Twilight * Call For Guides *

[Shadowwolf]

Alrighty folks,

Heres the deal. Its a new expansion, and with new expansions come a great sea of unknowns. We've all read guides online and we've probably all thought to ourselves sometimes reading them things like "this guide is awesome" or even "this guide is complete crap, who writes this stuff? It didnt help me at all".

Guides serve a good purpose in helping others out. Not only your own guild mates but other folks out in the WoW universe. Think how cool it would be to be in a PUG one day and some random person from a random server say to you "Oh wow, I know you! You wrote that kick ass guide on <insert subject here>!". Trust me, nothing feels better than being recognized for your efforts, I have been hearing things like that over the years from my presentations, speeches and writings in the technology community. Its a great feeling to know you helped people out.

Here is your opportunity to do just that! What I would like is a bunch of guides, on anything WoW related that you think needs a guide. What I mean by that is, think of something you either have done or want to do in the game that is difficult or challenging and would have been or would be a lot easier if someone had given you a step-by-step to point you in the right direction. The guide could be on anything you want, even something like how to config a custom UI or something. Hell I'll even consider things sorta but not entirely related to WoW.

Now heres where I make the deal sweeter...

Im going to make it a sort of contest. Thats right, you wont be necessarily competing against one another, but its a little extra incentive to partake in this endeavor. Im going to award a prize to everyone who decides they'd like to give it a try, and for the top 5 best guides we get (which I will put to guild voting so your fellow guild members will decide which they like best) the award will be pretty nice. They'll be things used in game like pets, etc. Maybe even some RL stuff, like a WoW game card.  

Heres the guidelines for this little contest:

• Guides must be something about something worth writing a guide about. I know this is kind of subjective but its pretty easy to know what does and doesnt need a guide. For instance a guide thats 1 paragraph long describing how to bandage yourself in game would be dumb. Make it a subject worthwhile but you are free to be creative about it.
• Your guide can be either written or a movie. Ill accept either or and movie guides wont get any added "bonus" of being any better than written ones. Its simply your preference.
• Don't copy and past or plagiarize another guide elsewhere. Trust me, I'll be checking. While some subjects will have very little room for deviation from other guides, its easy to tell whats originality and whats just a copied version.

How to do your submissions:

• MS Word, Textfile, PDF or other kind of document format is fine.
• A forum post is also fine.
• Email to myself (ill PM you my address if you need it, not posting it here due to creepy crawly spam bots on the interwebz)

Whats the intent of all this?

I'd like to put them on our Wiki. Quite simply I want to pass on the knowledge and experience we have here as a guild for all others in the WoW community. I think that over the last few years a lot of the guide sites and support sites for WoW have become too commercialized and are more concerned with ads, using their "premium" services, or something to honestly put any sort of worthwhile or genuinely beneficial information out on the web for those of us that play the game. I think as a guild everyone here has a lot to offer in knowledge and experience and that sharing that will not only be beneficial to ourselves internally, but if it can benefit the WoW community as a whole will also come back to benefit us as well.

Of course, you will get full credit for all the work you do. If you write a guide, you should be given full credit for it because its not easy to create something like that.

Now as much as I would like to give as much time in the world to make these, I have to put some sort of time constraint on this whole thing to make sure everyone has a goal date to work on finishing by. I think 1 month is ample time to write a guide up, so setting a date of March 4th, 2011 should be plenty of time. If you have your submission to me by then, can take the full month or sooner, whatever it takes you, then once the 4th comes, we will put them all on display for the guild and give everyone some time to vote on them.

Again, everyone who partakes in this will be given a prize, I want you to be rewarded for your efforts in some way other than the satisfaction of seeing your guide help others as well.

[Shadowwolf]

I forgot to mention, please let me know your intentions of submitting a guide for this via PM or email. This way I can kind of get an idea how many people plan to partake. Thanks =)

[Shadowwolf]

Just to clarify more on what im looking for guys, Im not looking for sophistication. If you want to write a guide on something simple but you think itll be of value, great. Im want to encourage everyone's creativity and desire to impart knowledge.

How sophisticated your subject is that your guide targets is entirely on you and will not have any impact on winning. I'll be providing a list of judging criterion that everyone in the guild will need to match your guide against so that every guide has a fair chance regardless of the subject.

Some good guidelines to follow are:

• Write like a newspaper reporter, not a grad student. This isnt a science project and its not being graded. Every guide is going to be put to use for anyone on the web to see. Make the subject of it attractive to the readers by showing passion in your writing of it. Even the most boring topics can be made to sound interesting if written in that way.
• Have fun with your writing, make sure that your guide doesnt read like its being narrated by Henry Kissinger. Add some humor or engage the reader as if you are having a conversation with them. Think about how you would speak to someone one to one if you were instructing them as a friend and use that to set the tone of your writing.
• Keep your objective clear to the reader, don't tangent off into long stories of how you came up with this or that aspect of the method. Don't waste their time, or at least don't waste it up front. Side tangents kept short and few are engaging but too many and your reader will get lost.
• If you're trying to express something complex, simplify your writing so it doesn't get in the way. Try to break it down in its most simplistic form so that it doesnt intimidate the person reading your guide.
• Think about what your audience knows and doesn't know, and what they want and don't want. Express things in terms of what they know and want, not what you know.

Keep asking me questions guys, I am so happy to see you taking an interest in this.

[Shadowwolf]

Well 2 days after the deadline and I got no submissions so Ill chalk this idea up to a dud along with the scavenger hunt =P