What do you want from a FF fan site?

[APZonerunner]

Hey folks. So... bit of a different discussion today, but I have a question that can help us to shape the future of our sites - what do you want from a Final Fantasy fan site? What would make you visit regularly, and become an invested member? This is of large interest to us.

As you know, we've currently got three sites based around FF and Square Enix:

• Mognet Central. Hello! You're here.
• Nova Crystallis - News & Opinion surrounding the FF series.
• UFFSite - Walkthroughs, information, FAQs, and so on, for old FF games.

Now, UFFSite is old. It doesn't contain detailed information for any FF past FF10 - the site is 14 years old, and out of date. One thing we're really keen to do is bring UFFSite bang up to date, because it's still very popular and useful for walkthroughs of old FF games. I imagine most of you have arrived here via Nova Crystallis - when you see a badge on somebody's profile that says UFFSite veteran, it's to show they were on the old, old forums all those years ago. Nova Crystallis is doing very well with news, and we have no plans to significantly adjust the focus of that site.

In the case of UFFSite, what we've been considering is a take on the Wiki. We know, the FF Wikia exists, but we're pondering putting in similar systems - user edits, user accounts, and user progression that leads towards profile unlocks and being entered for prize draws provided by our friends at Square Enix. Basically, contributing would earn you standing in the community; we'd build in systems, like trophies on Mognet, and this stuff would also link back into your Mognet profile, too.

My question: Do you all like this idea? Would you be interested in participating in editing pages, getting involved in a wiki-style user-generated-content system? Or not? We don't want to waste time building something that won't be used, and you guys and gals, our community, are the front line of that. So, yes - opinions needed!

What's your dream fan site? What sort of features would it have? Positive or negative, I please ask you try to reply to this (and there'll be a small trophy in it for all who do) in order to help us. Any and all thoughts welcome.

Thanks all!

 

[LeonBlade]

I think the idea of a fan site for Final Fantasy encompasses the entire brand not not any single game, the possibility of submitting UGC sounds appealing. I like the idea of submitting your own stories, art, music, etc based on Final Fantasy itself. You could also still submit things like what the site currently has as well, it would all fall in line with the idea of a fan driven Final Fantasy website.

One of the big things is what you do to keep users coming back, even if they're not engaging in creating their own content. What would drive people to come to the site every day even multiple times a day. The discussion on the forums here always brings me to check many times to see what people are posting, that's the sort of reaction I'd like a fansite to invoke; giving you a reason to always check it out.

I'd like to know a little more about your thoughts for this Wiki system and what sort of content you expect to be posted.

 

[yeah_93]

Well, I think the most important thing is that the site has an active community. So who's going to do all that stuff? I used to edit stuff for the FF Wikia, and it takes some dedicated users and a large community.

As for a fan site, well, as longs as it contains news of the franchise and little else, I'm good. That it doesn't look to amateurish. Opinion articles are fine, but stuff like fan art or fan fiction are not.

 

[LeonBlade]

Well, I think the most important thing is that the site has an active community. So who's going to do all that stuff? I used to edit stuff for the FF Wikia, and it takes some dedicated users and a large community.

As for a fan site, well, as longs as it contains news of the franchise and little else, I'm good. That it doesn't look to amateurish. Opinion articles are fine, but stuff like fan art or fan fiction are not.

You don't like fan art? Isn't that the point of a fan site, to show your love for whatever the fan site is about? Not that I'm against not having it, just wondering is all.

 

[APZonerunner]

These kinds of answers and debates - about things like fan art, yes or no, are exactly the kind of questions we're curious about opinion on.

In terms of ideas for the wiki-style structure, essentially it'd be this: UFF would continue to have walkthrough style pages for each of the FFs. I envision us opening them up to public editing - if the FF8 weapons page is incorrect, or empty, for instance, you could hop in and edit it to keep that information correct and well-presented. Doing this would earn you EXP, which would feed into a profile level. As well as staff-picked mods, higher-level users would be able to approve changes and moderate submissions by other users, that sort of thing. The EXP leveling up and things could also be used for rewards, competitions, all that stuff. It'd also be linked to Mognet profiles in various ways.

