My guild (Left Hand Path on Wiccana) constructed our Keep last night. It's the first building for our PvE Guild City and the prereq for most of the other construction later to come.

One thing that has stuck me is the sheer size of the Keep and our surrounding plot of land within an even larger zone. The scale of the thing is astonishing.

Some things to note:

• Buildings cannot be placed just anywhere, there are pre-determined lots, although you can choose "Thieves Guild on this lot, Armorsmith Shop over there" etc..
• There are three city areas within our zone map. As more guilds book their plots the zone is instanced. Right now, Funcom is restricting travel between these guild city instances probably to give players a chance to build first. So no visitors to our guild city yet.
• The guild city zones are actually shared between city building and resource collecting, which is very convenient and lends for some busy activity nearby.
• These are PvE zones, even on a PvP server the buildings cannot be damaged. PvP Battlekeeps will be in a corresponding PvP zone and take a much larger effort to construct.

I love this stuff. It has a lot to do with Age of Conan being my MMORPG of choice. I'm helping construct a city in a world that's enthralled me.

With the Age of Conan on the horizon, I've completely redone my guild's website: Left Hand Path. We're all set, cruft-free, to enter the world of Hyboria.

I've just made a small update to the MMOROG comments->forums bridge, enabling a template theme that matches my blog better, although it still needs more tweaking.

Overall, my forums site will still use the LeftHandPath theme, but I'll work on making appropriate themes for all of the sections supporting my other sites. This is all part of my attempt to consolidate forums for the numerous sites I update.

I've just installed a new comment system for MMOROG, using a Wordpress <--> MyBB bridge.

The plan is to migrate comments over to my forums @ Left Hand Path. I'm hoping this will put a stop to comment spam (I weed through it daily here) and reduce trolling, by requiring registration on the forums for commenting. It should also let me integrate some cross-traffic between my sites via centralized forums.

For the moment, old posts will remain on the old Wordpress comment system. I may change that later, but there are certain posts where I do not wish to disrupt conversations in place.

This change may bork pingbacks and trackbacks, but honestly the value of those has degraded significantly from spam and link farming exploits. I'm not sure if RSS will be affected, but I'm far more supportive of web-browsers than feed readers anyway.

Eventually I'll make a matching theme and try to autodetect visitors via MMOROG so the look and feel stays consistent.

I've setup a new forums site to support both our current Gloomy Bears WoW guild and our planned Age of Conan guild: Left Hand Path.

Age of Conan is still over 6 months away and I've never really setup a guild site in anticipation of a game before, but it feels right to do so at this time because of the direction changes we have planned. We are going to attempt a higher level of guild cooperation and community than before and AoC sounds like the right place to do it. We're also planning a little more roleplay in our experience than previously, although I doubt we'll become hardcore RPers it should be fun to have the options to interact that way.

We still have a fair bit to accomplish in WoW though, so I don't want to project any feelings of abandoning our guild there. In fact, adding guild forums to support us the Gloomy Bears should be a benefit too. All current guild members should sign up on the new site.