You should've seen him on Smallville. (I'm a little embarrassed to say that I watched that show.) But he was shirtless a lot!

Where do I see the Fleet going? Its taken me some time to sit down and think exactly what I think and what I hope.

I for one, am very excited to see this question being asked so openly! I think it’s the way the best guilds need to operate, the ones that last the longest would include involvement from all its members.

Anyway, on to what I think; the MMO developers seem to be taking things in small steps these days with an ever changing MMO marketplace. Its also the way I work, while it is good to have aspirations of where we want to be, I don’t want to get too distracted in that to not give the here and now the best of my efforts and make it the best experience possible. As I have read, people are talking about expanding to MMOs. Not everyone plays just one game, there may be a few, especially with some going free to play. I think it would be great to give a home to our current members in other games, but only if they prove popular enough with our fleet to justify putting in the time and effort to expand. As it has been mentioned, something comes out, something goes free to play and people go “oh shiney” and flock to it, to soon get bored and abandon it.

I see right now our focus being STO with a keen eye on the horizon to Star Wars. However, something has come our way which has a few people interested! Champions Online. While I am reluctant to say, lets go jump on the band wagon, it would be interesting to see who would go over to play that game. I know I will probably using it as my STO backup or when I need a little break.

I believe we have a great community here already and I wouldn’t like to see us expand too far, too fast to the point of fracture. There could be such a thing as too big a guild! Unless its micromanaged, but thinking of that is starting to give me a headache already.

Back to the here and now, the Fleet is my main focus, I won’t be going anywhere soon and hope to provide the best experience for all our other and future members. I have said it before and will say it again, we have the best people in the game right here. I want to look at improving and refining what we do and can do before we think about expansion. For example, I am looking at the Academy right now and want to make it the best for the fleet as I know everyone else is with their own sections (which is why its taking some time…. That and my total lack of computer skills).

We have a great future ahead of us though, and I just think we should take it a step at a time… enjoy the journey.

and yes same name, the anniversary events have been keeping me from it though.

Yeah the vampire was in Battlestar galactica too. He looks much better in Being Human. Especially since he is naked more often :)

I like Stonewall being a "multi-verse" kind of hub for members. It offers members a set of friendly faces wherever they go. I also like that Nick has stated it won't necessarily be the same officers, even though affiliated. Not that I have a problem with the officers (I don't!), but it is exhausting and draining managing one guild in one game.. let alone multiple games!

I like the sense of community in Stonewall these days. I hope that remains consistent in STO, and spreads constructively to other guilds in other games

Sam Witwer has been my biggest TV crush since I first saw him on BSG, then later on Smallville.

Russell Tovey is probably in the top 5... that is why I am so torn about starting to watch these series... I hate vampire/werewolf/gore-fest shows :S

The Vampire character in the US version I believe had a reoccurring role in Smallvile.

I was so happpy when I heard they are making a US version. Honestly, I like the US version more, if only cause I understand what the hell their talking about now. A couple new episodes of the UK version have aired since the US version started and I haven't even bothered to watch them, but I watch the US version as soon as I can.

I think the actors/actress for the main characters that they choose were great. I've seen the guy who's playing the vampire in some other things too and I thought he was good before.

I really like this discussion. I've belonged to a few guilds and player groups on other MMO's but none were ever like this. None were dedictated, supportive, and easy going all at the same time. And of course none where comprised of (almost completely) gay trekkies; a very rare breed (or so I thought lol).

I had to stop and think for a second about how I actaully came upon SWF because I couldn't remember at first. I've been a part of it for so long (at least 9 months before the game actually launched). I know I didn't google "gay star trek online guild" cheifly because I really didn't think there actually were a lot of other gay Trekies. I think I was looking for a definitive map of the star trek galaxy that was going to be in the game. I found a pretty good looking map in the picture search results and when I clicked on the link it took me to a SWF forum post by you, Nick :). I read and posted on a few more of the topics and I was hooked.

I'm feel very lucky to have found this community and look forward to continuing to be an active part in it. I feel that our next step should be to build a good group on SWTOR and see how that goes before heavily committing any upcoming MMO's. With regards to pre-existing MMO I'm wondering if anyone has thought about putting an offical presence on World of Warcraft or City of Heroes? Those are the three MMO's I play and I'm gonna have to really work on fitting SWTOR in but I'm totally going to. As for regional events and IRL's I'm totally down, SF pride sounds fun and @ Brandon; I would love to assist with any CA or Las Vegas events. We still gotta go to Jeri Ryan's Husbands's restaurant! lol.

Anyone else watching this? So far I kind of like it. I actually like the BBC original better. But here is also an article that I wrote for my school newspaper reviewing the show.

http://media.www.thegrandviews.com/media/storage/paper1329/news/2011/02/04/Opinion/Vampire.Werewolf.Ghost.Roommates.In.being.Human-3973488.shtml

2 for today.

