RipLab Marketing

[VibeBox]

now that cedric phillips is the content manager for scg i probably can't write for them anymore either, because (like all other people with low self-esteem) he hates me.

one of these days i'll probably do some drunk posting and that will be an ideal time to post my ranty story about why i hate cedric phillips, and the companion story "how my room mate got some modicum of revenge upon him at an Origins convention 5 years later".

but i rarely drink so that who know when that will happen.

 

[Rob Dennis]

those are kind of sad stories (people hating/feuding with other people in their local area), I'm sure this happens in DC to but I've fortunately not heard much about it if so.

I saw that the riptide account tweeted the cuesbey thread , that was nice and I appreciate it.

 

[CML]

well, there's only one way to find out...

(tweeted)

 

[CML]

it's a bummer, cedric is pretty smart and he's devoted to the game and could be an admirable emissary, if he didn't also personify a lot of the things wrong with the mtg culture. i'm more comfortable blaming wizards for shaping the culture of the game so poorly than blaming cedric for falling into these fallacies. it happens to a lot of people, after all, and i'm sure he's capable of being awesome and will maybe even succeed someday.

that being said, i will share this tale. i tried to friend cedric after i beat him in a modo ptq (1-0 lifetime!!!) and he sent me what was likely a stock message explaining that his regular account (the one he used to bitch on woo's wall about my 'insane' draws? [ed. they were insane]) was for personal use only and that i should go to his fan page. i replied that i would rather be a friend than a fan. he did not reply to that. a few months later he wrote an article explaining how sponsors' invites were a plague upon magic cards. i replied (i paraphrase) that a bigger problem was people who have lost perspective to the point where they think sponsors' invites were a plague on magic cards. he did not like that. again, fans and not friends. i shudder at that possible version of me.

 

[VibeBox]

it's a bummer, cedric is pretty smart and he's devoted to the game and could be an admirable emissary, if he didn't also personify a lot of the things wrong with the mtg culture. i'm more comfortable blaming wizards for shaping the culture of the game so poorly than blaming cedric for falling into these fallacies.

i'd like to take this opportunity to say that i find your viewpoints very refreshing, and it's one of the things that made me want to hang here. very few people are willing to talk about things like the toxic culture of the game, and WAY fewer have the insight to actually saddle wizards with their share of the blame. i see people every day on forums and such speaking with such a lack of fundamental understanding of the game, of its history, of what makes it tick.
wizards has cultivated such a short sighted and self centered attitude among their player base, and it's so hard to watch.

that's why i think this place is not only fun to be around, but could turn out to be very important. Cubes (and edh, ugh) are likely the "end game" of magic. currently the rhetoric of wizards dominates the conversation, but there are great gains to be made by purging that mindset and approaching the game with a critical eye and an objective curiosity. we can create a place where that shift forward brews, and that would be really cool

i'm sure he's capable of being awesome and will maybe even succeed someday.

i doubt it. he's extremely set in his ways. he sells himself on whatever he chooses to play and refuses to adapt. i bet he still probably plays kithkin in modern
it's a pretty common mindset among players who think they're a whole lot better theorists than they really are.

 

[VibeBox]

here, have a real banner.

 

[VibeBox]

the only cost is crediting the creator with a couple of links

http://lulztroll87.deviantart.com/
and
http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=508281

html for your convenience:

<a href="http://s1062.photobucket.com/user/VibeBox/media/riptidebanner.jpg.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i1062.photobucket.com/albums/t485/VibeBox/riptidebanner.jpg" border="0" alt=" photo riptidebanner.jpg"/></a>

 

[Jason Waddell]

Thanks Vibe! I like the image, but it gives me a bit of a weird feeling. For one, it bears striking resemblance to certain MTGS signatures. Two, it's perhaps a little too tall, and lastly I am not wild about the font. Actually, I don't know if we need text at all, but I am always into a more minimalist aesthetic.

If it's not too much hassle, would it be possible to make it without the text, and possibly a little less tall? Thanks once again!

