NWN2 News closing

Strauss today posted that his news site, NWN2 News, is closing due to ongoing problems with his site's software. Strauss has been an interesting character to watch the past few years. He's a dramatic, highly opinionated, and sometimes hyper-reactionary person, which led to a number of problems on the official NWN2 discussion boards. He also was perhaps overly-ambitious at times with his website, and seemed interested, at times, in trying to userp the roles of established sites like nwvault and nwn/nwn2wiki rather than working with those sites to better the community.

But at the same time, Strauss was one of the biggest promoters of NWN2 during its development, and aggressively pursued and distributed any nwn2-related news that he could find to help us gamers satisfy our endless need for information. As such, I've regularly read his site's articles via bloglines (I'm one of two, apparently, who do this) as a means to keeping up with current nwn2 news for over a year.

Strauss stated in his farewell post that he is considering starting a multiplayer/persistent world-oriented website now that nwn2news is closing. I think this is a fine idea. While NWConnections fills that role to some extent, I think there's a lot of room for additional fan sites in that niche. It also reflects the changing needs of the community. At this point in the life cycle of the game, news is less of an important commodity than it was prior to release. NWVault's daily developer postings are sufficient.

What we need now are sites that support community content. NWVault will always remain the most important on this front because its huge storage capacity, bandwidth, and excellent comment & voting software are such invaluable, and undoubtedly expensive, resources (having a person like Maximus running the thing doesn't hurt matters either). But other sites can support the community in important ways, be it via connecting players to one another (NWConnections), providing a repository of knowledge about the toolset (NWN Lexicon), or even, like my little site, providing commentary and discussion of community modules. A site designed to be a central place for support, commentary, and discussion of persistent worlds sounds like a great resource for that segment of the community. I wish him luck.