In addition to the walkthroughs, and things like character bios, plot summaries and whatever else, we could also have sections for fanmade stuff - and there, we could have space for Music Videos, Fan Art, Fan Fiction and so on...

This is just a vague kernel of an idea, but it's one that's been growing for a while. The key, of course , is that we need to make sure people would actually want to participate in such a thing, and if any of the idea could be improved to make you guys more likely to participate - or indeed if the idea simply doesn't work, we want to hear it...!

PS: Will add a trophy for participating in this thread tomorrow, so people should start to see it pop then.

 

[Squirrel Emperor]

In the past, Final Fantasy sites were very active because of variety of reasons. Latest info, news, screen shots, artwork, trailers, music, game tips, discussions. That's where you would go to get the latest information.

But then the Internet evolved.

If you're looking for screen shots and artwork, you use google image search.
If you're looking for trailers and music, you use Youtube.
If you're looking for game tips and walk thoughs, you use GameFAQ or Youtube.
If you're looking for discussions, you're going to go to a active site like NeoGAF or GameFAQ.
If you're looking for general information of the game, you're going to go straight to Final Fantasy Wikia.

These things have hurt the activity of fan sites throughout the years and have made them many of them dead. Of course, Square Enix is to blame for things as well as the company just isn't what they used to be.

But that's your competition and I think you have to fight fire with fire with them. Making a fan site really active in this day and age is not going to be an easy thing to do.

One thing I've found annoying throughout the years was the difficulty of finding all news for a single game. It would be scattered all over the place. As the years go by, that piece of news would get harder and harder to find. You also have little bits and pieces of stuff scattered all over the place that a site may never report on too or get translated. That's where I came up with the idea of doing monthly news compilations threads when I was a news reporter/site manager at FXN. Basically, all news for that month would be compiled into the first post. The point was to make all news easy to find so that you didn't have to spend time looking for it. It was about your convenience.

 

[BladeRunner]

I don't want to be negative but I'm not sure if there's a point in making a site like that. I mean, there's already FF wikia for information about plot, characters, mechanics, walktroughs, etc. and all the info there is pretty much as extensive as you can get. Unless you guys have some ideas that would make your site and its content somehow better than what FF Wikia already has.

And about fanmade stuff, do you see it as something like deviantart but only FF-oriented? Might be interesting.

 

[APZonerunner]

I don't want to be negative but I'm not sure if there's a point in making a site like that. I mean, there's already FF wikia for information about plot, characters, mechanics, walktroughs, etc. and all the info there is pretty much as extensive as you can get. Unless you guys have some ideas that would make your site and its content somehow better than what FF Wikia already has.

And about fanmade stuff, do you see it as something like deviantart but only FF-oriented? Might be interesting.

Nah, not at all negative. This is in fact a really good question, so thank you for asking. It's in my eyes a really key point to clarify.

So - what's the point? Primarily, I think this: I don't think that the FF Wikia should run unrivaled. The FF Wikia is a fantastic source of information, but it has its downsides. The way wikia as a website is constructed is a flat, leadership-free structure. That's actually brilliant for some things, but less good for others. One of the key problems with Wikia as a site is that it has no power structure behind it other than the wider wikia staff, who frankly do not give the remotest damn about the ins-and-outs and granular affairs of one wikia for one franchise or project.

While I can't really reveal much of the content of discussions, I can reveal that part of our desire to build something to at least offer an alternative to wikia comes from our conversations with Square Enix. It's very difficult for them, if not impossible, to interface with wikia. If we offer a wikia alternative with a similar-sized community, one thing we would expect to do would be to act as a medium between them and the people building out content and the like on the site - our higher-end, most-dedicated users.

This would lead to a few things; we'd be able to offer regular competitions and prizes to the top contributors thanks to SE. Through prizes and unique opportunities facilitated in part by Square, we'd be able to incentivize and reward participation in the content-editing and creation community with real things.

There's also ideas like the opportunity for site-wide Q&As with development staff, where we crowd-source questions and then put the top-rated questions to people we already interview on a semi regular basis like Yoshinori Kitase, Shinji Hashimoto, Naoki Yoshida, Tetsuya Nomura, and so on. This level of interaction with the company the wikia cannot establish without a centralized leadership, which will likely never exist. In that sense, we feel we have a strong basis for building something that rivals them, but something that is also definitively different to what they offer. To put it another way, we can combine the sort of access only the press get, thanks to RPG Site and the like, with the passion fans have. I think this is potentially very powerful.

