Mahiko San Log: The year that was, and will be (003)

Hello guys it’s been a while hasn’t it! Although I promised at least a bi-monthly MSL, the latter part of 2015 was pretty brutal administration-wise. So let’s see..

Our staff has increased by 33.3%!!!!

Whoa! 33% is a huge growth!!!! Yes, it’s all true!!!! Amazing!! We have increased from TWO members to a whole THREE! You know what they say, “There’s strength in prime numbers!”. While I may have made up that quote, yes, we have a new helper – Welcome her in, my girlfriend Princess!!!!

So since around November last year – our organizational structure looks like this

• Mahiko San: God.
• Maruko San: Corporate communications, Planning & Strategy, attempts to apply business-like structure to fansite management (much needed improvement)
• Princess: Slave

Princess, while not an expert in FF, has played the game and levelled up and is familiar with a lot of the chumpy aspects of FF. Her real purpose? To help me with the gruntwork which involves brainless copy/pasting, format checking, image uploading, spellchecking and other mundane activities. Which is good, since it frees up ‘god’ to make more meaningful updates!

Her motives are actually selfish – so I may ultimately have more free-time which SHE THINKS I’ll spend with her! What a value move!!! Here’s hoping she never reads this!

Mahiko San, if you are god – why have you forgotten us!

HAH! Divinity works in mysterious ways, scrub! The site is constantly being improved, even when the changes aren’t obvious. For example, my current goal is to refine all crafting guides to a modern standard. This little “bubble” of guides has 27 specific items in it.

2/8 leveling guides have been COMPLETELY REWORKED (ALC, ARM)
8/8 levequest list guides have been re-checked and fixed!
8/8 DoH class guides have been “princess fixed” but needs Gods Work

Are these new guides? No. Do you see them in the feed? The leveling guides, maybe. Again – you might NOT see these things, but a lot is happening behind the scenes. (for example, the linking to all levequest fish and ff14angler more-info links in the FSH leveling guide)

There’s a ton of little things going on. I haven’t forgotten about you guys or the site. FAITH is the framework in which gods operate. Have it, and I will come!

2015 – the Umbral Era

Ho boy, so where do I start here? What happened in 2015? Well, a couple things.

Heavensward Released

This one. This. Not like this… not like this… So basically my process follows a priority system like this:

• Make patch specific guides (BiS, new content)
• Any easy quick fixes to typos or info? Patch.
• Any “eternally useful” guides missing? Create.
• Any older guides need a major rehaul? Rework.

The last two share priority as “low”, but I’ve been focusing on that recently. So how did Heavensward break this pattern, and subsequently nearly break ME? See now, at the top of the list you get something like…

• Create every 3.0 specific guide (Leveling guides to 60, new skills? scrip? gathering rotations? try. to. remember. just. how. much. heavensward. added.)

So everything else quickly ground to a halt. Not only did I have to play double-time to actually experience the new content, the more time-consuming part is actually CREATING these new guides!

So I remember getting a comment “You guys used to update so fast! Whats up?”, well, heavensward was like a nuclear bomb. I remember listing down all the updates I needed & guides that need creation – and the number was above TWO HUNDRED. Needless to say, I suffered burnout.

Alex Savage tore me a new one

To top it all off, we have the now infamous Alex Savage. This… so much this… Imagine doing this while tackling that beast? Our static was still within the first handful of people to clear, and lemme tell you… That just ripped into any soul I had left. Again, burnout. Which ultimately affected my site-work.

The administrative side

Ohhhh now here’s the one. I can go on a long rant about security issues but that would suck. So lemme just say that “We learned a lot” and did a lot of things to prevent this kinda stuff from happening.

• We have a paid firewall and security service
• We migrated to a more secure web host.
• We improved our security protocols

Don’t wanna waste your time with all the details but things have been looking up since. The security issues were a huge toll on my mind and a hassle to you guys so it was our top priority for some time.

Lessons Learned

It’s hard to explain it here, but needless to say I learned a lot. When the next major patch hits – I will definitely be more prepared! So now im going back to the old flowchart of “Patch, Create, Rework”, because I want every guide to be up to my new standards. It wont happen overnight, but It’s something I want to give to the community.

2015 was tough, but my vitality increased by at least 17 points, coupled with about 30 DEF and MDEF so I’d say worth.

Visual Update – new theme

This one is a bit tricky! We’re currently looking at a few themes and testing them on our duplicate test site. We have a few issues with each theme we try, but please know we’re working hard on it. The main problem with FFXIVGuild is the content is SO WIDE. And most themes these days are quite thin.

It’s an interesting process, but in the meantime we can refine our current theme to be “usable”. It’s a move that we want to stick to for at LEAST 2 years so we wanna make it solid before doing so. Thanks for your patience!

Looking back, going forward

Honestly, there’s still so much more to say. But to summarize it, I’ll strive to make the site better for you guys. Simple as that, I guess!

You know, each time I write one of these I feel a little more relaxed. I don’t know if I can commit to scheduled posts, but I’ll try to write when I think it’s needed. It’s fun, but I honestly don’t know what’s holding me back in regards to this. Let’s see huh?

My to-do list grows and grows and 2015 seemed like it grew faster than it was getting chunked, but I’m getting more and more efficient at doing this, so I hope you all will continue to grow with me and FFXIVGuild.

Cheers,
Mahiko “God” San.

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