Contributoring writers desperately needed
In case you haven’t noticed, this site has been a bit barren of late. There’s good reason for that. I just started my job today and Grokmoo is starting his job tomorrow, and as a result, the amount of time we have available to write about the game (let alone play it) has plummeted. This isn’t the end of SupComTalk, mind you, but we’d be dishonest if we tried to pretend that everything would keep on going as they did during those halcyon days of college and uninterrupted summer break.
So, yet again, I’m putting out a desperate call for more contributors. Grokmoo and I can’t hold the fort down alone anymore. Really, the only qualifications are that you enjoy playing Supreme Commander and that you are a good writer. You don’t have to be an excellent player (heh, I’m not!), much like how many sportscasters were never themselves very good at the sport they report on. Writing about something and doing something are different but related skills. Besides, it’s easy enough to point out someone’s mistakes having the benefits of hindsight and a nice replay speed adjuster. It’s much harder to make the correct decisions in game facing all sorts of time and attention pressures; that’s what makes the top players so good. It’s not that they know about strategies that the rest of us don’t.
So, hopefully that convinces you that you, yes you, could be a writer for Surpeme Commander Talk. If you want your work to be read by a large audience, and you enjoy writing about things you like doing (and presumably one of those things you like doing is playing Supreme Commander or else you wouldn’t be reading this right now), there’s no better place. Hell, I’ll even throw in a cut of the incredibly meager advertising revenues if that’s what it takes (hooray for finally breaking even on the server hosting; you damn gamers never click on any ads).
So, please head on over to the Write for us page if you’re interested and get in touch with me. I’ll set you up with a contributor account, which lets you write posts but not make them live on the site. If your work is good, I’ll publish it and then I’ll upgrade you to an editor account, which means you can post directly to the front page, and thus the circle of life is completed, and Supreme Commander Talk lives on.
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Do you need any contributoring proofreaders too? Just joking, look, I understand being busy, jobs freaking suck. This week I’m trying to get a rank between 2200 and 2000 so I can play in the tourney, but with work and other crap (not to mention a 3090 rank as of now), that probably won’t even happen.
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 pm
I might send something in if I can think of anything to write about, but I’m not exactly the best SupComm player in the world.
On the bright side, I did click on a few ads for you after reading that =P
July 24th, 2007 at 1:09 am
I could write a Fields of Isis strategy guide for you.
I have the best strategy.
July 24th, 2007 at 1:53 am
I just got done sending in a piece for you to take a look at it. It’s on a topic that I haven’t heard too much about in my experiences, so I figured it would be a good idea to throw it out there.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:55 am
it may be slow and sad now, but sooner or later the expansion will come out and breathe new life into all SupCom sites.
July 24th, 2007 at 4:05 am
there are ads on this page?
July 24th, 2007 at 4:48 am
Yeah, there’s a few by Google, but Adblock Plus keeps them away just fine.
“it may be slow and sad now, but sooner or later the expansion will come out and breathe new life into all SupCom sites.” … The game’s only been out for six months. It shouldn’t be going slow at all given how relatively new it is. In theory, of course. I guess that’s what happens when a game tries something totally different while also having steep computer requirements.
I may get back into the game when FA drops, but odds are I won’t. UT3 comes out at the same time and I will probably be playing the hell out of that. I’d like to keep writing for this site (I actually had a list of potential topics in my global todo.txt) but as I don’t actually play the game anymore it seems like a bad idea to do so. ^___^
Here’s a few of the topics I had listed (pretty sure there were more at some point but it got pruned as I started playing less and less):
* Redefining rushing. — This is obsolete now; it was for versions prior to v3251. I actually had it fully drafted out but didn’t go further with it. This was basically to try to convince all those people who cried about “rushing” to stop it because it was actually just proper T1 play.
* Adjacency bonuses… Are they worth it? — Like veterancy, is adjacency broken? The bonuses aren’t very significant at all. For example, at T1 the mass you save gets you ONE free Mantis for every 40 produced when a factory is next to an extractor. 40:1 is pretty worthless. Harbingers are 20:1 but that’s still not worth it. Also, many times setting up the bonus hurts you: generators next to shields, for instance, means you lose valuable space under the shield… all to save 12 energy per second.
* Is SupCom totally flawed in design? — This was more accurate prior to v3251 but still fits for the most part. T1/T2 don’t matter much; once you’re at T3 most things becomes obsolete, map expansion being one of them. Once at T3 it’s probably easier to turtle and spam economy than actually do anything. This brings SupCom’s supposed EPIC SCALE down to a few big game enders.
* The usual mass fabs are dumb rant goes here. They pretty much break the game. End of story.
July 24th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
To clarify, I have always thought that SupCom will gather more players as time goes on, and that it will still feel cutting edge four or five years from now. Yes, I know how far away that is in the gaming world.
I dont think that the statistically average gamer has the required computer to play this game. I suppose a good way to check would be to look at the periodic surveys done on Steam.
But if gamers buy faster and faster computers, as they always have, GPG might be able to slowly enlarge the SupCom player base with continued marketing (which always felt very weak to me). People still play counter-strike now, nearly four years after its release, and it was not a cutting-edge game at that time. GPG will just have to convince people that it is not inferior to games that are released after it.