 

[VibeBox]

i'll run the revisions by him

 

[Jason Waddell]

Thanks, oh, and sorry if my tone came off not very positive. I think it's a really nice looking image, and he stitched together the different arts rather well.

 

[Eric Chan]

I like it, too. I pretty much agree with all of Jason's points - I think the site banner needs to be really wide, but not that tall.

I'm not sure where we can give the artist credit. Unlike with forum signatures, we can't really put his name up alongside the banner. I could potentially create a new tab under the Help section, and call it Credits, where we make sure to attribute the banner art to him. It would be nestled away, and not the easiest to track down, but I hope that would be sufficient.

 

[VibeBox]

Thanks, oh, and sorry if my tone came off not very positive. I think it's a really nice looking image, and he stitched together the different arts rather well.

no worries, i don't even know this guy. he was just the first to submit a banner. if we can get a better one later on, great.

edit: lol, the guy already responded with literally "ur joking right?", lol dude can't handle a simple request for revisions.
that's why it's best to just commission someone down the line. you can have something done very well for 20 bucks, and you get an actual grown up, not some pissy 17 year old.
in the mean time i may have a crack at the banner myself. i torrented photoshop for printing cube proxies anyway, so i'm sure it can't be hard to use a blending tool ffs

 

[VibeBox]

that reminds me, we should compile info on making proxies. i've been scouring for info on it lately and there's no good centralized sources of info. just a couple of salvation threads, reddit pages, and youtubes.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I was under the impression that posting guides on making proxies was perhaps questionable territory to be in. I know other sites try to keep that stuff under wraps, so there must be a reason.

 

[Eric Chan]

Yeah, I'd rather play it safe and avoid heading into that territory. I know the salvation administrators keep a very tight rein on what they do and don't allow discussion of on their giant proxy-making thread, because it feels like they're always one post away from having Hasbro lawyers jump all over them.

 

[CML]

thanks for the kind words vibe -- i try to hang around sane people in magic, and we are legion, but it's just so depressing that wizards is happy to treat its players as poorly as they do. there's a dissertation in here about corporate culture, conservatism, stinginess, misery loving "company," etc. and i will maybe even write it soon, but jesus the pollyannaism elsewhere is depressing and of course it's insincere. happy people don't treat each other the way most mtg players do (edit: i've been guilty of this too, of course.)

the flipside is that if the culture is changed then the people will be happier. (this happened in poker ca. 2003? or so i hear.) a nice parable to this end is the guy who told me i missed a pyreheart wolf trigger back in november when such a thing was still possible. it royally infuriated me and i imagine it didn't feel great for him either. i remember saying to a friend shortly afterwards that i couldn't wait for that rules change to be repealed so everyone reverted to their sane selves (like zelda or germany/1945 or zeal or whatever). so then they switched the rules back and i played the same dude again at the legacy open here a few weeks ago. he was really nice; it was a pleasure playing him. i was forced to admit that re. my character judgment, i had been wrong (which is not something that most mtg players teach themselves to do) and it felt good to be wrong! but then i realized that wizards was more responsible than i'd previously thought for the bad vibes (sorry) from the game and god was that miserable.

i think having riptide lab as a place where we acknowledge these uncomfortable truths and revel in them (this is why, on the previous board, i was so resistant to having a codified thing of 'rules') is a reasonable goal. like i said above i could write about these topics for 100 pages and more. for example, my experiences traveling to big competitive events have shown me that a 'grinder' cannot possibly have a healthy lifestyle. but if you'll excuse me, i've gotta drive down to portland to play some modern.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Last week I made a Reddit post linking to Rob's Cuesbey thread, and that drove in some traffic. I think if we want to market this place, the best way would be for users to create some high-quality linkable threads. For example, somebody could make a "Compendium of Small-Player Draft Formats" thread, giving resources on stuff like Team Sealed, Grid Drafting, Winston Drafting, etc. Then we all contribute ideas for a couple days, get a solid thread OP and then advertise. The same thing could work with VibeBox's archetype primer idea. Create a well-written post describing an archetype from a design and player perspective, generate some discussion then post the link elsewhere.

