Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

I know it’s not really Relic related, but as you are probably aware we’ve been following The Escapist’s March Mayhem “tournament”. Relic was knocked out of the final four round by Bioware.

If you want to take part in the final round, voting is here. I’ve voted Bioware as they’re a great developer (and Canadian like Relic!) whose games have provided me hours of entertainment.

If anyone is wondering what was up with the downtime, we moved servers. We’re using same hosting provider but now have new hardware for the same price as before.

If you can see this message, you’re looking at the site running on the new servers.

Forums are back as well.

Going on a bit of a “rant” here, I promise, it’ll be short. Little bit of a public shaming for THQ’s support organization who from what I can see are trying to do the best they can with not enough resources.

THQ Support is known to send people to the Relicnews.com forums to get support for Relic’s games. We’re a privately run forums staffed by volunteers. Perfectly reasonable for THQ support to spot a new problem on a community forum, identify a fix from it and document it in their database. But to send people to our forums to ask for help? That tells me that either THQ needs more support staffers, or they’re lazy.

Support for games often requires patches. The game companies provide them. Often games, like Relic games, require you to download patches as you log in. That means they’re already hosted on the publisher’s servers.

Now when it comes to patches, sometimes fans mirror patches as well, and post them publically. Sometimes even posting them in fan run support forums. Moe had his server also resolve to dowpatch.com and had the DoW Patches listed.

So what does THQ Support do? In a public support article, they use the list of DoW patch downloads from Moe’s server. Lazy THQ, Lazy. In all honesty I expect that someone there thought DoWpatch.com was a THQ hosted URL. Still doesn’t excuse it though. The bad part is, that Moe’s server’s been down for the last couple of weeks, so guess what, no one using that article has been able to download patches!

Edit: Just noticed this. I was wondering why people would MSN me asking about that error. THQ Support needs to add this info to the article so people can fix that themselves if the forums go down.

Update: Added “- Sometimes” to the Article title. I’ve been taken to task for suggesting the THQ support team is lazy for sending people to our forums for support as it is not THQ’s Support’s policy to send users to our forums for official support. As a support person, I know how hard it is to keep up when your corporation has you doing to much with too little resources (time and staff). I don’t know what the internal situation is at THQ’s various support organizations, so anything you read above is speculation on my part based on the few issues that have come to light on the Relic forums.

Following with the tradition of what Homeworld.com has become, Sumo gave us their new SumoSac to review.

Relicnews’s review of the SumoSac Chair

Our very own Relicnews Forum staff member, Corsix, is named the winner of this year’s Relic’s Biggest Fan. His contribution to the Relic Community and modding scene includes the Mod Studio Tool for Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.

Corsix will be flying out to Vancouver, Canada to attend Relic’s Community Appreciation Day.

Congrats Corsix!

Looks like it’s a bit of a sad day (and several days after the fact). Relic’s first community manager, Allie “Buggo” Henze is no longer at Relic. Allie was Relic’s first “version” of a community manager. I think I can speak for all the fans when I say that we appreciate everything Allie did for the community and for us fans.

To the members of the Relic community, we have to tell you that Buggo is currently pursuing other opportunities. This has led to some speculation that Relic will no longer be supporting our loyal fans - nothing could be further from the truth. Soon we will be introducing you to new members of Relic who will carry forth the commitment we have to our fans. We are expanding our community support greatly over the coming months; better support for our modders, frequent updates about what’s going on in the studio, expanding our numbers, contests, content, and more.

And for those wondering, we are still hosting our upcoming community open house - you don’t want to miss it because you’ll be treated to some sneak previews of our work.

Thank you for your continued support!

Relic Entertainment

Official post here.

Buggo does still have an account on the forums, and hopefully will be able to pop in and say hi (I’d not expect her to be able to comment on Relic and all the cool stuff she worked on). The forum staff helped Relic out by modifying her account to be named “Relic” and then created a new account for Buggo. Any posts on the “Relic” account before April 24th were made by Allie, and anything after were from another Relic rep. I expect to hear more soon from Relic about their intentions, but it’s been made very clear to me that they’re not going to go without a community manager type position again. Also, as far as I know, the Relic Open House is still on, and judging on the biggest fan contest starts today at noon pacific.

Allie, you set the bar pretty high for any future community folks at Relic. I hope whoever gets the position next can meet the community’s expectations. Good luck in the future and we’ll see you around!

A new video has showed up on Youtube last evening. I’ll say that it’s pretty darn impressive watching big angry giant robots slug it out against the horde of orcs.

Rickrolled

Relicnews’ resident teenage genius, Corsix, has won a Grand Prize in Google’s Highly Open Participation Contest (or GHOP for short). The author of the premier modding tool Corsix’s Mod Studio as well as a Relicnews moderator, he won the prize for his numerous and substantive contributions to the Drupal open-source content management system.

You can read what Corsix has to say about winning GHOP on his website, and see his name in lights on the Grand Prize Winners page, along with some details on why Drupal selected him as the winner for their project.

Ok guys please stop asking for keys as the contest is over now.

It’s lottery time! Reply to this newspost and you might win a key for the OF beta test! The post number of your submitted reply is your lottery number, and we’re giving away keys to the first five prime numbers, starting with the number 1.

This means that posts number 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 will get keys for the OF beta.

Don’t cheat, we’ll notice and we’ll murder you with a rusty fork. This is not open to people who just signed up today. Duplicate accounts will lead to severe rusty fork abuse.

Edit(Someguy):
Iro43, theshadow, jagdtiger00, Dave, and Sean are the winners. Please send your e-mails to ahenze@relic.com with RNFRONTPAGE, username, e-mail in the subject line.

ps. Use the e-mails you used to register for the comments, not your relic forums account (unless they happen to be the same).

pss. I’ll try to see if I can get more keys

There’s a thread running on the forums about people’s recollections of the Relic Open House. If you haven’t already, pop in and have a read. If you visited Relic for the open house, and haven’t posted your impressions yet, go for it!

Relic didn’t announce any new games, expansions or anything like that, but we did get to find out they have several teams working on various projects. Watch here for an article (once approved - NDA issues), about my recollections for the weekend.