Beyond that point, the other advantage I feel we'd have would be in the breadth of what we can do. Wikia is pretty strictly designed around the wikimedia commons software, which is excellent. Already, though, if we were to rebuild UFF in the image a wiki-style site, we would have an advantage - and you're looking at it. Mognet is a fantastic example of something that could never exist in this sort of format on Wikia, and, again, we feel this gives us an advantage.

However, we are absolutely interested in hearing if you guys don't think that'd work. We don't claim to be the all-seeing eye, and as @Squirrel Emperor points out, a fan site in the modern age is no simple proposition - which is why we're asking you guys. Part of what drives the wiki-style idea is the philosophy that the only way to find a smart route for a popular modern fan site is through co-operation at all levels of the fanbase, not just the silly top-flight webmaster Illuminati, which is how things used to work. (As ridiculous as it sounds, that's true - I've been doing this for a decade.)

Regarding fan-made stuff, I envision in any user-generated content based site a healthy section for fan-created stuff where people can upload, rate, critique and comment anything that other members of the fan community choose to create and upload. This is an idea that on a whole I have less strong feeling on, though; I'd be looking for outside opinion heavily.

 

[yeah_93]

Those ideas are interesting and sound really good on paper - let's hope it translates well in practice.

 

[Kaii]

I don't want to be negative but I'm not sure if there's a point in making a site like that. I mean, there's already FF wikia for information about plot, characters, mechanics, walktroughs, etc. and all the info there is pretty much as extensive as you can get. Unless you guys have some ideas that would make your site and its content somehow better than what FF Wikia already has.

That is exactly why thinking of the new fansite as just a Wiki is problematic. A Wiki is an unbiased repository of facts. There are many places you can go online to get those facts, so we've got to be more than that. What's always frustrated me about Wikias and places like TV Tropes is that it's tough to gauge fan opinion -- you have to infer based on sales, scores, critical reception, controversies, etc. All of the discussion kind of happens behind the scenes, but the discussion is mostly about getting the facts right.

But the interesting discussion is the stuff that's happening right here -- speculations based on trailers, disagreements about what we love and hate, and play-styles, advice and tips. It would be cool if we could do a Wikia with some "Live" categories, that is, categories that are constantly changing and growing. For example, a "Controversies" section that has two or more sides of a debate where you can see a quantitative measure of both camps (like a poll or up/down votes) as well as comments and discussion. Or for example, I've always been disappointed by the "Boss" sections of walkthroughs which usually only offer one approach to a boss. We could have people put up different strategies that have worked for them, or party/equipment/item combos that have worked well for them. The best ones could be unvoted to the top.

The tl;dr version of my suggestions: Subjective content (discussion, debate, and gaming strategy) in additional to the sort of traditional objective content (walkthroughs, character bios, etc.). Quantitative (polls, up/down votes) and qualitative (embedded comments and links to the forums) feedback for the subjective content.

 

[BladeRunner]

Okay guys, I think you convinced me. Your ideas may actually work if you manage to pull them through. You will need to draw a large community to support this site and keep it alive.

 

[masterlobo]

I don't think another wiki would be a good idea considering how big the existing one already is (15,979 pages). And even then, their MMO content is kinda lackluster at times.

Or maybe I'm not fully convinced because...what would be different? What value would we offer?

Anyways, if you guys end up doing it I might end up helping anyway

As for new ideas...I'm not sure if the active community would be big enough for something like a 'Let's play club'. The subreddit attempted it, but it wasn't as successful for some reasons like lack of exposure and ambitious timeframes. A game a month. And you know FF's are no small games...plus people also have to live their own lives, they can't commit to finishing a 40hr rpg per month!

It's cool for a number of reasons, you get to share your findings, screenshots, anecdotes, etc., you help people who get stuck or get help from community, and it can motivate people to play titles they haven't before, specially the older FFs. Or maybe even the MMOs. It needs to be a community effort though, so a reasonable amount of people would need to be interested in the idea.