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Gleemax Returns from the Dead

The Gleemax experiment was supposed to bring Wizards of the Coast into the age of Facebook. Instead it put off their customers, gave them another black eye from trying to do anything having to do with technology themselves, and resulted in many people losing their jobs.

Now Gleemax is reborn as Wizards of the Coast Community. If you can believe it, it is even more ambitious than Gleemax. Not only are there the discussion boards you’d expect, and the staff blogs (that are still difficult to find and read), but they’ve added photo and video sharing, real-time chat, and wikis.

My first impression is that everything looks much more polished, as you would hope, but it’s still pretty rough. Even though I’ve had an account on the forums forever, they now want my gender and zip code in my profile. For what reason? Even though I’ve had an avatar for my account since the 90s, I have to pick a new, different picture. And there are many, many little things that annoy, like the buttons looking grayed out everywhere, chat not working, and the blog section being almost completely worthless for discovering blogs you haven’t already seen.

I hope this ends better than Gleemax, if only to push other gaming community sites to improve their offerings as well. For example, EN World has offered many of these same features for years to the D&D community, but has struggled with good design and availability.

Update: OMG, What did they do to the Forum layout and graphic design? It’s almost unusable. It’s as if the person who designed it has never written to or read an online discussion board and didn’t bother before spewing this out. Good lord it’s bad.