Supreme Commander Talk

Last night I was in the red zone (what I call the time period between 2:00am and whenever a sane time for waking up is) and unable to get to sleep. Ann1h1lator, leader of the National Allegiance Guild, ambushed me on GPGNet for an impromptu interview. I never thought I’d be posting an interview about myself, but here you go. Hopefully this will provide some insight into who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish with SupComTalk. I have modified the interview from its original format for spelling, grammar, punctuation, flow, etc. Basically I wanted it to match the quality of a typical blog post here, rather than reading like a chat transcript (which it originally was).

NAG: Firstly. I would like to thank Cyde Weys for taking the time to be apart of this interview.
NAG: So Cyde Weys. What inspired you to start Supcomtalk.com?

CydeWeys: Well, there’s obviously my love of the game itself. This goes back to my love of Total Annihilation, which I have fond memories of playing. I had a group of good friends in high school and we used to have regular LAN parties, and Total Annihilation was a big part of that. More recently, in college, I made some new friends, including Grokmoo, and we had a blast playing Total Annihilation together as well. This was before we even knew Supreme Commander was on the way. And of course, once we learned that Supreme Commander was on the way, we were really excited.

After Supreme Commander came out, Grokmoo started climbing the multiplayer 1v1 ladder quickly, and I was having a lot of fun playing through the campaign. I thought to myself, we should be doing something special with this game beyond just playing it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with my personal blog Cyde Weys Musings; I started that back in December. It’s been going decently, but personal blogs have a problem of lack of focus, and thus don’t tend to attract a deep readership unless you really, really work at it. So SupComTalk partly came out of a desire to run a successful blog and have a wide readership for my writing. Vanity, if you will. I’m also a newspaper columnist for my university’s newspaper, which has lots of regular readers (many more than SupComTalk, at least so far), so I’m really just into the whole writing thing. It was only natural that I’d end up spending time writing about a game that I spend so much time playing.

NAG: Excellent. It’s obvious that your heart is really in it, and you have experience in writing. How did you meet Grokmoo?

C.W: Funny you should ask that. I met him the first day of our Freshman year back in fall 2003, during the move-in period before the start of classes. He was moving into the dorm room right next to mine. I remember getting on the campus network and downloading the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had never seen before, and watching the opening sequence with the apes. It was so awesome that I basically dragged Grokmoo over from the next room and made him watch it too. And we’ve been friends ever since :-P

NAG: *laughs* what a way to meet. It’s now obvious that Supcomtalk.com is one of the most recognized Supcom fan-sites out there. What do you think helped you guys in becoming so popular?

C.W: I learned a lot about blogging in my three months of experimentation with Cyde Weys Musings before I started SupComTalk. One thing is that you have to update your content regularly, preferably multiple times a day, to really get a regular readership. Otherwise it’s just a site that people look at occasionally, rather than refreshing multiple times a day, like I do with many of the sites I read regularly (Slashdot, Fark, Digg, DailyKos, Pharyngula, Joystiq, etc.). Also, writing quality matters. Our time is more valuable than we give ourselves credit for, but we do realize it subconsciously. Even on the Internet. It’s annoying wading through forums full of misspellings, bad punctuation, and the same nonsense over and over again. It’s a low signal-to-noise ratio. The point of SupComTalk was to be a place full of good content and only good content. So if you only had ten minutes a day to spend reading about SupCom, you could spend it on SupComTalk and be guaranteed to get a good read. Whereas you could spend ten minutes wading through forums and have absolutely no intellectual enlightenment to show for it.

Oh, and are we really one of the most recognized fansites out there? You’d think we’d have more traffic if so :-P 1,000 daily visits isn’t anything to laugh at, but it could be a lot bigger.

NAG: You’re right up there! It also has a lot to do with the traffic you currently get. A lot of high ranking S.C players visit and comment regulary ;)

C.W: Well, to be fair, I have taken proactive steps towards getting acquainted with the best players.

NAG: One thing that struck me when reading your blog is that you have a great way of bringing a story to life. It’s also very obvious that you know a lot about the game [Supreme Commander]. How did you come to gain a great knowledge of this game?

