What's the half-life of Arcanium?

I was just wondering, do the TA site creators have any plans/desires to do another site?

I liked the way TA was put together, and found it more useful than the typical game sites. Also, being able to include a successful, active forum on the site seems to be beyond many fansites. I think it'd be a shame if TA turned out to be the only one you run.

Sorry if you've done other sites of which I am unaware, but they don't let me out much :grin:

Another, related question - what's the professional status of you guys? I'm in the business and was curious.

 

Calis runs a Planescape site. check the links.

 

Not me. The reason Monkeypunch, Xerophyte and I started this site varies for each of us. For me, it was because I liked running that Planescape site Jinxed mentioned. I thought it went pretty well, but I also learned a lot from that site, so I wanted to do another fansite and see how good I could make it now that I knew a little more and was a little more aware of the pitfalls involved, and Arcanum looked like a great game to get excited about.
I think I could learn from the mistakes I (and other staff members) have made with T-A and make an even better fansite for another game, but personally, I just don't have the energy to get involved in a game community the way I have with Torment and Arcanum. Also, the current state of the online advertising market (and the resulting troubles for online game site networks) makes it hard to run a succesful site; you keep running into limitations because of your hosts, and I'm a bit tired of that... a solution for that would be for me to turn into a gazillionaire enabling me to hire my own dedicated webserver with lots of bandwidth. Unfortunately, I'm a cheap-ass student and I can't afford the monthly $250 or so that professionally hosting a web site like this would cost.

So this site is probably the last you'll see of me in the fan site scene. Fear not though, I'll still be around to take care of T-A. Also, I can't speak for the other staff... Stonecourier might do some stuff for Gamespy sites (he did all kinds of nifty databases for planetbaldursgate.com ), Saint P will still be working for vault13.net, and I'm sure Monkeypunch will keep on designing websites, although not necessarily gaming-related.

 

I hadn't realised the ad-funding scene was so dire. My little corner of the market is all professional funded sites (although we also had a share of crack-pot .com'ers certain they had spotted enough "revenue streams" to fund their development & hosting).

Hosting costs suck, don't they? I want do run my own site, away from work, and it now looks like my best option is to host from home over an ADSL link. It's £40/month for a 512Kbps link with no volume cap/charges.

Actually PAYING for a place in a server farm is way too expensive for non-profit site.

 

You'd never get those connection speeds over here in Australia, especially from Tel$tra, probably one of the few telco's in the world with a legal budget bigger than the competition regulator's (the ACCC) entire budget. I may not even be exaggerating, Telstra has profits of at least $4 billion each year...

 

Jeez, don't even get me started on the stupid "we've got an ADSL monopoly, where you gonna go if you don't like it" service attitude BT has over here.

ADSL: LOVE the technology, HATE the providers.

 

Oh, it's better than that. It's "We've got an ADSL and cable monopoly - we don't have any other ADSL competitors, and the only other cable provider (who has a 90%+ satisfaction rate, uncapped speeds and about 18 gigs a month allowed, compared to capped speeds of 64k, 3 gig limit, all for AUS$100 a month compared to $75 for the other plan - keeping in mind that these are the base plans, don't get me started on the ones with higher limits) can't cable the whole of Australia, because cable will be outdated soon and it costs too much to set up a cable network, they are losing money anyway. So take our rip-off plans or stick with 56K dial-up.