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PCGamingWiki:About

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Revision as of 09:29, 19 March 2012 by Andytizer (talk | contribs)

PCGamingWiki was founded on 09 February 2012. The site and its community have attracted some of the most friendly and passionate PC gamers motivated in helping others with their problems.

Support Us

Please help us to pay for server and bandwidth costs. Donations can be made in the following ways:

Contact

In order to contact us about a general site issue, please leave a message on the Forum where the admins and moderators will be notified immediately by email.

Andrew Tsai aka Andytizer (Founder) is available on:

Forrest Fuqua aka JRWR (Server Admin) is available on:

Thanks

It's an honour to be working on a project which I hope will benefit the PC gaming community.

Thanks to:

  • Everyone who has written, edited and helped with the content on the site.
  • JRWR for his server admin help.
  • The moderators for all their help.
  • All the people who have made donations. Your names are on the home page to show my appreciation to all you guys.
  • GumboJelly for the current logo design.
  • Randall Munroe from xkcd for having such an awesome usage policy for his comics.

Reddit Comics

Origin Story

I’d just picked up Titan Quest on a Steam sale. I spent a huge amount of time navigating through search engines and forum posts trying to see what to install to get the best experience from the game. It turned out that there were a large number of fixes, fan patches and mods developed by the community after the demise of Iron Lore, which vastly improved the original game. However, information about this was strewn all over the internet and hidden in blog posts comments and buried in multi-page posts. Once I was done with the game, however, I realised that I had spent more time setting up the game than I had spent actually playing the game.

I decided to write down all my own research so that I could share it back with the community. However, I wanted the format to be very simple and to contain everything required to get the game to run well on a single page. Instead of a putting everything into a blog or a forum, however, I thought ‘this kind of information would be much better on a wiki where other people could help keep it up to date’. It reminded me of reading the recent xkcd comic alt-text (displayed on our front page) where all long forum posts should have a user-editable section saying – ‘DEAR PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE – this is what we’ve figured out so far…’

PCGamingWiki was registered on the 9th February and I began posting slowly on the site, adding pages here and there as I was setting up and playing more games. It was only when I started asking for help from reddit, that their PC gaming community went into a frenzy for it and upvoted my posts to the front page. I was tracking the real-time analytics (normally 2-3, now in the hundreds from reddit) when I suddenly saw a max influx of referrals from Twitter, and before long we had over 500 concurrent users on the site. TotalBiscuit had tweeted the site and my server was completely overloaded and no one could get in. Not long later, my hosting company told me my traffic was too much for them to handle and they dumped the site and refunded my money.

From the server outage, I had an outpouring of support and interest from the community for help with hosting woes. This included offers for assistance with the server move, free hosting and sponsorship. From this, I recruited JRWR, an amazing server administrator, to help with migrating the wiki to a new service and to help with all aspects of the backend including load balancing and caching. So far we’ve been managing the load really well and the site is growing massively. As of 29th February 2012, we’re standing on 1000 articles and 300 registered users, all in under 3 weeks, and it's still growing immensely.

The community has been really amazing on this project, and I was really surprised and appreciative of the number of donations I received and the level of contributions that people have made. Our users are extremely active, adding fixes and guides, requesting wiki features, spending time in our IRC channel, debating over categories and policies and really taking time to care for the site. I see the wiki as only really working with the support and knowledge of the community and the industrious editors, who only want to help the rest of the community.

My hope is that the site will address PC gaming’s biggest problem - it's intimidating and confusing. My aim is for there to be a single page about every PC game that has and will ever exist, and to list the things that we all want to know about how to fix them and get them to perform the want you want them to: Where are the save games? What’s the difference between the GOG, Origin and the Steam version? What exactly is Steam Cloud syncing? How do you fix the FOV? My wish is that when anyone gets a problem with a game or think of a fix for a game, they turn to PCGamingWiki instead of the forums. This will allow us all to collate information on fixes in a central communal location, in a simple and consistent format, that’s user-editable and can always be kept up to date. Ultimately, I hope that this resource will make PC gaming simpler and better for everyone.