C.W: I find that talking with the great players gets me great insight on SupCom strategy, which I can then write directly onto the blog. I think my apparent great knowledge of the game is really just an illusion :-P I really don’t know everything about it. For instance, I’m aware that some units can be toggled to shoot at land units or air units (but not both simultaneously), but I don’t really know which units, nor how it really works. I’ve never used Sacrificial Preparations either, so I couldn’t tell you how that works. And I beat all three of the campaigns on hard before realizing you could drag building blueprints to create multiple ones in a line. It’s a bitch queuing up fifty power generators individually, let me tell you. And I really don’t know what all of the commander and support commander upgrades are. I only discovered in the past two weeks that there even was such a thing as a tactical nuclear missile, for instance. So I would say that I don’t have a particularly great knowledge of the game.

The expert players that I talk with a lot, on the other hand, do. And I’m constantly learning more from them. As for bringing a story to life - that’s more about writing skills than anything else. And I’ve been working on my writing skills for a long, long time. I’ve just always been drawn to writing. I started obsessively reading scifi and fantasy books back in elementary school, and didn’t really stop until I got to college and ran out of time for it. And of course I’ve written a fair number of scifi short stories along the way. For me it wasn’t just about the reading. It wasn’t, “Let me read this story,” it was, “I’m reading this story, and I’m seeing some interesting elements and techniques in here that could be incorporated into my own work …” But I digress!

NAG: You’re skills show through both your personal blog and Supcomtalk.com. You have recently started sign-ups for SCT’s first Exhibition match. How did this come about and who is going to win

C.W: Hrmmm, yesterday I started SupComTalk’s first ever open thread. Basically it’s just a way to add extra posts on the site and get people commenting without actually having to expend any of my own effort with writing content. I copied the idea from other blogs and their frequently-sighted open threads. But we got some really good feedback from the open thread. One suggestion was to host our own multiplayer exhibition match, kind of like the 6-way FFAs that Unconquerable has been running. That was such a great idea that I immediately made some plans to actually do it. And whereas Unconquerable has chosen Roanoke Abyss for his large FFAs, I wanted my match to be absurdly intense. So I chose Open Palms, which is a really small map. It’s going to be insane with six players on it. I think we’ll see the first player defeated within a few minutes of the match starting. And I’ll be loving it, even if that first player to go is me. As for who’s going to win — Unconquerable might make an appearance, and if he does, my bets are on him. Otherwise, I’m betting on Grokmoo. He’s really a good player. Definitely better than I.

NAG: *laughs* Good luck to yourself and Grokmoo. Lastly, What are your plans for SCT’s future? How do you see things going from here?

C.W: Oh, I have some plans, some I can tell you about, and some I can’t. For one, I’d like to see the wiki expand and grow. It has the potential to be a really great resource, and it already has lots of content right now. But it still needs a lot more work. Of course I’d like to see more of the same content on Supreme Commander Talk, because the formula has been working well for us so far. We can always find great replays of matches between top-ranked players to talk about. And the site logs show that people love those posts more than any other. Any random replay we post is downloaded about 100 times, so someone is watching them! Also, I think we have a lot more work to do in profiling the different competitive multiplayer maps. There’s lots of general strategy out there, but not many strategies for specific maps. This is a shame, because a lot of what determines the outcomes in many matches is how well the player plays to the map, rather than how good they are overall. One final thing: you’ll notice that I started running ads on the site recently. I’m just trying to recoup my hosting costs, which aren’t trivial. Once I recoup those costs, I guess I can just start divvying up the remaining profits between the active writers. If we become popular enough, I’d eventually like to be able to pay people by the post to write for us. So we are more monetized than other Supreme Commander fansites, but we’re certainly not getting rich off it or anything (nor are we even making close to a minimum wage).

NAG: Sounds like SCT has a bright future, and I’m glad NAG and everyone else who frequents SCT has the opportunity to be apart of this growing site.

C.W: I sure hope it has a bright future. Neither I nor Grokmoo plan on quitting any time soon. I don’t ever see myself making serious money off of this. But it’s fun, so I’ll keep doing it.

NAG: Excellent. Thank you Cyde Weys and keep up the good work!

C.W: Nice talking with you. See you around.
C.W: In battle >:-D

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 2:12 pm by Cyde Weys and is filed under Interviews, Meta. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.