A new Neverwinter Connections?

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Carlo
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A new Neverwinter Connections?

Post by Carlo » Mon Feb 04, 2019 5:50 am

I posted on this in the DMFI forums as well, but believe it warrants its own topic here.

The short version is that I think the lack of a Neverwinter Connections-style hub is severely cramping DM'd multiplayer gaming in Neverwinter Nights. After the demise of the old NeverwinterConnections.com site, which fulfilled the MP community hub role (outstandingly), and with the pre-NWN:EE decline in the number of NWN players, the dropoff in campaign and small-group gaming was inevitable. I thought it was a natural phenomenon and was happy with just running my own DM'd campaign here, thanks to the forum resources offered by NWN Campaigns and Venture.

Post-NWN:EE, with a rising playerbase and an improved platform with technical support and ongoing development from Beamdog, there's much more of an opportunity and need to have some type of community site available to support DMs and players. Even with just a single campaign to manage, it requires a lot of work for new DM and player groups to find each other, set up a game schedule, and have everything needed on hand to support it. For both new and existing gaming groups, there's no real central resource for bundling together game scheduling, forums, chat and other resources. Persistent Worlds (PWs) are booming again in the NWN:EE era, which is a good thing to see, but none of them have the core function of general community access and support. And there is still unfulfilled demand for classic small group multiplayer gaming, as shown by a recent Reddit topic - Alternatives to Persistent Worlds.

Talk being cheap, I'm therefore working on getting a new Neverwinter Connections (NWC) site and basic functionality up, with the idea of it being a free resource that anyone can use for scheduling games. NWC Forums would link here to the old Neverwinter Connections backup forums, which would be revived and updated. NWC Chat would be linked to the existing Neverwinter Connections Discord. Both site admin have indicated that they would welcome the integration and site promotion.

The idea currently is to get a site published and publicly available that at minimum works for scheduling games with automatic time zone adjustments, has individual event pages and comments that can be created and admin'd by registered site members, is cleanly organized featuring the integrated forum and chat links, and is simple to use. I would love to make it sexy and duplicate all of the old NWC features - but that would require significant additional development time and additional, skilled new NWC project members.

Once up, I'd plan to use it for scheduling my own campaign - which has players in five different time zones and requires a big effort to coordinate times manually - along with any side games I run. So even if the community doesn't do much with it and there's zero initial interest in using it, it'd still be personally worth doing.

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to gather all of the available old NWC resources I can find, update and organize them to the extent possible, and launch the site using the NeverwinterConnections.org domain. I expect to reach out to at least a few of the veteran NWC DMs for permission to post some past content, and will welcome additional content, ideas and comments from any community member. That also goes for expressions of interest in contributing to the new Neverwinter Connections project in an admin, developer, content provider, or other role. For an example on content, one of the things I'd like to have is a history page on Neverwinter Connections, which I can take a stab at, but some others might have more personal background and knowledge.

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Re: A new Neverwinter Connections?

Post by Carlo » Mon Feb 04, 2019 9:40 am

The internet being much faster at these things than it used to be, the initial site is now in fact up:

https://neverwinterconnections.org/

I'm not going to publicize it much yet, since it's under construction, but it's actually functional and I'm using it for my campaign already. People are welcome to take a look and poke around. There's a front page post that offers some initial orientation and instructions for users.

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Re: A new Neverwinter Connections?

Post by Carlo » Wed Feb 06, 2019 10:49 am

Thanks to Venture at the forums here and Ranan over at Neverwinter Connections Discord, it looks like all of the new Neverwinter Connections components are ready to be integrated, so it's officially launched. Still have a bunch of multiplayer-related references to see about collecting and adding, have posted separately about that.

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