Smogon Articles

[QibingZero]

I also fully support Tangerine's idea and would love to be involved. A quick question though: Would this be more like an actual publication or one of those community projects that many forums put together as a sort of 'best threads and contributions of this month' summary? I assume by the description that it would be a combination of both, which is cool. I'd be glad to do either articles or editing.

I think it could be nice to have 'correspondents' for the various metagames that could document the month's activities. Tournaments, interesting trends, statistical analysis - that kind of stuff. This would fit directly in line with the idea for Metagame Analysis, and obviously would allow everyone involved to optimize their contribution to this. For instance, I was heavily involved in the first month of the new UU metagame, and as a result I felt confident enough in my knowledge of the metagame to make quality suspect nominations. At the same time, a lot of my knowledge of Standard at the time was lacking, and most of what I could say was either speculation or outdated. Now, I don't necessarily want to be a UU correspondent or anything, but if we needed an analysis at the time I feel like I was one of the more qualified people to work on it.

I mention this mostly because while most people play Standard and not much else, we do have users who are very much in tune with the lesser played metagames. Users who could provide thoughtful commentary that would increase activity on those ladders, as well as interest in general. This is especially the case for Ubers, as I recently found out when I prepared to play my first DP Ubers game - less than 2 weeks ago. I was surprised to see how many other people who were involved in the community actually hadn't played an Ubers game this generation either.

Hell, we could even have an article on Little Cup or something every once in a while if we wanted.

[Tangerine]

Okay, now a more formal proposal rather than the 3 AM thoughts that prevented me from going to sleep.

I honestly don't see why this should project should just stop with just stark threads that aren't articles. I think the site can now produce enough content to have something that is closer to a full magazine.

This doesn't mean that this is only written by us, the badgeholders. The idea is to draw content from all parts of the community from Firebot to Smeargle to Stark to CAP to maybe even WiFi.

The contents can vary from month to month depending on the submissions or what people feel like talking about. However, I think we can have few select columns - such as all the math analysis by X-Act or other arbitrary analysis.

Things that we can cover are

- Metagame Analysis, OU and UU
- Featured Pokemon (where we pick one Pokemon and analyze it in a much more indepth manner not found in normal analysis)
- Featured Warstory(ies)
- Featured RMTs/Teams
- Featured Artists (new art?)
- "Math Corner" (that's where we can publish X-Act's articles)
- Ask a Question receive an Answer - this will most likely be a stark driven thing, where we can get users to submit questions, and we can get users to submit answers
- CAP related stuff
- Tournament Reports/Smogon Tour reports
- "Metagame Prediction" contests where we can get users to predict the metagame after certain threats get added to the metagame or just "two months from now"
- Newsworthy events /Suspect Tests
- Anything people want to submit, whether by featured articles or Editorials/Opinions
- Other Community related stuff such, maybe the firebot people can start giving us ideas.
- Any other ideas.

Here's the thing - while we might get a few dedicated writers, I want this to be mostly a feature where the common user can contribute to. Ideally I'd want to give these people their "own badge" (<Magazine Name> Writer/Editor/Artist/Contributor badge) for contributions rather than the typical Contributor badge (which is for site analysis and articles) but that's not my discretion and I will worry about that after this gets approved by admins.

This can start off as a section within the site, and when we get more artists/designers etc we can make templates and spread it around as pdfs too. I think there's alot of creativity we can tap in to.

What do you think? =]

[tennisace]

I'd love to help out with this Tanger, especially the CAP part. I'd also like to help edit for content.

[twash]

I'm willing to help with Featured Pokémon and Tournament Reports etc. as they are both things I enjoy and could make time for.

Havak bought the idea to me earlier of having a Pokémon Give-away style thing with the magazine every so often, literally just giving away a Pokémon to whoever wants one.

[Jimbo]

- Featured Artists (new art?)

If this could be an actual magazine, we could feature art on the cover, which would be really rad.

to maybe even WiFi.

If you can find good things in Wi-Fi I'd be all over it. While I know you guys (hell even I don't) love Wi-Fi, I bet some members of the Wi-Fi community would love to have their trade threads featured (Maybe like a food critic? i.e. Very creative sets, very organized, needs smaller photos, etc.) We could also say only trade threads of "not terrible" wifi-ers would be featured, this could be an incentive for them to post substantial shit. I don't know if this would be considered at all, since it is, you know, wifi, but it might be something to think about if we want to include all parts of the site.

Anyway, I would love to help out with the Pokemon analysis too (and maybe even the tournaments). I think it'd also be cool if, at the end of <magazine name>, each month, we did kind of a q & a for random (or badged) users - kind of like what People magazine does (they ask Celebrities random shit to end their magazine in a cool way). Questions would include cliche stuff like What's your favorite pokemon/type of team, etc, and maybe some more unconventional stuff.

Edit:
<+Jimbo> hmm we should feature good battlers
<+Jimbo> i.e. interviews

This could be really cool. Stuff like "This is Obi, he made a famous stall team and still uses it well even though others kind of suck with it." or "This is IPL, he makes pretty badass teams all around but he's kind of a creep." with a Q&A with the battler.

[darkie]

Sounds alright to me. I can help with whatever; I have experience with this type of thing (see: www.smogon.com).

[Lorak]

So, has there been any progress on the Smogblog yet? Or is it still just conceptual?

[Havak]

I had an idea that we could use for a later issue, and it could be 'Best Reactions to the Smogon April Fools'. Obviously I'm posting this in IS so no non-badged member can see it. It'll be a good way to further embarrass the members who go over-the-top.