Good morning folks! I hope everyone is doing well after the Thanksgiving smorgasbord/WoW marathon and everything is prepped for Cataclysm this next week. Can't wait to roll up my Worgen to eat some Orc face.
In any case, I'm sure a lot of you have noticed that some of our database content is getting out of date and that the site hasn't had it's normal "refresh" with each patch coming down the pipe and the shattering of Azeroth. After discussing it internally for most of this year, we decided that some changes needed to be made in terms of how we go about updating our data for World of Warcraft.
Right now, ZAM owns Thottbot, Wowhead, and WoW.AKZ, three sites that have done arguably the same thing (in terms of databasing) for years. While this strategy worked for awhile and people really enjoyed having three different places to find information, eventually we discovered that more and more people were using Wowhead as their primary WoW database source. Rather than continue to double up our work (at least on the ZAM side) we've opted to go ahead and shift the focus of our WoW AKZ site away from the database, implement Wowhead tools into the AKZ system, but spend our time improving the forum and user experience on ZAM (which helps out all of our ZAM sites) rather than trying to "compete" with one of our own sites. In short, we're going to be keeping (and improving) everything on WoW.AKZ except the database and the systems that it tied into.
However, we're going to try to make this transition as easy for you as possible and really try to highlight all of the things on Wowhead that are comparable with what you've come to expect on ZAM. One example of this is a sig generator that the Wowhead team has been working on specifically for this kind of transitional period. When the change does happen, I'll try to provide you with a substantial guide to all the new toys that you'll be able to use on Wowhead that will translate over to these forums.
And, just so it's clear, WoW.AKZ/ZAM is not going away, especially those areas that the community has spent so long working - namely the forums and user created content. I'm open to any questions, so feel free to toss them my way. This will be a pretty significant change, so I don't expect all unicorns and rainbows, but I do think that they're a positive change and that hopefully, with more time to devote on the user experience, we can attract more users and really push this WoW community as a positive place to be outside of the official forums.
Edited, Nov 30th 2010 9:00am by Micajah
Edited, Nov 30th 2010 9:01am by Micajah