Website

Pokemon TCG Chat For Everyone

TeamOmar’s Pokemon Chat

Adam over at 6P had this bright idea to get some webmasters to add chat capability to their sites. His plan was to link the chats up such that anyone using any one of the participating sites will be chatting live with everyone from all the sites.

I believe that the list of sites using it will be:

I already chatted with J-Wittz using TeamOmar.com’s chat client this morning. He’s working on getting his set up. Adam already has the Six Prizes one running.

If you want to join the conversation, head over to TeamOmar’s Chat Page.

Are You Atwitter For Nationals?

First of all, I’d like to hear some comments on this one. I have some ideas to present, and I would appreciate some input. Before we get to that, though, I am curious how many of you are going to the US Pokemon Nationals. If you didn’t know, it’s in Indianapolis, Indiana on June 25 to June 27. Here is some recent news about the registration process.

So, while you’re chiming in about how excited you are to go to Nats or filling us in on your sob story of why you can’t attend, maybe you want to weigh in on the idea of a twitter feed. For those of us (like myself) who won’t be attending, this is a way we can follow fellow players during their stay and while they progress through the tourney. For those of you that will be attending, it will be a way for you to let us know how you are doing, what the metagame is like, how your nightly partying fares, and brag about your wins to a wide audience.

So, that’s the idea, but the implementation is up for discussion. Here are some basic questions. Maybe you have some ideas about them or whatever. If you’re willing to tweet from Nats, let us know, and let us know how you’d want it to work. If you aren’t going, but you have experience with this sort of thing, let us know. If you think this is a stupid idea, let us know.
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Comments, New Artwork, and a Road Trip

Vuluxie
What do you get when you put Vulplix with Uxie?
Ava created another piece of art for the website. This time, she has combined the forces of Vulpix and Uxie to create Vuluxie. I can’t say, for certain, why. I can’t pretend to understand the mind of an artist. I have no such talent, so these things are above my comprehension.

No, on to today’s news. Cheffords, who recently wrote about his experiences at the Michigan State tourney, contacted me to inform me that some of his comments were missing. Low and behold, he was right. I had wondered why we weren’t getting very many comments lately. Well, it seems that people were commenting all along. It was just that the automatic comment SPAM filter system was marking the vast majority of comments as SPAM. Indeed, there are a lot of comments that are SPAM. It’s a sad reality, but when your real comments get tossed in with that garbage, it becomes a huge problem. Of course, we’re trying to create an atmosphere where people can share ideas and comment on people’s experiences, decklists, questions, etc. That’s hard to do if those ideas and comments get automatically discarded.
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Zigzagoon and Team Omar

Zigzagoon GEAccording to Bulbapedia, “As Zigzagoon shows an interest in everything it happens to see, it always zigs and zags, even leaving distinguishable zigzag footprints.” We at Team Omar are also interested in many different things, so today, we will zig and zag leaving a footprint.

For a website, though, the footprint is a bit different. The trail left for you to follow us is at TeamOmar dot INFO. That’s our footprint. If you want to find the real Team Omar, though, you will now find us at TeamOmar dot COM. Don’t worry, though. Until the footprints are washed away, you will still find us the old way. Okay, let’s drop the Zigzagoon bit.

What I’m trying to tell you is that we used to be at a different web URL. I thought that the site deserved a real dot com address, so I switched from .info to .com. The old URLs should still work, but not forever. If you have ever linked to Team Omar on another website, please change your links to www.teamomar.com!

If you’ve told your friends to check the site out, please let them know of the URL change. As I said, the old links won’t work forever. At some point, they’ll stop redirecting to .com.

If you haven’t posted the Team Omar URL ( www.teamomar.com ) anywhere or told anyone about the site, maybe this is a good time to do it. More people will lead to much more interesting and enriching discussions.

Thanks trainers!

Pokemon Deck Workshop

I really like how this website is shaping up. We’re getting a good amount of interesting Pokemon TCG articles here. We’re even getting more and more traffic from people searching for information about different decks and cards. In fact, our top search is for info about a dialga garchomp deck, so Omar will need to write an article titled “Dialga Garchomp Deck” in the near future. [winks and points finger at Omar]

So, the site is becoming a good repository of information, but I feel like we’re missing out on it being a good resource/medium for discussing things as a team and working together to create something or come to a decision as a whole. A tournament report really ought to be one guy’s take on what happened, and the comments are probably just going to be like “good job” or whatever. Reporting about how a deck worked while play-testing or in an actual tournament/league situation (like what I did with The Problem With Porygon) could generate some interesting discussion if others show up and have questions/comments, but it really is just another report. These things are in the past, and therefore they can be somewhat standalone and don’t require much interaction.

I’m thinking, though, that we need a new way to interact in such a way that there is a back-and-forth discussion that results in and end product. I know that Omar tried to do something like this in the past with articles like “Palkia G Lock and Lady Gaga.” I’m going to create a category called Deck Workshop for this.

Here’s how I am hoping it will work. This could go for things other than deck building, but building a deck is the focus for now. The original author will lay out a request for comments. Then, anyone who wants to help can leave comments with suggestions. This includes the original author. This can go back and forth, round and round, etc. All the while, the original author will be taking the best pieces from the comment section and using them to build up the original main article. Instead of having a static original article with a bunch of comments below it, parts of the original article will be in flux based on the comments and suggestions. Let’s test it out while trying to build me a winning LuxApe deck.

Speed Blaziken FB Deck (Should this info be public?)

Now that Team Omar’s website has been blasting off for a while, we are starting to get some content. I think we should talk a bit about what we want to do with the site. I think that the main issue is whether or not we want our conversations public. Right now, people can find this site via Google. I keep track of some stats. They are in no way large at the moment, but you never know what it might grow to be. I think that maybe 2 or 3 people that we don’t know have stumbled onto the site. For example, I saw that one person found us by searching for “speed blaziken fb deck” on Google.

If we start mentioning specific things like what deck we’re playing at a specific location/tourney, then people might end up searching for that and knowing what we’re planning. This may not be a bad thing, but it might not be the best. The other side of things is that if we talk freely here, then we might get new people from around the world coming to read and discuss topics here. Who knows.

I think we should at least discuss how to proceed. I can make the website only viewable to members (people that can log in), or we can keep it public. What do you think?