EpicAdvice Gains Momentum

Mary Diamond

Wednesday February 17, 2010

Several of us here at Momentum Workshop have personal projects and interests that we hope will someday evolve into potential income streams. It's the new American Dream, really, to find something you love doing and figure out a way to profit while doing it. One of those projects has been ramping up to epic proportions in the last few months, and we're kind of excited to have this chance to talk about it.

EpicAdvice.com is a website designed to be a question and answer forum for players of the massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Even more than that, it is reminiscent of the game itself with it's system of honor badges for thorough answers and accomplishment rewards for specific activities. A member's level of involvement and number of questions asked or answered gradually contribute to that member's profile and status on the site.

Those sage few who have been voted up by their peers for consistently helpful questions/answers can even become moderators of the site by virtue of their online contributions. All of this structuring is facilitated by a pre-existing site for developers and programmers called stackoverflow.com. The idea for EpicAdvice belongs to our friend Aaron Cox over at Greymass Studios, and Momentum Workshop's own Corey Frang.

As of December 2008 World of Warcraft had 11.5 million users, and we at Momentum Workshop all have registered accounts. Most of us have put our gaming on hold in order to pursue epic wins in the software solutions and web development field, but being a part of the EpicAdvice crew makes it harder and harder not to log in. Players of the game have had many resources at their disposal to help improve play and acquisition of in-game resources but we think this one is by far the most concise. EpicAdvice is not a discussion board and it does not cater to forum trolls. In fact, trolls and flamers are voted down by the users themselves and despite boasting over 30,000 visitors total and 60,000 page views in the last thirty days, the site has not allowed advertisements from gold sellers. Ad space on the page is currently being auctioned off via ProjectWonderful.com, which is turning out to be an easily managed advertising solution.

Their next project, EpicPlan.com, is in development and accepting applications for the beta. This is a site that offers players a platform within which to create detailed animated strategy guides for instances within the World of Warcraft. What's awesome about it is that it's currently free to join and it allows you to share any plan you create as an answer on EpicAdvice.

http://epicplan.com/plan/4

For players who've never ventured into the complicated 10 - 40 player raids in the game, EpicPlan.com provides floorplans and moveable icons that demonstrate exactly where each member of the raiding party needs to stand and what actions to take at each interval of the attack. The presentation can be viewed as a continuous video, or clicked through each step manually.

This is the kind of strategy guide platform that could assist just about any group effort. Imagine making an Epic Plan for a family trip to Disneyworld. Mom and Dad could be represented by icons moving through the park to each ride and the kiddies could see exactly what route to take from Space Mountain to the emergency meeting spot if they get lost.

While they are still testing and polishing the EpicPlan strategy engine for it's WOW specific purposes, the project really could move. We wish the best of luck to Aaron at Greymass Studios and all his projects, and we hope to continue supporting any future epic productions. Be sure to check out the EpicAdvice blog for updates and information on these projects in the future.