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[fmunoz]

Congratulations Toady, your game got to Slashdot (sadly not in main page...)
 

quote:
Another Golden Age of Gaming?
Posted by Zonk on Tuesday September 19, @09:53AM
from the not-golden-until-mass-effect dept.
Games
An anonymous reader writes "Julian Murdoch over at Gamers With Jobs thinks that this is the best time ever to be a gamer. In his conversation with a (one suspects hypothetical) kid in a library, he engages in a bit of a rant on the topic: 'He's me when I was 16. Everything sucked. But I'm glad I talked to him, because it turns out I needed to hear myself say it all. For all of my daily kvetching, this is the best time ever to be a gamer, because the games are good. We can bitch all we want about console wars, prices, fanboyitis, and those games which do, in fact, suck. But at the end of the day, there are more different games out there than ever before, from the oh-so-pretty Oblivion to Guitar Hero to Dwarf Fortress. From Magic: the Gathering to Pokemon (laugh all you want, it's a good game). From Heroscape to Warhammer 40k.' So what do you think? In the midst of all the negative campaigning in the console wars, is this another golden age of gaming?"  

http://games.slashdot.org/games/06/09/19/1346206.shtml

[ September 19, 2006: Message edited by: fmunoz ]

[Toady One]

Is being "slash-dotted" making the front page?  Or is that term only used when your site overloads and dies?

[Sheep]

Usually when the server dies due to the hundreds of thousands of nerds holding down F5.

[Capntastic]

To me, Slashdot articles come off as ridiculously pretentious!  But for once I'm glad they namedropped something good.

[Aquillion]

They didn't link to it, though.  There didn't even seem to be any links in the discussion...  the only comment on dwarf fortress visible at the level I had it set to, anyway, was just someone mentioning that they'd never played it (and they listed it alongside Morrowind, so I think they thought it was some commercial game they missed...)

And the Slashdot Effect hasn't been a real thing for years now.  Way back when, Slashdot was one of the biggest concentrations of high-bandwidth users on the internet, and they tended to link to small personal webpage that had something interesting.  Nowadays slashdot is far, far smaller, proportionally speaking, and even the smallest hosts are designed for high-bandwidth access and the occasional sudden burst of activity; unless your server is connected to the internet by two tin cans and a string, even a link from slashdot's front page generally won't have too much effect.

[ September 20, 2006: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Toady One]

Slashdot in part seemed to increase Tuesday google searches by about 3x.  However, the little post Tuesday on metafilter accounted for more than 20% of that day's traffic.

[rabbit]

Hey there, this is Julian, guy who wrote the piece at GamersWithJobs.com.

First off, my sincerest apologies for failing to put the link in. I tend not to engage in deep linking when I'm writing fictionalized editorials, as I find it distracts from reading the piece, and assume people can hit google.  I've rectified it in this case, as I do indeed want as many people as possible to get on the dwarf fortress wagon.

Second, I didn't write the link into the piece from Slashdot, so I'm afraid I didn't have any control of that bit.

Third, while perhaps the /. effect isn't the monster it once was, i can tell you from having run several small fan sites that it can EASILY still take down a site that's on a shared host.

Thanks,

Rabbit

[Toady One]

Oooo, the DF text is red now.  Like the trees in rural New England should be at some point.  I used to live out there...  Texas has geckos though.  There are white geckos all over the door frames at night, eating bugs that are attracted to the lights.  Maximum number spotted at once = 4.