MMO-Champion’s CEO Fabien Bonte will be joining Curse. They’ve promised a redesign of MMO-Champion and MMO-Champion’s popular forums in the near future.

I can quickly describe each site as – MMO-Champion is the place to go to talk about MMO; especially World of Warcraft, of course. The forums are the des res. The site has over 60,000 fans on Facebook. Curse.com is more complex than that; in addition to game/genre specific forums and factfiles they also let gamers customise and save their gaming preferences. For example, if you like your WoW dashboard set up “just so” then you may be interested in Curse.

The announcement says that MMO-Champion gets about 7 million unique each month, that’s about 80 million page views. When that’s combined with Curse.com they’ll reach a total of 300 million page views each month. If you think about the banner inventory alone then they’re beginning to become significant.

It’s not all good news for the growing curse, they’re being used by Games Workshop over the domain name Warhammer Alliance and this blogger gave up trying to monitor their output due to constant spam down their RSS feeds.

In fact, it looks like Titan is simply linking through to Amazon in order to sell their books. That’s also very bloggy! I suppose this saves them the trouble of all the retailer business, fulfilling peskily small B2C orders, returns and that sort of thing. I’d do the same thing.

They actually have a blog though. A chance for us to write back and say hello. Today they’re posted some of their exclusive, Danny Nero provided, Firefly pictures. The pictures from the Titan book Firefly – Still Flying which was featured on Geek Native a while back.

So here’s a teaser of the pictures while I recommend you to go have a look at the proper website. It’s pretty funky.

I think it’s especially funny when these guys do it.

S.T.E.A.M, by the way, is the Supernatural and Troublesome Ectoplasmic Apparitional Mangement.

Are they worth calling out? Firstly, you could check out their website and see that there’s actually quite a lot of them.

Or you could sample their hunts YouTube. Here’s a sample video (in which they annoy New Moon fans. Thank you)

This is a micro-review of the gaming comic sensation that is Looking for Group. What began as a gamer comic designed to reflect on MMOs quickly grew legs, took its independance and started the fan machine.

A lot of Looking For Group’s success is down to the dry and dangerous humour of Richard the Warlock but we can forgive it that. Here we see Richard channeling Doctor Seuss.

If you’re looking for a regular piece of fantasy comic fun then you’re Looking For Group.

Looks a lot like Google, doesn’t it? That’s why its covered in legal disclaimers. You may think Google has a sense of humour but they take their brand very seriously. Mystery Google had to be renamed several times until it became Mystery Seeker due, I assume, to Google.

Cthuugle, itself, suffered some “away time” but late in December 2009 Derek Anderson and Enki brought it back.

They pinged my radar again today with news that they’ve raised a whopping $6m in a second round of VC funding. That’s not bad for Hubert Thieblot, the founder, who was struggling with his own World of Warcraft addiction when he kicked out of the family house by his parents.

I assume that’s where the name “Curse” comes from. World of Warcraft addiction or any other MMO addiction is a curse.

What Curse does is let gamers save and share their settings and intelligence. It’s actually a collection of sites as they look ahead to what will be the attention grabbers of the future.

What Curse doesn’t do very well in manage their main RSS feed. I’ve tried subscribing to it before. I want to see what they’re interested in because they’re always so good at picking the winners.

The problem they face is that they let all their user blogs feed into the RSS too. The result is a spamfest. It’s common to find posts of nothing but hyperlinks. Curse delete these accounts quickly but not enough for the real-time web and nor even the relatively slow RSS update.

Can we have an alternative approach from getting news from Curse, please?

GamingReport was an RPG news site. It mainly covered traditional tabletop RPGs but did have an CRPG section for the big news. Way back then there wasn’t all that much CRPG news to get excited about so I can only wonder  how the site would have evolved if it had lived.

When it was running it ran well. It collected news from lots of sources. For big news – like WotC doing another round of redundancies just before Christmas – they’d ring up and check facts but also do special emailing.

I think GamingReport had less of a community feel than ENWorld but, equally, it felt less cliquey than ENWorld and had a wider remit than d20 / Dungeons and Dragons news.

I liked GamingReport so much that GameWyrd was a partner. They had a badge back to GameWyrd on their homepage. GameWyrd linked back to them, badge and all, from the homepage. I wrote a few haxxor scripts that helped put their JavaScript news ticker on desktops. This was the Windows 95 era and RSS adoption wasn’t high.

What happened?

They got bought by F&W Media. The people behind Scrye magazine. It was an early shot in the new versus traditional media battle that’s been so hot this year. GamingReport didn’t last in F&W’s hands very long. The Scrye magazine died shortly the deal.

One day, without even an email to partners like GameWyrd, the site started to redirect cbgxtra.com.  Today that redirect’s gone but you can still find the remains of GamingReport via their server’s IP address. It shows that the last entry was in July 2009 – although it feels that GamingReport has been gone for longer than that.

Rest in peace GamingReport, rest in peace.

In essence OgreCave is an RPG blog. The site’s nearly 10 years old and that shows how insightful Sven the Ogre when he started to record his thoughts in writing.

In fact “Sven the Ogre” is Allan Sugarbaker – the chap who’s been keeping RPG.net running since 2001 and who was the first “unplugged” editor of Gamer.com.    Allan isn’t the only writer on the site; there’s Mike Sugarbaker, Steve Kani, Demian Kataz, Owen Fletchyr and other contributors too. I take solace in that – OgreCave may have outlived many of my own sites but its always had a team working on it.

And what a team. The strengths of OgreCave are thusly;

Well connected – the authors get the early insights into the latest releases. They recently whisked up a review of the new Doctor Who RPG. I’ve not got my copy yet despite securing an early one. See; whatever I can do, Sven can do better.

Brave ogres – perhaps my favourite things about OgreCave is that they’ll say what they’ll want to say. It doesn’t matter whether it’ll ruffle a few feathers or not. Some of my best industry insights have come from here.

Reviews – closely tied with ‘brave ogres’ is the quality of OgreCave’s reviews. I don’t always agree with the review but I’m confident the reviews on the site aren’t paid for fabrications. Sadly, the tabletop RPG industry is pretty bad for “positive reviews for freebies”.

Range – It’s easy (for me, at least) to think of the OgreCave as a site for traditional RP reviews but that’s not the case. The site has covered computer games, card games, board games and even LARPs in the past.

Nahast was born back when Alejandro was busy working on a demanding d20 D&D 3.0 schedule producing supplements for Mongoose Publishing. It popped onto my radar because I’d read a lot of Alejandro’s work and liked the idea of a “d20 compatible” comic. The idea, I think, was that the fantasy comic would grow to provide the backdrop for a valid d20 campaign world.

Of course; anything could happen and we might yet see a Nahast RPG.

The premise is beautifully simple. An impressive warrior woman comes to the city in order to start an academy and teach a bunch of new female students the arts and craft of the sword.

This automatically gives the comic a long cast list. So far Nahast has kept its focus and not been pulled off in too many directions. We’re still just pulling back the curtain to see what possible obstacle awaits for our good looking heroes.

Nahast has travelled around a number of webhosts in its time on line. Currently it’s at Spiderforest. It doesn’t have a picture embedded RSS feed but I sign up just to know when I should go back and visit the site.