Much boilerplate and text shamelessly lifted from Valg, in defiance of whatever we say about copying below. Do as I say, not as I do! :)

The Ridiculous Time Pressure:
Let's shoot for a finished product by Friday, March 2nd. That means you want to get submissions in ASAP! Rar! Whip-cracking!

The purpose of the contest:
The content of the main/home page of www.carrionfields.com badly needs replacement. The news information is great for existing players, but not really appropriate for enticing people who haven't played CF or may not even know what a MUD is.

Your goal is to provide that content. Something that someone could find from a web search, ad, or friend's recommendation that would help them decide if they wanted to play CF. Make the game sound cool, but equally, don't make it something it's not. Sell me on the coolness of this game and why I need to give it a try!

That's the main and most important task, and where, given equal quality/work, prizes will mostly go. A sub-task to consider, if you so choose, is writing one or more separate pages that might be linked either from the home page or elsewhere that would explain the differences / cool things about CF to a more specific audience. For example, a page angled at players of commercial MMORPGs that would explain to such a person what kinds of things about CF they might find familiar or attractive in their difference. "You've played X kind of game and you hated Y about it? In CF that's no problem because... " A lot of possibilities are there for people with different backgrounds to enjoy different things about CF and I think we can speak to that. Collectible card games, traditional RPGs, computer RPGs, strategy games, books, people interested in puzzles or problem solving, etc. Who knows? If you know why people who love bass fishing or yahtzee will love CF, get it out there!

But that big paragraph aside, the main, home page is by far the most important thing. Please focus on that first and primarily if you have even the slightest inspiration there.

The Prizes:
We're trying to give the site a facelift and involve the playerbase without breaking the bank. If you want to help, but don't feel like writing material, feel free to buy one or more PBFs and earmark them as "Contest Winner's Choice!" Once we're done, we'll make a decision as to who chipped in the most, and let them name PBFs they'd like published.

Standard boilerplate:
1) Carrion Fields reserves the right to clip, edit, dissect, mangle, fold, staple, merge, reject, re-word or otherwise alter entries based on user and staff feedback, in order to get the best final product possible.

2) All submissions become the property of Carrion Fields, LLC. We will credit all contributors on this forum.

3) Be respectful of the work of others. Any submissions found to be someone else's intellectual property will be rejected immediately, and the submitter possibly disqualified from future contests. Create, don't copy!

Thanks to everyone who contributed. It'll be of help as we try to improve the content of our web page.

I'm leaning strongly towards either cleaning up Death Claw's post a little bit and rolling with that, attempting to write something else in a similar vein, or probably both plus seek other similar write-ups and rotate them. If anyone feels inspired to write something of the kind, feel free to post it and there's a good chance we'll use it in some form.

DC, I know this isn't so much what motivated your participation, but I owe you a PBF. Everyone else, thanks again.

Granted, it isn't perfect, but it's a start to modify from.

What is Carrion Fields?

Carrion Fields is a text-based online multiplayer game. It is a roleplaying and playerkilling game, where people play as their characters

and interact with other people in a medieval fantasy world called Thera. Roleplaying is mandatory in Carrion Fields, which means that people should act as their character while playing the game.

Carrion Fields is 100% free, which means that it is free to play and you cannot purchase any benefits to your character with real life currency. Carrion Fields is a derivative of Diku MUD Rom xxxx.

How to Play?

You can play Carrion Fields with by clicking the PLAY NOW-button in top-left corner(this opens our JAVA-client and connects to Carrion Fields and the game starts) or you can download abd install a MUD client to play. We recommend playing with a MUD client for maximum enjoyment.

Instructions for client users:

1. Download a MUD client

Some MUD clients:

-MUSHclient is a fast and versatile MUD client. It has a registration fee of 20$, but you can play with the free ShareWare version as long as you like.
-ZMUD is a fast and versatile MUD client. ZMUD costs about 30$ and has a 30 day free trial period.
-**Other MUD Clients here**

2. Install the client to your computer.

3. Create a new World for Carrion Fields with your client.

Instructions for MUSHclient:

-Choose New World from File dropdown menu. MUD adress for Carrion Fields is www.carrionfields.com or *Put CF's IP here* and MUD port is 9999. World name is Carrion Fields(or whatever you prefer to call it). After these three pieces of information have been put in, click OK and the world for Carrion Fields is created.

4. Play the game

Open the World you made for Carrion Fields and the game will begin. A picture of a skull will appear, asking you a question: "By what name do you wish to be mourned?". At this point, you can choose a name for new character or type the name of existing character. For new characters, the game will ask a few questions about the name to make sure that it is suitable for the roleplaying enviroment.

This is WAY over my head. It's a roleplaying and a playerkilling game? Diku Rom what? What are those? Oops, you've already lost me and I'm looking at someone chug Mentos and Diet Coke on YouTube again.

