Quote Originally Posted by Jet View Post
Woh, Tachi, thx for the plug. =3

Honestly, it can be nerve-wracking running a fansite. Have thousands of players who expect flawlessness can be pretty intimidating, and I have stuff break a lot, and sometimes slow updates (I was probably 8 hours behind Mozk getting the new gear up). But I don't mind critical users AT ALL (I'm critical too!). Especially when I get a lot of support from happy players.

Here's my (critical) opinion as a crafter, gatherer, combat-er, and designer:

YG: Was amazing because they had everything. They had a 3rd party app for users to run while they played that sniffed out where you fought mobs and sent that data to YG to populate their maps with locations and record mob drops (completely against Senix's ToS, but that's besides the point). That's awesome. I wasn't a fan of how they displayed data, but at least it was all there. Unfortunately it fell behind on updates...

Zam, Eorzea: A pain to navigate and data display isn't very usable. The dissatisfaction I got from these sites (and YG) was the inspiration to make mooglebox (initially I ran it on a local server just for my own use, before I got a little more charitable).

Disciples of the Land dot com: Really novel site that does one thing great: gathering. I hope Kida sticks to it.

xivpads: Obliterated ffxivpro with better design and relevant features. Premium Virtue is a really, really talented designer/developer, and if he expands his product to incorporate item/crafting database, mooglebox will probably submit to him and retire (and I have a feeling he's going there eventually. Yes, my days are numbered o_O).

mozk-tabetai: Really, really awesome design (jquery expert I'm assuming). Great for browsing. Can't stand the background images, but I love the UI, and I think if he made it more easy to compare gear and items (filterable), and made the search function work better, then he'd take all my users (I hope he doesn't read this and discover how to destroy me).

mooglebox: Excels at making game data usable for players; for comparing, planning, etc. Its target audience has always been the more hardcore- the players who want to see the numbers. The tabled display of data can be intimidating to a lot of people, so it's more of a like-it-or-hate-it resource. It needs to fix a handful of things, add a system for commenting, and make faster updates when patches come out. The problem is, I work full-time, and some nights I just don't feel like workin on it >.<.

There's an evolution for fansites... mooglebox took over a lot of yg users, xivpads took over a lot of ffxivpro's users. And someone might come along (ahem, mozk?) and take over me. That's how it goes.

Keep using what's best. I demand no loyalty ^^.

tl;dr: Woh, Tachi, thx for the plug. =3
I have a lot of problems with the XIVPads site.. not so much in the design or it or how it looks but in the language they use.. for instance to go to your settings you click on Manager ?? "Manager"? Not Options or Preferences, or Settings but Manager? .. the entire site is like that.. it's kinda confusing.

I really hope the FFXIVPro/Guildwork guys get it in gear and get their sites up to date again.