4/29/2013 -
-A lot has actually been going on behind the scenes that most of you won't be aware of.
-We've been working on a new website on and off for a long time now. The plan was to go from PostNuke (circa 2004) to a more up to date service that is actually supported still.
-We're bringing the look and theme over to a new website, and we have stuff completely functional for a while now, including porting the forums over. We've been tinkering with the theme for a while.
-Our current website was working fine and we switched to a new server, so that made things faster. Thus, we didn't feel any rush to push it out.
-Back in January, Tbone started following the Oculus Rift, a new virtual reality headset with head tracking. It's pretty sick, if you haven't checked it out, yet.
-It was best at CES and GDC, and it has gained a lot of development attention from every big name out there. TF2 is already working with the Oculus Rift, and Valve is already looking heavily at it.
-A lot people are making drivers for games to make them compatible with the Rift.
-Release is slated, tentatively, sort of for either Summer or Winter 2014. It's not a console device or a computer; it's a peripheral that works with your current computer.
-Price range is currently about $200-$300 in order to keep it mainstream.
-They raised $2.5 million to send out prototype developer kits with Beta Rifts, and Tbone was able to test it out. If you haven't seen his write-up, find it in the main Oculus Rift thread.
-The potential it has in end-gaming is incredible, and Tbone wanted to see if FA was interested. Where was our role in this? Is this something we could get into on the ground level?
-Behind the scenes, Tbone was talking in the Staff forums of the direction he wanted to go to in the next year, and he had posted that same thread in the Staff forums before opening it up to everyone.
-All of the responses have been very positive towards incorporating the Rift into the future of the guild.
-Essentially, we would become the pioneers of the new generation of gaming.
-Tbone is embedded into that community and is already making a name for himself there, as well as learning the who's who of the groups on Reddit and the Oculus forums.
-Tbone wants FA to be the first-round group who gives direct feedback to developers, including Teamspeak functionalities and how immersive somethings feel vs. not.
-We essentially want to be the molders who help it succeed.
-That would mean a lot of changes to some of our core values, including staying in one game only. We've always been very tight-knit and a closed community.
-However, when Tbone sees our VR community, it would be very open with game developers and Rift guys who stop by with people who play RPG's and FPS's and everything else in between.
-It would be our job to find to find people who have a similar mindset. Everyone who has a Rift could play together, and they could all sort of be on the same wavelength in terms of gameplay.
-We would be a place where other VR gamers could find VR gamers.
-We would have different tiers of members (Visitors, Tier 1, Tier 2, etc.)
-If a person actually wanted in the guild, they would simply fill out an application. It'd be a lot lower threshold to get in now than it is now.
-If an MMO were to come out that supported the Rift, we would have different chapters of the guild there with a more specific entry level with a possible interview if the Chapter Leader decided to.
-These specifics are hardly ironed out, and this is Day 0. We're trying to figure out what works and what doesn't, and this is simply Tbone's initial idea. Much of this will evolve more as we go along.
-Sared thought it would be a good idea to do a streaming thing, archiving everything we're doing to make VR gaming happen. A lot of video content of us experimenting in different games, what's cool, what's not, what's (not) going right, etc.
-Big picture idea: Smite has a 24/7 Twitch TV channel, DJ's pulling 3 hour shifts. That's too much now, but a weekly or a bi-weekly journalistic take on the game's we're playing with the Rift.
-We've recruited with the intent on cultivating a group of people that "figure shit out" so that we can share our discoveries with the world.
-****Tbone is giving a preview for the new FA website****
-While we are still developing this, SWTOR is going to still be our main game, and EVE will gain some support.
-Main concern is cross-poaching, competing idealogies between two games. We're simply giving options. There should be no "LOL SWTOR is WoW with lightsabers" vs. "LOL EVE is Speadsheets Online"
-We're looking for ideas, feedback, etc. with committees based on what people replied with and where they naturally fit.
-Website, forums, recruitment, social media aggregation/Furious TV are just some of the few.
-If you'd like to help out in one category you'd be good at, feel free to say something.
-Our deadline is, at the latest, Spring 2014 in anticipation of all of this.
-This is a weird concept because we're developing a community around a device we don't even have access to right now.
-Revalis is planning on getting one through work, and could work on some FA-specific UNITY stuff.
-Tbone has very very limited access to a Rift in Washington, DC. Tbone wants a few of us to have it now so that we can develop relationships with the developers now and so we can give feedback to the Devs now.
-So far, there haven't been any guilds stepping up to the plate to say that they want to be a VR only guild.
-The big thing is is that its not consumer ready, and access to the Dev kits is very very limited, so actually "testing out the RIFT isn't going to happen" anytime soon.
-Instead, we're mainly going to set up the community so that we can give feedback from an online, community aspect with an interactive, immersive point of view.
-We're not going to contact them until we have a significant structure set up.
-Talk to Tbone if you have any specific questions.
Veterans Day
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