the communities of both DAoC and WAR. All of these people made my job either easier or significantly more pleasant. I’m not going to include my colleagues at GOA or comrades-in-arms over at Mythic in this (although there are certainly a lot of those who deserve just as much credit) as this is mostly about the players and the guys within the community, I’m also going to apologise in advance if I missed anyone out, my memory is notoriously leaky and is mostly filled with useless facts rather than actually important stuff. So here they are in no particular order, my community heroes:

• Garthilk of WHA, could not have tried harder to help us out in building the community for WAR, right from the start of the beta.
• Jupitus of Freddyshouse. As a guild leader of Phoenix Legion and then an admin on FH, he has been a part of our community efforts from the early days of DAoC. The help he has given us is literally incalculable.
• Morg from Only-WAR. A very enthusiastic fansite admin, even though the EU wasn’t really represented in his users, he still came through for us a few times.
• Beibhinn from the VN boards. <3 <3 <3!
• Fahran and Cranmer from WAR-RVR. Both of these guys worked hard with us to shape the community for WAR, Fahran in particular was always willing to help out with collaborations.
• Flimgoblin. As a DAoC E&E, then as one of the most enthusiastic beta testers for WAR, his feedback has been instrumental.
• Nate. A DAoC veteran who did a lot of excellent and much appreciated work in the WAR beta, organising events, presenting detailed feedback and generally being a great commentator.
• Arbitrary. Admin of the Book of Grudges blog (which is now being updated again, yay!) Someone who was one of the first bloggers to run an EU centric WAR site and helped a lot with raising the profile of our community work.
• Mehuge, Kroy, Esraymuk and Roo for being major points of feedback in the WAR beta as well as pivotal leaders in the community both before and after launch.
• Svartmetall, Bahumat, Chodax and the rest of the FHOT crew for keeping me smiling.

All of these people and many more that I have inevitably missed through being rubbish deserve my gratitude and a lot of kudos for all that they did and in most cases continue to do.

So one more piece of self indulgence for me for today, we published my Archmage painting guide today on the main site and, jsut as before I have a bunch of photos left over. You can see the rest on my Flickr page.

For various reasons I’m really not interested in talking too much about the circumstances of my leaving GOA, I will say that I’m going to be sad to leave some really awesome people behind and that I will be taking a lot of very good memories away with me. Anything beyond that is a matter for my exit interview and some carefully written parting emails. I will have been here nearly five years when I leave and it’s been a valuable experience every day. Not always good times but I don’t regret any of my time here.

Finally in my last blog post Belsameth asked if I had more pictures of my Grumlok miniature in progress. I forgot to upload them for ages but I finally got around to it today so here’s a gallery of all the pictures. The darker ones were taken with my digital camera at home while the brighter ones were taken by our studio A/V guy here hence the stark difference in quality between them.

Things are happening, there are bright things on the horizon and some exciting changes on the way which I’ll expand on in time. Meanwhile, read my Grumlok painting guide. I had fun writing it and I hope that people will link me up with pictures of their completed work too.

A proper update coming soon, in the meantime, I’m not dead and I still have opinions to share.

So at the weekend I was over in the UK indulging in my secret vice which happens to take place somewhere between Nottingham and Derby. Many years ago I lived in Nottingham and so I like to visit friends and my favourite stores whilst I’m there and so it was that as I was killing an afternoon before the flight home, I found myself in the Friar Lane Games Workshop store. Had a bit of a chat with the staff as you do then I browsed the books for a while. Not long after, another chap walked in and the staff did their customary greeting and sizing up routine to determine if he was a true believer or simply a confused passer-by. As it happened it was Jake Thornton – former White Dwarf editor, games developer, Fanatic Press manager and all round Nice Chap. If you cut him crossways you’ll probably find the letters of Warhammer going through him like a stick of rock. Needless to say the staff didn’t recognise him and so he and I had a bit of a reminisce and a general catching up with what had happened since I had left GW.

