Discuss about the recent KapiTimes in here!

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Discuss about the recent KapiTimes in here!

Post by Guest » 05.12.2010, 14:14

Hello you all!

How do you like the recent KapiTimes?
How do you like the contest, the quiz, the comic? :)

Are you missing something?
Would you like to take part in the KapiTimes?

Tell us what you think!

The KapiTimes-team

Guest

Post by Guest » 05.12.2010, 14:40

I think its pretty much back to where it was about a year ago, Vercon obviously is still doing his comics which although not always funny :D must take him some time, everyone else has disappeared (including David this issue) and its poorly edited the news section still mentions the creative contest bearing in mind there is no actual news it shouldn't really of been missed.

I still think the older articles were the best and they have disappeared, the interviews, the stalking the newbies, they were really what got me reading and were the most enjoyable basically just to be nosey and see what people where doing, I don't have a hell of a lot of time on my hands with a full time job and 4 children running round but I would be willing to help at least get the interviews up and running again (wouldn't take that much time I don't think once a template of questions was established) although I wouldn't be writing the old blurb that started the interviews it was a bit farfetched and didn't actually bring anything to the article. Would love the see the stalking back though maybe with each new company having a mentor leading them in a certain direction.

Guest

Post by Guest » 06.12.2010, 00:19

In response to NYKs post, i would like to say that i used to enjoy the kapitimes much more when i first started on this game, but then after a year long break i came back, restarted my company and changed sectors to the oil and gas industries - (not the most profitable but you just wait 280 hours when i throw a massive amount of power into that competition ;) Halle will be bootling in her trems! ) - and since i came back i haven't quite enjoyed it so much, it was a long time ago i can't put my finger exactly what has changed, but i rather like the idea of mentoring, for instance, i would love to one day branch into the car or wardrobe industry (for sheer capitalism and profitability,) and am finding it nearly impossible to do this due to having to sell up all of my buildings to make a reasonable profit then spending the next half a year expanding whilst having no income, it's just not financially feasible, but i believe that with someone to help me with the process i could do it easily.

On the flipside i produce 2 billion power every few days as well as a large amount of oil and gas (when not saving up to blitz a competition,) and i would have no problems whatsoever purchasing expensive gas or oil of a new company, if merely that my large gas stations could still sell at a high rate of profit/income, netting me enough to support the power production and make a profit during the duration of this competition, making a lot of money for the newer company producing his lower quality gas and oil and allowing me to keep my stations running around the clock during mass power production.

Regards,
Unity Gas Exchange,
R1.

Guest

Post by Guest » 06.12.2010, 17:09

Writing a full sized paper is difficult these days we we're down to a very small editing team, unfortunately.
We started off with 5 editors back when we did the stalking/interview pages.

Now we're down to 2, and 1 editor has been away for the last month.
Writing several pages takes time, and unfortunately we don't have the time to bring the stalking/interview pages back, it's simply too much work.
I personally have a dayjob and I'm glad that I'm able to do as much as I can do. ;)

As for that special contest being mentioned:
That's just a dumb mistake, I removed that from the news page but I forgot to edit the title of the page :P


Any type of criticism is welcome, and we've had a ton of great ideas for articles from several readers, but with an understaffed editing team it's too hard to actually get those ideas off the ground. :(

Guest

Post by Guest » 06.12.2010, 18:16

Interviews were interesting. Only page which I read. To ease up editors work you should publish template with general questions and everyone who are interested to give interview could answer and send back answers using PM to one of kapitimes editors. Then you could publish each time one of "interviews". Even if you get 20 replies, look, that means you can have interviews page for next 20 nespapers, and knowing that there is no newspaper each day, then these interviews will last for quite long time.

Guest

Post by Guest » 06.12.2010, 18:34

There's a lot more work involved than you think there is, really a lot more.
We already worked with a question list which was sent out to different people, but coding everything and finding people to interview is still a lot of work.

Personally I think it would be a bit "cheap" to just post a list of questions in the paper and having people answering that list, that's as far away from an interview that you could go.

I'd love to bring back the interviews, but in a different style which would allow previously interviewed people to return as well.
(a great suggestion by a reader will make that possible)
But as low staffed as we are right now, we're happy to have the paper as ' full' as it is.

Guest

Post by Guest » 06.12.2010, 19:59

It would be cheap, ofcourse and not compareable to old ones (interviews).

What coding you have to do? I am not much familiar with web design, coding so on... But isn`t it possible to code once interview page and each next time just paste into it the new text (interview)? page template doesn`t change each time.

For me it would be interesting to see market overviews. Much statistical info of stores. Like highest price drop/ rise during week. In stats page there is info, but only of current page. That shouldn`t be hard to extract needed data from database and create graph.

For example: Week 50 most unstable price was for capi cola and then graph how it was going up`n`down...

I would be interested in much data, overviews and graphs. See price tendency (trend) if it is going up or down...

just idea :)

Maybe upjers should think of reward in coins for players who keep newspaper live. Maybe that should attract more people to do some input for better newspaper.

Guest

Post by Guest » 06.12.2010, 21:00

Some coding from interviews and other articles can be standard, but there's still quite a bit of coding that needs to be rewritten whenever an article is changed.

As for graphical overviews and market watches etc, Great idea, and it's something we've been thinking about in the past, but there's simply no time to do that sort of stuff.

And I often get players that promise to write some market watch / in-depth look at a certain production line... none have actually done that so far.
If you'd like to be one of the first readers to submit articles to the paper, you're free to do so.

And I'd be against "coins for articles" or stuff like that,
it'll get people writing, but for all the wrong reasons.