Now to the topic on hand, i like the social hub idea. Most new games could be supported with just new sections in the forum and new groups.

Someone mentioned Rifts, the only reason that thoroughly awesome game is not on my radar is the fact that so many awesome games are already there. I have Crysis 2 in march, (possibly) SWTOR in september, Diablo 3 sometime next year (i hope). Thats not even thinking of the games i have decided not to try due to all the cool ones im looking forward to. I have dropped down on my estimations of playing Civ 5, Brink, and maybe even Rage. I dont know what i will do if they actually do create a Fallout mmo.

For those of you that may be reading and following along, I encourage you to post your own thoughts about all this.

How do you see Stonewall Fleet developing further? How do you feel about us creating future guilds in other games? And more importantly, how do you think all of this should be developed? What ways should we go about handling these things?

I've posted a lot so far about "what I think" or "what I believe," but you're opinion counts too and its deeply appreciated. How Stonewall Fleet develops is up to all of you; so have a voice and make your opinion known.

I believe totally in transparency of the leadership and I'm putting my thoughts out there now so that as I develop a clearer picture on how all this will work, all of you can help steer me in the direction that the majority of us would be happy with.

Quote by starseed

Expanding SF into other games would be a great idea because it took a lot of work to build this framework, and it would be much easier to simply adapt that framework to another game, than to start anew. There are times when I get STO-phobia, and block the game from my memory for weeks, or months at a time... so it would be great to have SF take root in another game that I would be interested in for when those times come.

However, Fraggot gaming (a gay FPS gaming community) seems to have become very inactive lately, and it probably has a direct link to the health of the core games that it was involved in. There are still several members playing FPS games under the Fraggot banner on a regular basis, but the community as a whole seems to be fairly stagnant. :(

An mmo-based community would not have nearly the same levels of those types of problems, but I think it would be a good idea to make sure and focus on the health of the STO community first and foremost... as suggested.

I look forward to the release of the star wars mmo, and SF's involvement.

I was looking at Fraggot the other day and it seemed really quiet! Sad to hear that such a great community is slowing down. Hopefully it can rebound soon!

To some extent, that's why I think it's important for us to go into another MMO. I, for one, want STO to last for decades to come, but sadly, at some point, they will have to shut down the servers. I hate to think what would happen to the Stonewall Fleet community on that day if we didn't develop other guilds.

Creating the Member's Handbook, Code of Conduct, and the other methods and policies that we've developed over the years is where the real work has been. While creating subsequent guilds and an organization to help them interact isn't easy, it's definitely better than seeing our friends feel the need to leave when they decide to play a different MMO.

Quote by Halish

Your eyes actually need to be focused on the central hub of Stonewall which is currently STO. I've seen a few communities fall apart because the leaders eyes are fixed elsewhere and they normally end up passing power from themselves to other leaders in the original game and the community falls apart. Then as Silver says the new game community doesn't fit right and people start to leave and you're left with people scrambling about trying to rebuild on another new game without a base of operations.

One of the things that I've been committed to from the beginning is that the officers of Stonewall Fleet will have nothing to do with who's the officers of Knights of Stonewall. The two officer groups will be separate and manage their own respective guilds. As well, I can tell you that I ain't going anywhere soon. While SWTOR looks like a impressive MMO that will be a ton of fun to play through with you guys, I'm a Trekkie through and through. After I burn threw the content in that MMO, I'll be right back here and I know most of the other Officers feel the same way. Several have no plans to even play SWTOR. So don't fear us abandoning STO anytime soon. I want to make it so that Stonewall Fleet and those not interested in other MMOs don't notice the slightest change as we go into different guilds.

I hope to setup the new guild with a compilation of dedicated Stonewall members shortly that can, with my guidance and assistance, form a stable guild with the same feelings of community and family that we have done so well to form here.

Quote by Halish

I'd love to see us in 10 years time as a fully functional social website, a central hub. Where we all talk and discuss everything and anything we can possibly think of. This would be the new home and we'd instead have "offshoots" into different games and if one falls apart it doesn't matter because the entire guild is still connected through the social hub.

This eliminates the problem we've seen with some of our members quitting STO they also seem to feel that they have to abandon the website because it's tied into STO. It's an absolute shame.

Quote by Silver101uk

A group I was with before did have a central hub the website but they never commited to a game and would let it fall to the way side when the next big thing came out, when I say we go with caution is that yeah make this the central hub, (lots of work for nick :D:D:D) but we support thoughs here that are making a group in the new game and any from that game that join us are made to feel a part of the whole community not just a small section of it.

