ROLEPLAYGATEWAY – AN OVERVIEW. By Lord SaladinWhat is RolePlayGateway.com?RolePlayGateway.com (RPGateway, Gateway) is a community dedicated to online, text based role-playing games, their players, and other skills and pastimes associated with role-playing.
Where does Gateway come from?Eric Martindale. Essentially, the genius that is this fiery haired fellow is where RPGateway originates. Of course, however, nothing is ever quite so simple.
I have had the fortune of hearing the stories of old, and as such will give you a brief history of the site.
In the beginning, there was gundamwing.com. It was here that a great amount of chat based RPing was taking place, and a community soon began to grow, friends were made, legends were started, and people generally had fun role-playing.
Gundamwing.com then changed, and became animemetro.com. No longer just a chat based community; animemetro (AM) now incorporated forums as well, and saw a period of prosperity, (It IS still around today) and the community grew greatly. During this time, for reasons not worth discussing here, or anywhere, a certain amount of discontentedness grew among those who had been in the community when it was nothing but a single chat room.
So it was that Eric Martindale (
Remaeus on the forums, AKA Master and Crescendo), in all his genius, decided that he would create the thing that people were really wanting, but had been lost in AM.
It was from there that gwing.net was created. The name, perhaps misleading, was in honour of the original gundamwing.com and its members. However, the RP in gwing.net was not limited to Gundam Wing, but all genres were welcome.
It was this site that was to become Gateway. It found, over the years that it was in existence that those who had originally migrated from AM remained, and more and more new people joined. I was, in fact, one of the people who was around when the site was a beautifully dark coloured, simple forum that was, essentially, still finding its feet in the greatness of the RPing world.
Eric, friends with the founder of another RPing site, roleplaygateway.com, would speak with Hilde (She is on these forums under that name as well), and the two found that they were wanting to move their communities in the same direction.
So, in their wisdom, a decision was made, raised from the question – Why, if we are moving in the same direction, should we be competitors? They obviously answered with something along the lines of “We shouldn’t, because that would be stupid.” So, a pool of resources, a lot of discussion later, and roleplaygateway.com was what replaced gwing.net.
Why? Why not keep the name that honoured the old days? Simple – it was misleading. As mentioned, it was easy to think gwing.net was a Gundam only site.
That wasn’t the impression that was needed for the community to grow. So, the name changed.
The release of PHPbb3, in Release Candidate stage, (for non techno geeks, that is what the forum is built from), was to spark a major change in the image of the website, to a more crisp, more professional aesthetic. The site you all see now.
And since that day, none of us have truly looked back, the community is growing almost exponentially, and we know that it will continue to grow as Eric continues his diligent work.
What is the belief of Gateway?At Gateway, we aim to provide a community where you are
welcomed with a warmness unmatched, made to feel right at home, given freedom and not being constantly watched by the staff members.
We will never delete an RP thread that has been made. We are not the type of organisation that will be uber strict, and come down like a tonne of bricks, issuing bans and official warnings at the first opportunity.
Free Form Role Play, that is Gateway. And as such, you should be allowed freedom; we give that.
Yes, a community. A community cannot possibly grow and become stable from a singular common interest. That is why, throughout the site, you will find many non-RP threads and discussion. From general, often random, discussions and debates, to gaming,
martial arts,
technology discussion, to places where you can show off skill such as
music,
art,
writing ability, you will find a place to have a decent chat with people who share more interests with you than just RPing.
Alongside the forums, we also have an
integrated chat service that will allow you to talk to staff and other members in real time, along with being able to RP in a chat style.
What do you guys get out of this?The owners of Gateway run this entire operation completely voluntarily, with money direct from their own wallets. Madness, surely?
Well, for these people, Eric and Hilde, RPing has been a passion for many many years, and played a massive part in their lives. Making friendships that have grown beyond that of a computer screen in many cases, giving an escape to the madness that is the life of a teenager.
They, quite simply, want to ensure that people who share their passion are given, in some respects, the same opportunities they had, along with opportunities they didn’t have. The staff at Gateway are simply wanting to ensure that other people who share, or are just beginning to realise a love for RPing, can experience RP in the best way and in the best environment.
I, personally, enjoy watching as young people join the site, totally ignorant really to what RP is, then start up, and find they enjoy it, and subsequently grow in many different ways.
Who are the team, and what do they do?The team are easily found by their different coloured usernames.
As to what they do, the Administrators, most easily signified by their names being in red, keep the site running, in ways that a fair numbers of us cannot even comprehend. Maintaining servers, SQL databases, making new CSS files so that the forum looks pretty, and many many different things.
They also work on making the community grow, Eric, for example, spends a ridiculous amount of time to make sure this site is at the top of Google searches for anything RP related.
Moderators ensure that content on the site is suitable. Making sure there are no spammers linking to porn sites or advertising such things as medicines or other random products.
All staff members are also there, and completely willing, to help the members of this community.
You mentioned non-RP things?Yeah, a good majority of the site is RP based, but we also have a massive portion that is completely away from RP. From, as mentioned before,
general discussion, to discussions on various other, more specific, topics, such as
Technology,
Martial Arts, and
Entertainment.
Along with that, the
Artwork forum is place for those artistically talented to show off their skills, and those who are less talented in that area to request artwork for many purposes.
The
Writing forum is a place where you can show off your literary talents, and receive, if you show wish, feedback on your writing.
The Growth section within the Writing forum also has a fair number of resources that are designed to help your writing get better, and a few interactive things where you can be given ideas on what to write.
The
Music forum is a place to discuss music, bands, instruments and myriad music related subjects. You can even give links to your own music.
NB: We do not, in any way, endorse copyright infringement, so any such links are not allowed.So, what should I do?If you are a new member, go take a look around, say hi to us all at the
Welcome Desk so we know you are here. Scope out the thousands of RPs we have, decide if you wanna join any, look for topics of discussion that interest you, and put in your two cents’ worth.
In regards to RPs, you can, in general, just jump in with an introductory post, and enjoy from there.
You could even put profiles of your characters, or even journals, in the
Characters forum, as a means of keeping a record of all your characters.
And, should you be of the disposition to enjoy text based fighting, you can make challenges in the
Battle Arena.
In general, just have fun, that is what you came here for anyway.