Category Archives: News
Field of Glory II: Dark Ages!
Prepare to be sacked!
Artwork
The next installment for Field of Glory II is coming and nobody will be able to stem the tide. According to our contacts at Slitherine, Wolves at the Gate “depicts the epic struggles that newly forked European kingdoms had to face for their survival during the ‘Dark Ages’, a long period of recurrent conflicts that eventually gave birth to Europe.
By: Grogheads Press
Moving On!
A note from the content editor ~
Brant Guillory, 9 September 2018
Hey folks,
If you frequent our forums, then you’ve probably seen the announcement that I’m leaving GrogHeads. This wasn’t an easy decision, but it’s the one I felt the need to make at this point in my life.
I’m leaving behind a fun, vibrant, exciting community that didn’t exist 7 years ago. Together, we took GrogHeads from “non-existent” to a serious site in the wargaming world. At one point we were one of the top 100k sites in the US, and were regularly killing our competition in some pretty neat measurables, like the time the average user spent on the site.
You guys rallied around your fellow community members like no other. One of our Wives of Grog™ got inundated with Christmas cards when they’d moved to a new base only weeks earlier, and he had to pack up for Afghanistan, leaving her with a newborn and few other kids in a new town for the holidays. Twice, you guys rallied to support Bayonet Jr getting to a major soccer tournament when I was un(der)employed. You pitched in for the community ranging from fighting childhood cancer to surprise birthday card avalanches to helping a young man fighting possible vision loss. We’ve had Grogs show up a funerals for folks we only knew through online interactions, with cards signed on behalf of the whole family.
That generous spirit is a key reason we had an active and vibrant thread just to donate extra copies of games to each other, usually digital codes, but often tabletop games, too.
And the annual family reunion that was Origins became a tentpole event for some people’s summer vacations.
We started a podcast, a video show, tried a few different recurring series, and peppered a variety of Civ AARs with unnecessary sexual innuendos. We wore our bowling shirts like a university history department tried to form a biker gang and ended up going out for tacos instead, and what started on a lark turned into 2500+ posts of puns to torture MetalDog.
It’s been a fun 6-1/2 years, but it’s time to pass the torch. Gus & Jarhead will be steering the ship now, and it’ll be exciting to see where they take it.
I’d tell y’all to give them the same amount of love you gave me, but that’s just kind of a mean thing to wish on them!
You guys take care, and remember that it’s all just one big, dysfunctional gaming family.
— Bayonet 06, Out.
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
Forum Database Trouble!
Crap! We blew up our database! ~
GrogHeads Newsdesk, 13 July 2018
Apparently the Russian hacker disapproved of the latest episode of Dragon Up The Past and they took down our forum database. Either that, or our YUUUUUUGE fanbase has posted so many messages that we blew up the server. Go with whichever one makes you feel better 🙂
Meanwhile, you can always just use the comment area below this post to continue to discuss and/or commiserate.
Or hit our Facebook page.
Or our Twitter feed.
Or you could, y’know… go play a game!
UPDATE 2245 EDT 7/13
We got an alert from GoDaddy at approximately 1645 today that the database for our forums exceeded the size limit for our hosting plan. About 60% of that limit is the table in that holds all of your posting history, so it’s not a lot of fluff.
Of course we get this alert 15 minutes before the curtain comes down on the work week on the East Coast, and as everyone is already bailing out of work with visions of beer & wargames dancing in their heads.
Now, when this happened, we were only about 5% over the DB limit and well within the capabilities of SMF’s own internal maintenance tools of paring the error logs, backup files, etc. to bring us within compliance. But we’d had our write-access completely shut off, which meant no one was able to log in at all (because each login writes a login event). So not was our admin team locked out, but the database continued to balloon as you – our loyal fans – kept trying to log in and get errors when SMF was telling you that you were locked out (each failed login writes an error).
We shot up almost 1/2 GB in 3 hours thanks to all y’all GrogHeads-addicted forum geeks.
But we still couldn’t get into our forum to do anything.
Our next plan was to create and download a backup of the DB, and then attempt to manually edit the SQL tables using GoDaddy’s built-in web access. Of course, that was right when the server threw an Apache error, and what was normally a 10 minute process dragged on to 80 minutes before GoDaddy shut it down and restarted it.
We manually edited the database, and go down from 155% of our capacity limit to 40% of that limit, but we still couldn’t get in, because even though we got below the size limit, we’re still hitting the threshold on rows within the database.
Worse, GoDaddy wouldn’t even allow access to the DB for our team to even try to run the built-in SMF maintenance tools. After 85 minutes on the phone, we finally found someone who would let us get into the system and run those SMF maintenance tasks.
At this point, we’re online, but honestly not sure for how long.
And we’re still on GoDaddy right now, but honestly not sure for how long.
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
Connections 2018 Announcement
This year’s professional wargaming conference ~
GrogHeads Newsdesk, 15 May 2018
This year’s professional wargaming conference, Connections, is being held at Ft McNair in Washington, DC 17-20 July.
Click to enlarge the flyer below for details.
Chat about it below, or in our forums, or hit our FaceBook page >>
Some Thoughts on Kickstarter Financial Benefits and Risks
Is the risk worth the reward? ~
Avery Abernethy, 27 February 2018
Kickstarter has provided significant start-up funds for many gaming projects. Pillars of Eternity raised almost $4 million dollars. The 7th Edition of Call of Cthulhu raised over $561,000 and many smaller PC, boardgame, and tabletop games raised enough money to fund their project. But for individuals, funding a kickstarter game project is fraught with risk. There are no guarantees that a funded project will be completed either on time or ever. Kickstarter itself does not guarantee that projects are legitimate or that they will be completed. There are a number of horror stories about funded Kickstarter projects which never completed their project and ultimately returned nothing to backers.
From a financial perspective, how can you decide if contributing to a Kickstarter Campaign is a good bet? I’ve recently helped fund a couple of kickstarter projects after overcoming extraordinary levels of apprehension. I’ve got a few thoughts on how to consider a decision to fund a Kickstarter game project.
The Unavoidable Risk Is Huge
Even a casual reading of Kickstarter’s legal language shows Kickstarter itself does not stand behind any funded project in any way. They do not promise that a funded project will be: competed; completed on time; or completed in a manner consistent with the project’s promotion. Kickstarter’s policies have been tested in US courts. Legally, if you pay into a funded Kickstarter project and the project fails, your only recourse is suing people responsible for the individual Kickstarter project. Good luck collecting from a failed funded project. If an individual or a company does not have any assets, you will not collect anything even with successful lawsuit. The conclusion I draw from this is pretty simple. Don’t fund a Kickstarter project if you are unable to accept the risk of losing 100% of your pledge.
