News

By way of our lovely Scotsman, Del S (and not by way of his less lovely brother), enjoy a new collection of fanfics!

Today, we have a fanfiction update. And it's a rather large update when you look at it really... Ten fics from six people in three sections.

In Final Fantasy V, comes MogMaster's first of two offerings, "Battle on The Big Bridge." Following Galuf as he clashes with Gilgamesh, MG captures the personalities of both characters rather well: Gilgamesh is a complete moron.

In Final Fantasy VI, comes the vast majority of the update: Another from MogMaster, this time the grainy piece "The Roses of Death," following Siegfried and expanding his backstory as he fights through endless battles, on the field and in the mind. And if a serious and gritty long fic such as that isn't enough for you, Sherick's 23-part, 45000-word epic "Afterstorm: A Story of Honor," is the next offering. Set some time after the end of the game, the party reunites in the face of a new threat to the stability of the world. Both fics contain some violence, so be well warned if you're eating.

If, perhaps, all that might be a wee bit too hard hitting, there are two fairly light hearted and entertaining pieces from Bezdomny. The first, "Leisure," sees the party have some fun and games before getting on with saving the world. The second, "Words of Wisdom from Married Men," explores what it truly means to make one of the greatest commitments of all through the thoughts of the cast.

For a little look back into the in-game past comes L. Cully's latest offering. Of the usual high standard, "The Good Neighbours" follows a girl who should be familiar by the end as her life goes through continuing changes.

Next in the FF6 section comes onelowerlight's story, "The Final Battle," an intresting story capturing Kefka in all his arrogance and the party in all their courage. And last, but not least, comes Lothar Goldfist's first offering, "Reflections," a fic that explores ground dozens have dared to tread, but from which few find true success, and is in no way reliant upon that, providing an extremly stable and well written plot.

In Final Fantasy VII, comes a first for CoN: A crossover. Lothar Goldfist gives us another fic that knows where the landmines are, stepping around the booby traps of not explaining how it happens very well, or relying solely upon the crossover to move the plot forth, this fic uses the crossover as a foundation rather than an entire package to create an excellent piece of fiction.

And finally, an action packed fic, "A Warrior's Redemption" by Artlies. Following a legendary soldier of the Shinra army as he is given a questionable order too far, he refuses to follow the command, and makes his way home, leaving a trail of blood and carnage in his wake.

Read them, enjoy them, and comment here (or in the original threads!). And if you feel inspired, why not write and submit your own fanfiction work at the site submissions section of the forums?

Thanks to some short-lived and mildly frustrating work, we've gotten our third site up under the CoN domain. We've added a second site dedicated to the internal workings of our favorite games, this time from our happy staffer Djibriel. His old site was pretty ad-ridden, so it was the least we could do to get him set up with something a bit nicer.

So, have fun at the Collapse of Heaven and Earth: http://tenchinohoukai.cavesofnarshe.com/

Thanks, Dji!

I briefly debated just re-posting last year's CoN birthday message. I'm awful lazy. After nine years I'm allowed to be, right? Caves of Narshe has now been a part of me for over a third of my life. I think I've earned it.

But really, the reason behind it is more that the results of this year are not dissimilar from those of last year. Some good stuff, some rough stuff, all the same stuff. Of course, I like talking about the good stuff. So, since I'm posting this in the news forum, let's start with our news coverage. Since last birthday, we've had three and a half pages of news posted here in the default forum view. That's somewhere on the order of 100+ threads started by our news staff in the last year, an average of one every three days or so. That gives you guys a lot of great information to learn and discuss, and it's all thanks to our great news team (all added in the last year!) - Silverfork, Karasuman, Laszlow, and Zero_Hawk.

We've increased our rate of fan media on the site as well, again thanks to some new staff, in this case Mimic, Kappa, and Del. Now you needn't see new art on the site only once a year, but more like twice. Or three times. Hey, you want more, you submit more! Really, though, we're as pleased as can be with the submissions we're getting both in terms of quantity and quality, so definitely keep it up and we'll do the same.

Chat recently has been pretty explosive, we're starting to turn around the numbers for that part of the site as well. If you've never chatted before with CoN or even anyone, it's actually worth your time. We've got people online most all the time now; I and the Britons of the site tend to anchor down the American morningtime (it's the best way for me to avoid work), and then a large collection of staff, members, and thoroughly random people stop by all hours of the day to join in. And after I take my old, decrepit self to bed, I assume it's some sort of scary after-hours sort of get-together. Climhazzard won't tell me what all goes on. It seems that what happens in CoNChat stays in CoNChat - unless it ends up in our collection of #narshe humor, CoNQMS. We're not all Final Fantasy all the time, and a visit to chat will definitely confirm that for you.

Now the site, the site. Well, as most of you probably know, we crossed the one-hundred-thousand post mark here at the forums since our last birthday, and we're rapidly closing in on 125k as I write this. We also have just crossed the barrier of 2700 members signed up. And now due to some upgrades to the signup process, we're pretty sure the new folks aren't spambots, either! So you new folks, maybe you might want to consider making your first post right here in this thread to give your congrats, and then head off to the Greetings forum to tell us a bit more about yourself.