I personally feel that i will keep SupCOm through my next two computers, which could last me more than a few years.
T2A’: your comments are very valid, but i dont feel that they are the reason most people dont play or know about SupCom. In the big picture, those are nitpicky details unless you throw yourself into the ranked games. The majority of SupCom players play single-player, not online. under those circumstances, those problems tend not to be noticed. In the big picture, claiming that mass fabs “break the game” sounds very melodramatic. Nobody is tearing their hair out, playing the campaign, saying, “WTF these mass fabs are so efficient, it isnt even fun beating the AI” well, i dont think its very fun beating the AI anyway but that is another set of reasons.
July 24th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
I’m not a good writer :P
July 24th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
I would love to write for you, I’m a student studying for my masters in English with creative writing and I love Supreme Commander, the perfect combination to write on this site… almost. The only fly in the ointment being that I’m not a competitive player, I don’t know a lot about ranked stratagems or the like. I’m afraid to say I’m one of those players that ranked people seem to despise, you know, the kind that like to play custom games with their friends instead of worrying that I’ve lost a game because I built an air factory too early. What do you think Cyde Weys? Do I have a shot?
July 24th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
CS 1.6 has been played for a long, long time. It’s not because of marketing or anything Valve did aside from making the game. CS is played because people find it fun and it doesn’t require anything but a $300 computer to run. There’s little GPG can do to make their games become truly accepted in the community; that happens when players tell other players about it and the community keeps growing. SupCom’s is shrinking and has been doing so since February. I suppose FA will cause a resurgence for awhile, but ultimately SupCom will remain a niche game, especially with SC2 coming some time in the future. Five years from now I suspect SupCom2 will be out and enjoyed by that niche of players while most everyone who plays RTS will be playing SC2 or the Warcraft IV.
Besides, those points of mine were potential articles, not reasons that people don’t play. People who don’t play do so because it’s not fun (in the majority sense) and the computer requirements are too steep. One (or both) of those is always why games aren’t played. Look at Q4. id pimped the hell out of it and its launch was highly anticipated, but no one plays the game because it’s not fun. Now, getting commercials on TV and having the game at big-name LANs does help, in theory, but even that didn’t help Q4. Q3? Fun and easy on the computer, so people play it. UT2004? Not fun, so people don’t play it. UT? Fun and easy on the computer, so people play it. It’s common sense.
July 24th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
If only everyone knew how to build their own computer. For between 4 and 500 USD you can easily get a computer that could handle SupCom, obviously not including a monitor. I almost don’t think hardware requirements are a very legitimate excuse for SupCom’s dwindling numbers (by the way, I haven’t actually seen any statistics, and I find the community to be large enough for my interests), especially with the patch or patches that made stuff run better.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Hah, cydeweys, what you do for a living?
July 24th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
@Baddox - For a game to have truly mass appeal, such as WoW, CS or Starcraft, it needs to be able to run well on the sort of stock computer that a family typically buys. That’s not the case for Supreme Commander at the moment. Sure, I’ve built my own computer that runs Supreme Commander alright (but not well), for about AU$1000, but for the vast majority of under-18s, that’s not an option, so they have to use their family’s computer.
July 24th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
That is true in, I’m 17 and have a top notch pc that runs supreme commander on full with a good fps, but I happen to have spent all my money on it, then it blew up 6 months later, the refund given me the money to have the pc I have (I love the fact that I got 180 pound for a card that is worth 100 now, giving me the money to get an 8800) but I don’t know anyone personally under 18 that has a high end pc, they all have lame family computers/laptops. Oh sorry about my big brag there but I had too :P
July 25th, 2007 at 1:32 am
I’ve had a decent to high-end pc (for its time) since I was 16, which now that I think about it, was before I had a job, so I must have just saved up gift money and such. I think SupCom should only appeal to the somewhat hardcore gamer who will probably already have a good PC. I don’t see any problem with SupCom not having as huge of a community as, say, World of Warcraft, which everyone knows is the Mother Whore of PC games. McDonald’s sells billions of burgers, but any chef would scoff at the idea of using sales to gauge the quality of food.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:10 am
“I think SupCom should only appeal to the somewhat hardcore gamer who will probably already have a good PC.” … If you think that than you cannot really complain about the small size of the community. I’m not saying SupCom should have six million players like WoW, but the player base is still very limited no matter how you look at it. And even then, as small as the player base is, at least half of it doesn’t go online, and probably 30% or more of the half that does is really, really bad at it. That’s not very much potential for good games at all.
All I’m saying is a game needs to be accessible to do well on a large scale. On all fronts, SupCom is not accessible in any manner. Even if you’ve got a really nice computer and have played RTS games before, there’s still a huge learning curve due to the game being so different from others. That’s one of the reasons UT2004 failed to impress the masses long term — there’s just too much to learn compared to your average “hop in the server and start shooting stuff” FPS. But I wrote all about that before.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Sounds like I have something to do now. I’ve always been a min/max-er and now I have an outlet for my nerditude. Expect great things from me. You heard it first here.
August 1st, 2007 at 8:33 am
I would contribute to be a writer if required, get in touch with me via the email supplied with this post.
Check out my website to see some of the other items ive posted, and if you guys like it, i’d be grateful to help out.
AJ