There is something we've been discussing on the irc-chat off and on:
As some of you may know, I've been jumping forth and back between P:C and SHOTN quite a lot lately. And I'm not the only person who does that.
To me it is a problem, because I often suffer a nagging feeling of neglecting the respective other project, when I work on one of them without helping the other one for a while. That may sound silly and probably is, but that is what nearly gets me to a point where I want to quit one of the two projects, even though I consider my participation in either projects as crucial. That may sound as if I thought rather high of myself, but to me it often seems just to be the little bit of support I do in addition to what other people already do that can make all the difference.
You probably already see what I'm getting at: I propose we merge the projects. In the first place that would include using the same website and forum and a common organisation.
There are two big advantages and one possibly big disadvantage I see about doing this:
Advantages:
- We can compensate weaknesses the respective projects have. Skyrim has never been as strong on lore and "story" as P:C or TR, for example. Some parts of SHOTN are not as solidified and do not carry the mark of the nirn-universe as strongly as they maybe should. If we had a common forum, some of the people from P:C could stop by and give input without having to sign up somewhere else and involve themselves more than they want. Skyrim on the other hand, as far as I can tell, has a better workforce in the interior and exterior section and could lend a hand around here, which practically happens already anyway. But the fact that the forums are not divided would make it much more convenient for a couple of people, I imagine.
- There can be one person doing publicity for both projects. And we can use the same space for both projects to show off. It might be more likely that there is something to show off at a given by one of the projects.
- Together we might have an active staff size similar to that of TR. We would have a bigger weight in the modding-community as a collaboration that works on the active province mods, given that we can increase publicity in some way.
Disadvantage:
- We run into the risk of the presence of a sibling project on the same forum causing people to lose their focus and stray themselves too far. That aside, it would actually increase the feasibility and productivity to only do one of the two projects, anyway.
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But I have spent so much effort on both projects that I want both to continue and at least reach some of their aims. Reaching that common release we've been speaking about, would already be an unlikely but desirable mark, I'd definetively love to see it hit and of course, seeing the Nibenay after that would be even better than that.
The way I see it there are only two ways I can go about this:
- I only work on one of the two projects and leave the other project to itself.
- We put the projects together and combine and optimize our capabilities and try to stem both projects.