I know we don't have a front-page for blog entries and mini-articles yet, but this could be looked at as a test run and would help for gaining exposure and traction.

As always, I'll continue to plug this place at the end of my articles.

 

[VincePendrell]

Just my 2 cents: I think that before any more serious undertaking in gathering more users, we should try to organize the threads a little, maybe adding categories for stuff like (post your cube here), (card/archetype evaluations), and whatnot. With more users, we will get more threads and eventually great threads might get lost in the shuffle (like this one, which has provided some great reads but is now renegaded to page 2).

I love the openmindedness of this community and I think that there are great things going on here, but my OCD senses are tingling for the need of more horizontal structuring before more vertical growth. I don't think we need rigidly defined categories just now, as it might cut some discussions and create some 'category localism', but yeah, I'd love to see more categories around

 

[Eric Chan]

Hey Vince, not to sound too much like a broken record, but I'm going to quote myself from this very thread:

I've been involved with a number of communities over the years, and I've found there's nothing that kills a burgeoning discussion group like splintering threads all over the place, forcing people to remember to check multiple links. As long as the volume of threads is manageable, we'd prefer to keep all the people in one place for now, which makes it easier to check for what's new. We realize that at a certain point, this approach becomes untenable, and then and only then will we create subforums and manually reassign threads around. This is a model that I've seen work well at large, thriving communities - i.e., split into subforums only as needed - so it's something I'd like to emulate. But I appreciate the comment, and I hope you understand it's something we've thought about and will continue to keep in mind.

So it's not that we haven't thought about this topic; in fact, Jason and I bring it up every now and then. But with anywhere from five to seven users online at our busiest times, we're not yet at the point where traffic is high enough that we feel splitting up our small community is necessary.

However, I will say to everyone to keep the feedback coming. This is your forum, after all, and if people would prefer to divvy things up neatly, then please let us know. Just make sure that OCD isn't the only reason for the request - after all, Jason and I both run doubles (and quadruples!) in our cubes, so that argument doesn't really strike a chord here.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I will say, I too want there to be more organization, but I think we just need to pick the right time to make the switch. It's always been a question of when. Maybe we're there? If you guys want, we can always test a subforum structure and see if it feels too empty or not. It's pretty easy to move threads around and create new forums, so we can always revert things back.

Keep in mind we currently have fewer than 50 threads, and anything that gets pushed to Page 2 has been dormant nearly two weeks. There's also a tendency for people to ignore certain subforums, and for something as small as our site it might be good not to dilute the traffic.

There's also a system of "Thread Tagging" we can implement, that is maybe a good halfway point? What do you guys think?

 

[Eric Chan]

I'm going to start adding thread tags, as a kind of compromise between subforums and a giant mishmash of thread soup. Let us know if this is good, bad, or just horribly ugly.

 

[HannesVersmissen]

I'm going to start adding thread tags, as a kind of compromise between subforums and a giant mishmash of thread soup. Let us know if this is good, bad, or just horribly ugly.

They are ... Suprising at the very least. I think it's quite usefull for browsing though (once i get used to them. maybe an hour or so)
One tidbit: Would it be possible to have them all be the same size ? that way the thread-titles line out neater. Especially SCD is an "offender" in my eyes.

 

[Eric Chan]

For your viewing pleasure, I made SCD into the longest tag instead.

No, but seriously, I'm not sure if I can force them to all be the same size, short of typing in thread tags that are all the same length. Sorry!

 

[VincePendrell]

I think it might be good enought as is. Tagging does try to improve visibility for topics, so it was definitely weird having a "hidden" tag. I think this might be enough for a while, but hey, we are here to test new ideas and see how they work. If tagging or categories start to split the community, we rebalance our configs

 

[CML]

great visual changes. magic is popular these days because it is popular; i hope that happens here too!