Hi, all! I am a newbie to this amazing game. I am posting in a spirit of humility and thankfulness to all your time and work in preserving the community. So I hope nobody will be offended by my frankness, but I have been emboldened by my, so far, very pleasant encounters with some of you, to jump in and offer a "fresh perspective" and a suggestion or two.
The suggestion simply has to do with web presence. The two "official" sites,
councilofelrond.org and
meccg.net, should be merged. Or rather, both URLs should point to the same site. And that site should be the current CoE site.
The
CoE site looks modern and pleasant, and it has the benefit of sounding really official. The content, however, can be expanded. Right now it seems like a page for the Council and about the Council.
MeCCG.net has the better URL, but when you open it, its design screams, "1990s!" Continuing the impression that "this site and this game are dead" are the many prominent links to old and/or obsolete sites it hosts. For heaven's sake, don't ever list "Worlds 2006" unless it's next to a link for "Worlds 2008" and "Worlds 2009", even if those links just take you to bare bones info! Don't get me wrong: it's good to host archival material. But put a simple "Archive" link at the bottom of the index, which takes you to a sub-index of that material.
The best content on MeCCG.net is on the
Dutch Council site. In terms of content, this is actually the single best MECCG home on the net. But the newbie is confused about that he must go to the Dutch site to read the
official rules (which seems to be different from the CoE Rules page) or to download the
Beginner's Rules, the Map, and card list spreadsheet. Much better if this content were fully integrated into the main site.
Chris's Trade Center -- advertised as "Simply
the place to go for trading, buying and selling of MeCCG cards" -- is another indispensable site which should be fully integrated and given a facelift. I want to emphasize, though, that names, faces, personalities, like "Chris," should never be removed. Personality is good. I'd actually like to see more of that. Mark's X. Joe's Y. Wolfgang's Z. But under the aegis of the official Council.
There are quite a few "newbie intros" around, but I found Treebeard's
What is MECCG and
All about the sets to be particularly timely and coherent. What would be even more helpful/accessible with pictures (something like
this plus a little bit of
this).
I daresay the average person is more intrigued and impressed by the existence of
Lure of MeCCG than just about anything (including Worlds).
The two forums should be merged together. Probably all three, counting the Lure forums. I know, I know. Tricky, touchy.
I think you get the gist of what I'm saying. I'm just throwing some ideas out there, not angrily demanding immediate change!
In short, it would be great to see something like a mix between a "commercial" site (like imagine you are ICE and you are still selling it!) and a "one ultimate fan site to rule them all" (which I think MeCCG.net set out to do but never really got going). Thanks for reading.