Quote by SBOSlayer

I think that the way you are going about developing different website communities for different games is a very smart idea. It allows the communities to stay seperate while becoming combined. I guess an intersting question for you nick, is the Stonewall Fleet site always going to be the central hub if we land up expanding into other games with the removal of everything STO related and STO have it's own branched website like SWF. Then developing a website that is the hub, where all gamers in different stonewall communities can meet with their individual gaming sites or respective pages at the hub. The potential for that could seriously be amazing, with a lot of people coming through stonewall. However, from a financial point of you it must cost a bomb with the way it is at the moment and managing that many members between different communities is a lot of work. So yeah :P I'm just throwing ideas about.

Would we ever strip down stonewallfleet.com and make it just a general guild site for all of the guilds that we're associated with? Doubtful. That would present a whole host of problems. For instance, how do we organize a Welcome Center that includes articles and procedures for X number of games? Or how do we operate a store that includes in-game items from X number of games and allows any of them to be purchased with a different games currency? Having different sites for each guild allows us to specialize that site to that guild and game, and having one site for all of them would be very difficult.

We could have one "social hub" site that's mainly just the social networking features that are shared with all of the different guilds, but like I said above I don't think it could handle all of the information that we need for different members to have access to.

The way that multisites mainly work is that there's a Master site that controls and stores most everything and Slave sites that pull information from that Master site. Right now, stonewallfleet.com is the Master site while knightsofstonewall.com is a slave site. For awhile now, I've been planning on doing a complete refresh of the sites and when that happens, I was planning on rearranging it so that the Master site becomes some yet-to-be-created site and stonewallfleet.com and knightsofstonewall.com become slave sites to it. (This is mainly for administration purposes. Having it laid out this way is a lot easier to manage.) When I do that, I could easily turn that Master site into the "social hub."

I think this could echo the organizational structure that I see developing for Stonewall Fleet and the other guilds we create. We'd make a new umbrella organization who's major responsibilities would be to see to the needs of our current guilds and help assist in creating new guilds as desired by the community. Within that umbrella, would be Stonewall Fleet, Knights of Stonewall and so forth. The umbrealla organization could have its own officers who help see to the needs of the community as a whole and managing other areas where the different guilds interact.

How does that sound to you guys?

Quote by Halish

This new fancy social hub should have personal Blogs, btw ;)

Personal blogs are easily do-able. :P

Quote by SBOSlayer

Another question would be are we going to be exclusivly LGBT, by exclusive I don't mean that stonewall hasn't been welcoming to anyone, but I mean state that more to the point, in all games, i think it would be awesome if we are, but I've seen games that are quite limited in that respect. I must also state that if we didn't I guess we'd come away from the roots of stonewall. Then again that's a question of Quality vs member numbers vs what Stonewall stands for. Personally I don't see a difference between LGBT and the Straight communitiy anyways, but I am aware some people place more emphasis on sexual preference. So yeah it's a question to be asked :P I know we are very open, so that's just a random thought I thought lets chuck out there :P

Personally, I feel that the reason why Stonewall Fleet has been such a success is because we are united by one common deep characteristic. We're all part of the same family, community and culture. Even divided by oceans, we're all still brothers and sisters. Departing from being a glbta organization (a for straight allies. They've been totally included from the beginning.) would be betraying our roots. Like you said, some games are short in glbt players, so I doubt we'd have the community pull to develop guilds in them.

Episode 175 - The Next Generation - "Hollow Pursuits" - 04/30/1990



Parts 2-5:

Found from the above link in the related videos section

Lt. Barclay's use of the holodeck as an escape interferes with his duties. Meanwhile, the Enterprise suffers from mysterious and random malfunctions.

Enjoy!

This is a really interesting topic! I've been hoping that Stonewall would branch out and establish themselves in some different games for a while now.

Personally I play a lot of different games, and my play style can be a bit unpredictable. I might feel like taking a break for a while, and then come back after a couple of months, play for a bit, and then take another break again! So what I would find beneficial is if there was one central gaming hub (ie. this website) and one universal fleet/guild/legion represented in all the games.

So that if I felt like doing a bit of raiding, then I could just flag something on the website to notify that I'm up for it and away we go! 8)

And with so many new games coming out soon (Terra, Rift, GW2, Secret Word, BSG...), having a hub might be a really helpful tool.

Quote by bfelczer

I was actually gonna plan it for May! I would like someone to help plan it with me, though.

I was also thinking about another one at the end of September/ beginning of October for a weekend at Disneyland coinciding with the D-land "Gay Days"!

I knew there was a reason you are so awesome...I would be happy to help ya plan it. May 25th is my birthday! (hint hint)

And I have been wanting to go back to gay days at D-land, miss Thunder Mountain Railroad so freakin' much!

Quote by MrIzzy

What about an event/get together in SoCal (Brandon I'm lookin' at you :P)?

I was actually gonna plan it for May! I would like someone to help plan it with me, though.

I was also thinking about another one at the end of September/ beginning of October for a weekend at Disneyland coinciding with the D-land "Gay Days"!

taking over the universe. the end.