User avatar
pearlbay
Posts: 1671
Joined: 14.09.2007, 09:52
Location: Pearlbay Holdings (R1), Bay of Pearls (R2)

Post by pearlbay » 07.12.2010, 08:51

VerConMat Industries BV wrote: And I'd be against "coins for articles" or stuff like that,
it'll get people writing, but for all the wrong reasons.
Agreed. :-) The idea of the newspaper is to be a player-project, in the sense that those who feel like the want the contribute something to the game, they can do so, without needing to join the moderating-team.

And as a paper offers a variety of options, I am quite sure nearly everyone would be able to offer something, from contributions to the jokes to recipes for a business-man's Christmas-dinner. ;-)

If we promised each contributor Coins for participating, then we might get a large quantity for articles, but probably to a detriment of the quality. ;-)

Personally, I think the paper is a great way to participate in this community, and if you are interested in html, you might also learn something on the way.

That being said, I also would like to offer my thanks to the current team for their awesome work, and I hope they will keep going in 2011 as well - maybe with a few new editors at their side. ;-)

Best regards,

pearlbay
In case of urgent problems or questions, please use our support form!

Guest

Post by Guest » 07.12.2010, 16:13

Hi
I not like the current contest and I'm not the only one. At a fixed price every player buy to computer and is the biggest seller of power and never runs out.

The raw material should not be used in contests, or else remove the Raw Materials LLC (NPC)

Best regards,
Lorenzo

Guest

Post by Guest » 07.12.2010, 16:59

I didn`t mean coins for article. But coins for steady and trustful players, like VerConMat Industries BV and few others that are regularly doing their job to keep kapitimes alive.

But if you say coins for article, then we can think about coins for only published articles. Everyone can send in but each weak you should publish 1-2 articles, best of received. The ones which are most valuable to other players, or with most interesting story.

Guest

Post by Guest » 07.12.2010, 17:35

Honestly the motivation has to be the other way round:
For a player-project like the KapiTimes we need players that are willing to participate in the project due to their attitude towards it and because they want to. It's not about sending in articles to recieve some Coins - that's not the correct motivation. There are other ways to get some Coins.

Players who are really willing to see the KapiTimes grow (and even just once by sending in an interesting article) will do that without Coins etc. You can get well known in the Kapilands-community, you can receive positive feedbacks, you can get to know interesting people - and you only need to write a nice article.

And there is more to write about than just market analyses or whatever. You have all possibilities. Be creative. Think about a story, a spectacular experience, a recipe for Christmas cookies for business-men and -women... :)
greenPOWER wrote:Everyone can send in but each weak you should publish 1-2 articles, best of received. The ones which are most valuable to other players, or with most interesting story.
And that's exactely how we would deal with it if there were so many articles from players. ;) Otherwise we would publish all articles (that fit to the rules)... but unfortunately we aren't able to publish a single article sent in by another player. :(

@ Lorenzo:
Thanks for your comment about the contest.
Unfortunately we have got two threads for this topic now - there was a "contest-thread" opened in addition to this thread. But because there came up a nice discussion I didn't want to close that one down.
Just have a look at the other thread. :)

Guest

Post by Guest » 07.12.2010, 18:56

My opinion is that Kapitimes should contain info only about kapilands game, its players, forum. Kapitimes is newspaper which informs its readers about most important things of virtual economy of Kapilands, of Kapilands business owners and so on. Kids will not cook cookies and the ones who needs real recipe will search for it in recipe oriented pages. I don`t think that recipes in kapitimes will attract players to read newspaper. Articles like that can be the most easiest - copy & paste from internet resources, starting from how to make tea and finally how to amend car. Interviews were interesting and was about real people who plays kapilands. Such info I will not search in worldwide news page or somewhere else.

You have loads of data of products - prices, qualities etc. It should be possible to get product prices for each day for last month. And from that date it would be nice graph of how price has gone up/ down for different products. For players like me and most of others - we have to copy every day data from stats page, save it for few weeks to get data to work with. Most important - if one it is not possible to be online and copy data from kapilands stats page, then there is loss of one day data. Imagine graph of wardrobes, where is price up`n`down line starting from january `10 up to now (in month scale, and most dramatic month in week or even day scale) See the tendency of price. Notice drops or rises when one of key players in wardrobes sector stops selling or lowers price seriosuly. Nice.

Contest product should be written only in newspaper, that would keep players to open at least once the new newspaper.

Advertisements part is nice, but for that reason most of players are using forum.

By the way for article like this (first post), is it possible to get it into newspaper? Or such amount of text and images requires huge coding? Maybe you should republish few articles from forum which lots of players keep in their bookmarks. Like this one in link above.

And last thing - navigation. If there will be interesting posts in future in newspaper how I`ll be able to navigate back to older publications? Do I have to be address bar guru and change there numbers of newspaper? If we could choose from list of dates. Then talking in forum and writing: "Hey, remember that market overview in Kapitimes where was... bla bla bla.. It was in 07.12.2010 edition. Go and have a look." In this case player will need list or drop down menu with options to choose from to get older edition.

Kapitimes can`t compete with kapilands forum. Kapilands should have info which is not in forum or elsewhere.

(Do you know what means Kapi in Latvian? It means cemetery/ graveyard, grave in plural. Kaps in singular) Info just for fun :)

Guest

Post by Guest » 02.03.2011, 14:29

Anybody want to do a interview for this next edition of the Kapitimes? i really am on a limited timescale this week so could really do with completing it today (tomorrow at the latest) just send me a message ingame. :)

R1- NYK
R2- Jackeys UK

Guest

Post by Guest » 03.03.2011, 16:57

LOL I just finished an article in our monthly newsletter and it was not easy.

I think a you should open a space or two for anyone who wants to write about anything related to this game. Its a good way of giving other people a chance of giving something without the pressure of expectation deadlines.

Cheers!

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