It’s a cold morning. Your breath steams in front of you as you look around at the meager band of men you have with you. Thalan grips his axe between his stubby dwarven fingers as he swears at a rock he’s had the misfortune of stumbling on, muttering under his breath of some druidic curse me is afflicted by. Vyork stares blankly off in to the distance, his massive giant frame seemingly unafflicted by the adverse weather. Fingering the pommel of your dagger you glance over at the guardian of the Village of the Battleragers, noting his stern countenance, iconic of dedication.

The Imperial War machine will arrive any hour now, your scouts alert you but you aren’t disturbed. On a cold day such as this, the wounds that will undoubtedly be cast abounds will numb quickly. Its as good a day to die as any.

Without warning a fiery blast erupts by the guardian, exploding dust and pebbles against your breastplate. It seems the Imperial Army has arrived. You hear a guttural growl erupt from Thalan as he charges forward, his axe blade piercing the air before him as it will undoubtedly pierce flesh in a moment or so. Squinting your eyes, you lunge forward joining his charge. “Today will bring victory or death,” you think as you muster every ounce of adrenaline in your blood, “time to choose which.”

Welcome to Carrion Fields. Step into a world where the unspeakable depravity of those who bargain with demons and spread vengeance of long forgotten Gods of War are only countered by the unmatched courage of those who stand against them. Where age old hatreds unfold on a battlefield spanning several continents, hundreds of dungeons and places of mystery and magic, with so much to unearth and discover you may never live to see the end.

But then, that’s up to you.

Obviously this would need a bit of massaging/proofing/whatever but I like the idea a lot.

If this doesn't end up on the HP I can definitely see some version of this as CF ad text.

That was a pretty cool little piece there, I agree.

How about having a few of those short "hooks", stories, whatever, and randomize which one's show up on the loading of the home page.

I could see there being several stories: one for each cabal, first person perspective for the various races, classes, and so on.

P.S. I actually like the idea of having the hook be something text-y like that that paints a picture with words (rather than a fancy picture), because, well, that's what CF is all about. Good stuff.

The idea crossed my mind that, much like the D&D manuals, you could have some small set of characters who you follow through different pages. IE, there'd be a snippet of a character fighting a necro on the necro class page. That same character might also be described interacting with a cabal on the cabal pages. Etc. One set of characters that the reader can get to know and then follow their "adventures" through the information pages here.

This accomplishes two things. It gets people to read more content because there's an interest in the story and two, it can feature some tactics off the bat so you can get a better understanding of roleplay and gameplay before even connecting.

Plus, obviously, it'll drive up the desire to play.

Three stories there so far. It's easy to add more.

Questions, comments, self-doubts?

Seeing those stories gave me an idea.

How about having the webpage load into an intro, where these stories are laid out paragraph by paragraph, or key-part by key-part, with a picture going along with it? These frames would fade into one another, and then auto-load the homepage at the end. Of course, there would be a "skip intro" link present during this.

For what I have in mind the art would not be too difficult, but would be tasteful. If you are interested I will see what I can come up with.

Eh:

1) How do I know how fast you're reading so I know when to load the next one? Doing this right and not violating 5000 standard usability rules of the web might not be trivial. Granted, our current web site probably violates 4985 standard usability rules of the web.

2) I'm not awesome with php, which the CF web page is written in, and I really have no idea how easy or possible it would be to do something like that within the framework of php. Coming up with some kind of suave Flash/Silverlight/Whatever intro that we could workably host on this box with minimal fuss is beyond my current interest/ambition level as far as the web page is concerned.

1) How do I know how fast you're reading so I know when to load the next one?

Just feel it out.

About the webpage, how about doing a small poll with the intent of finding out how many players are willing to donate their skills to improving the webpage and/or promoting the game? I imagine you'd find a wide array of talents and at least a handful of professionals who would be up for it.

Depending on the success of the poll, you could then create a thread asking players to briefly describe their skills, and the time they could allot to this project or that.

The final step would be to divvy out the projects.

I think this would be fun, and would be a way for the playerbase to give back to the game (and the Imms). Come on! Just do what Mek says for once and it'll be all good, baby!!

Makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Oh fix this text though QUICK :-)

"Rain beat down on the cobbled streets"

Really cool though. I took a break from writing a new role entry to find... that!! awesome and pretty inspiring.

"Rain beat down on the cobbled streets" makes perfect sense to me now that I read up on those tricky past tenses!

A smattering similar to how the mud appears. Also, I want some combat interjected into at least one, log style. Like beginning the assassinate one with a log, something like that. Not a gigantic fight, but some quick and dirty actual gameplay.

>A smattering similar to how the mud appears.

Write/tag one up and we'll toss it in the rotation if it's cool.

>Also, I want
>some combat interjected into at least one, log style. Like
>beginning the assassinate one with a log, something like that.
> Not a gigantic fight, but some quick and dirty actual
>gameplay.