The content areas of the site, where we still give you the best Final Fantasy coverage you can find for the classics, are still getting better. Of course, I don't have quite as much great stuff to say as in the last message about our content because frankly we've slowed down a bit from our torrid - as if - pace of adding Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy VII in 2005. We did, very recently, though, upgrade most of our Final Fantasy V data, improving by leaps and bounds what might have been our weakest content section. We have more to come for FFV, so stay tuned. Also, it's a thinly veiled secret that we're also doing some work on upgrading other content, notably Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy IV. And Djibriel has been hard at work behind the scenes with some Final Fantasy VI tweaks, too. You'll know more as we finish, of course. We do like to trumpet such things from the minarets and all.

And, of course, you'll actually be able to see all this great stuff as it finishes, because we've had six months of nearly rock solid server performance, too. That's a far cry from where we were 365 days ago, isn't it? Since we moved in late January, our downtime has been virtually nil - we've been, on average, up 98.5% of the time, and we've had 99.5% or higher for the last two months. You don't have to worry about not coming here due to downtime, or not telling your friends about us because they won't be able to get here anyway, because it just won't happen now. Reap the fruits of my out-of-pocket expenses.

I've decided to bury the boring stats bits a bit lower this year just in case I'm the only person who cared. But thanks to our increased forum traffic and reliable server, we're having a massive year so far in terms of traffic. July's numbers won't be final until about 24 hours after I've posted this message, but I've extrapolated the numbers a bit to find that July of 2006 will finish at about 80% higher than January '06 (the month in which the server was worst-behaved this year) in terms of pages viewed, and 44% higher for both unique visitors and bandwidth pushed out. Now, when you consider a more normal month, this time last year, we're up a more standard number, roughly 20%. While that may not sound like much compared to January, imagine a corporation that grows 20% a year, as we have done the last two years running. You'd be looking at one amazingly successful and wealthy business, let me tell you.

So that's where we're at after nine complete years of being both a site and a group of individuals brought together under one banner. We'll make ten years. After that, who knows? Fifteen? Twenty? Will we be here, from nursing homes, with our brainscan PCs, thinking out horrible topics about why Sephiroth could, like, totally crush Kuja even if, OMG, they switched outfits and Seph was in a hot bishie thong? Lord, I hope not. Let's, instead, just take each year as it comes and enjoy the things that make us different, and maybe even a little bit better than other sites out there in the ether? My staff and I are turning the corner and getting motivated again after a year of general downtime, so definitely stick around and watch what we've got coming up. We'll thank you for it then just like we're thanking you right now (thanks, by the way).

Enjoy the site in the way that we enjoy presenting it to you.

In another one of our fun, intermittent fanart updates, we've got eleven new pieces available to vote today. They're all from Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, and Final Fantasy VII this time around, and Kappa, Mimic and I have them all put together for you on the new fanart page.

Here are your artists this time around:

• bratkitty



• Rujuken



• Skangl



• SilverFork



• InkTank



• Terra_the_Mighty_Esperlet



• Kame

Some of these artists you'll recognize right away if you're a CoN regular, but we'd really like to thank Terra_tME, Skangl, and InkTank for sharing with us for the first time!

Today, we have a small update in the fanfiction side of things for your reading pleasure so long as you don't read the ones by Del.

The first fic to be placed into the Final Fantasy 1 section, from Del S, and hopefully not going to be too lonely for very long.

Second and third up, in the Final Fantasy 6 section are two more from Del, Mog Soldiers, a slightly nutty and violent dark comedy with... weremoogles?! Also, an updated version of one of his eariler fics, Unavanged Dead. That particular fic won the 2004 fanfic competition, and this updated version expands the story.

In Final Fantasy Tactics is an offering from Kilakandra DiMenia, an in-game fiction from the point of view of Ramza as he battles not only the enemy, but his own inner thoughts.

Finally, in the Final Fantasy 7 is another from Del, this time, an alternate chain of events detailing a completely different kind of attack on Sector 7 from the one that occurred in-game.

Please enjoy these, and feel free to comment upon them here.

NOTE: This was our 2006 April Fool. I think we got a few of you! -Tiddles

After several days of discussion with staff, Caves of Narshe webmaster Rangers51 has officially decided to take the next step in the CoN's evolution. After witnessing fewer hits on the main site, decreased participation levels in the forums, and generally lower morale among staff and members ever since the debut of the Final Fantasy VII section on February 13, 2005, R51and staff agree that sometimes the best course of action can be to admit a mistake.

The decision to eliminate Final Fantasy VII content from the CoN was not an easy one for R51 to make. Echoing the sentiments of the staff who worked on the section, R51 states, "I really loved the FF7 content we made, I thought it was the best on the web. But in the long run it just wasn't bringing in the kind of clientele we were looking for to sustain the site."

Even though this is certainly a step backwards in terms of site content, the CoN is bound to take a few steps forward almost immediately with the addition of a brand-new section to replace old content and hopefully generate new interest in the CoN. While the Final Fantasy VII section took a very, very long time to build, we've really worked hard as a group to finish up an all-new section and have it almost ready; look for it to launch sometime in the next week or so. If R51 has availability while he moves, it may even go up sooner. We know that our work will ultimately lead the CoN in a direction that staff and members alike have always hoped to see it go in.

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It will be sad to see all the hard work of the creators of the FF7 section come to naught, but I, for one, am excited about the new direction the site will be taking. Hopefully, this change will begin to diminish the influx of FF7 fanboys and instead attract fans of the next game to grace the CoN's pages!