The accidental meeting however did remind me of possibly my favourite memory of my time in GW. We (being the games development team) had gone into Nottingham to buy reference books to use as source material. As it happened, the big Waterstones was right opposite the GW store on Friar lane in those days (this is when the Design Studio was still on Castle Boulevard and so it was only a short walk round the corner for us). On the way out we decided that we’d say hi to the guys in the store and so we crossed the road and wandered in. We had Andy Chambers, Nigel Stillman, Tuomas Pirinen, Gav Thorpe, Ian Pickstock, Warwick Kinrade, Andy Kettlewell and myself. Apart from me (who was still pretty new) all of these guys were featured multiple times with mugshots in every issue of White Dwarf, we barely had time to let the door close behind us before the over-eager red shirt came bounding up to us.

‘So’ he says, ‘Do you guys play the games then or are you looking to have a demo?’

Good times.

Don’t worry I’ll talk about computer games again soon.

I can’t imagine that any one reading this blog doesn’t fit the profile but just in case, please only answer if you are a player of computer games.

All I need you to do is to copy and paste the following questions into the comments field and add your answer to each one where relevant. You don’t need to register to take part but please don’t submit the poll multiple times.

Here are the questions:

1: Which of the following types of game related websites do you read (please delete all that do not apply)

• News sites (for example TenTonHammer, IGN, Gamespot etc)
• Community forums (for example a guild or clan forum, or general computer game discussion forums such as VN boards, F13 etc)
• Official game sites (sites operated by the developers or publishers of a game)
• I don’t read game websites

2: Do you actively seek out news and information about upcoming games that may interest you?

• I follow games I’m interested in very closely
• I check out upcoming games I’m interested in every so often to see what’s happening
• I actively avoid finding out information about games I may be interested in
• I don’t actively look for information on games I’m interested in but if a friend sends me a link then I’ll check it out.

3: Are you an MMO player?

• Yes I play multiple MMOs currently
• Yes I play one MMO currently
• Yes although I am not currently playing any MMO
• I have never played an MMO nor am I planning to do so.

4: How many MMOs have you played for more than the trial period/beta?

• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five or more
• None

5: Which would you say is your main source of information about games that interest you?

• Official game sites
• Community sites or word of mouth from friends
• News sites
• I don’t know or I don’t look for information like this

6: Which of the following would you be most likely to trust?

• A news article on a professional game news site
• A news article on the game’s official website
• A news article written and researched by a fan on a community site

7: Please indicate how trustworthy you generally find each of the following (rate from 1-5 where 1 is barely credible and 5 is an unshakeable faith).

• A news article on a news site that you do not generally read
• A news article on a news site that you read regularly
• A news article on the game’s official website
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you know personally
• A news article on a community site written by a fan that you do not know personally

8: Roughly how many of the following types of website do you read regularly (at least once a week)?

• Game forums (official or otherwise)
• News sites aimed at gamers
• News sites aimed at computer industry professionals
• Official game sites (operated by a developer or publisher)
• Blogs by gamers
• Blogs by game developers or other industry professionals

9: Please rate the following factors in your choice of game to play. Provide a rating for each of 1-5 where 1 is not a factor at all and 5 is an overwhelming factor in a game’s favour.

• Many of your friends are already playing the game or intending to do so
• Information from the official website
• Good previews/reviews in the gaming press
• Good reviews from friends
• Developer’s track record (your experiences with their previous games)
• A friendly community on fan forums

10: Finally, which of following games is the one that you are most likely to try? (delete the one that does not apply)

• A game which has received bad reviews but that is enjoyed by your friends
• A game that your friends did not enjoy but has received glowing reviews  in the press

Thanks very much if you take part in this. I’m aware that it isn’t very scientific and that my sample size is likely to be too tiny to take meaningful data from but I need some kind of rough reference at reasonably short notice.

Fear not, this doesn’t mark a return to the dark days of updates every month or so.

In the past couple of months I’ve left one country behind and relocated my home and my office to another. It’s been something of an experience. The good news is that I’m now full time on my new job without any distractions from my old one. The bad news is that there’s not much I can actually do just yet. Not that there’s nothing to do mind, oh how I wish that were true. There’s a lot of things I need to be doing – posting on community sites, sweet-talking site admins, writing news, playing nice with journalists and co-operating with my confreres across the pond. Unfortunately I can’t actually do very much of that just yet due to having to get all information double and triple checked and the need to be marching in lockstep with said confreres. This is harder than it sounds mostly because practically everything I need to know has to be filtered through a couple of people who are insanely busy and get to check their inboxes twice a day if they’re lucky. I dare say it will get better as things shake down but for now it’s an incredibly frustrating experience.