Do you think that's the best way to introduce the game? I think it depends on the audience.

Ever seen those on the new madden commercials where they basically have CG that makes the game look nearly photo realistic and yet when you play the game it isn't really that good? Well that's how it worked a while back anyway, now they have the horsepower to actually do it, but still.

I don't know about you, but I always felt just a little bit cheated, even when I knew the game wasn't really going to look like that. You can present CF like a book, but that isn't really what it's like, and people might feel a little cheated if they think it's going to be like that.

I'm not saying anything huge, but maybe 4-6 rounds tops to sort of demonstrate what it's really like.

The way this is written is very similar to almost all other fantasy tabletop games. It's proven very effective for them, it'll work for us. I find the scenes painted in these stories extremely intriguing, and I think that they will DO A LOT for our website. Besides, we want the player to make the transition from the stories presented into the game system.

Like muds...

The big gaming cons still draw thousands and thousands of people. I mean, it's not as popular as NASCAR, but it never really was, either. It's niche but it's not going anywhere tomorrow.

n/t

The unnatural clatter of steel and iron-shod boots rang out like an alarm bell in my ears. They would not see me, so completely had I blended into the canopy, but the goal was not simply to avoid detection. The cursed duergar WarMaster Duggud and the fire giant Empress Kharg made no effort to disguise their path through the forest; instead she cast fireballs to set it alight. The anger rose in my veins, and I could feel the rise of the predator within. "This will take all I can bring, and perhaps even that will not be enough," I thought silently, but the call of the wild could not be ignored. These trespassers, these defilers, these abominations of Thar-Eris must be destroyed utterly for the blasphemy of coming to this place. Out of a sack made from the hide of a town guardsman I pulled scrolls of power, and used up precious charges from my most potent wands. The cry of the Huntress sounds out in my mind. The time to act is now. Shall I become the venomous cobra? Or perhaps a fearsome tiger to pounce upon my prey? No, this job will need speed. As my body shifts from its already feline form into that of the cheetah, the predator spirit overcomes me. I am Nefla no more, but a primal force of nature, and I shall drink of fire giant blood and feast on duergar flesh tonight!


Names have been change to protect the Prey!

We will probably want to have several "first" pages. For example, if we link from a TMS ad, we'd probably want something that is more about "Why you'd play CF instead of other MUDs."

That said, a story-type front page is a good hook for non-MUD people, which is potentially a much bigger source of new players.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

A story-type frontpage would be interesting to non-mudders only if it were some sort of stylized, even graphic font.

If this ever gets implemented, I could work on making graphics such as these.

splntrd@hotmail.com

Personally I find it difficult to read those highly stylized fonts. I imagine I'm not the only person who feels that way. Books are printed in plain(ish) fonts for a reason.

I don't mean HIGHLY stylized, I was thinking stylized more along the lines of it needs to be in a graphic format, something with like a scroll with texture and maybe some images overlaid or something. A graphic or even an animation with the words scrolling by. Large blocks of plain text don't hold people's interest.

Can you point me(us) at an example of what you are talking about?

> Large blocks of plain text don't hold people's interest.

DC's text wasn't that long. I think that there should be just some kind of an opening chapter(not too long) of a story on the home page as eyecatcher to pique interest. Maybe after that, this and more stories link to a page with stories listed(something along the lines You can find this and more stories on our story page).

Having good headlines will always help in breaking the tedium of the text. And just a little bit of info from every subcategory, stories, what CF is, how to play. Not too much to bore people, but enough to get people interested in it to play or read more.

That's sorta the point. Large blocks of text invokes laziness. You want something quick and to the point. You can add some extra navigation help but for the most part the side menu and links on the home page should help you navigate to the places you need to go. But, you don't want an overly verbose landing page. I want to know what CF is about by looking at the homepage, then I want to know how to play it from the help system.

Its one of the reasons I love Kasty's helper file but I think it should be broken up into much smaller chunks so as to be less intimidating. If I open a doc that's like 23 pages on how to start playing, I'd be like wow, this is a lot of work.

I also tend to think the color scheme is terrible and the layout is very cluttered, but then I've been brainwashed by "Web 2.0" designs.

Then again, I have no idea what CF's page's retention rate is like (IE, how many people come here and don't ever fire it up). So the value of an overhaul is really not something I can measure.

It is a good eyecatcher and something that could be used create some immersion to draw the interest. Maybe the front page could be sort of a hybrid.

First, the story. Below it a link to more stories(a story page).

Second, brief explanation what CF is. Below it, a link to page that gives more detailed explanation about the game.

Third, how to play. This section states that you can play by pressing button and gives MUD port and adress for client users. Below it, there's a link to how to play page that gives more detailed instructions on installing a client etc.

Basically, it'd be an immersion, implementation, and how to play page.