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Looking Back to Giving Something Back - 2019 Review and 2020 Look Ahead

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 09:00:08 +0000

Looking Back

Don’t blink too fast or it’s gone. Oh, sorry. Already has. Well, that’s how I felt anyway. And from the sounds of it most of you all did too.

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See, what you're meant to do when you have a mid-life crisis is buy a fast car, aren't you? Well, I've always had fast cars. It's not that. It's the fear that you're past your best. It's the fear that the stuff you've done in the past is your best work.

- Robbie Coltrane.

Due to our average age currently at 36 and the many personal IRL things that have happened to many of our family this year I’m not surprised to say that games this year didn’t bring the best out in us. More so reminded us of a time that we thought we were invincible playing MW2 or even early parts of Destiny 1 in the newer era smashing raids out of the park. So you have to keep moving. Let’s face it, I’m friends with every single one of you for your company, great banter and the odd occasion where golden MLGpro360noscopeskillz come out, so I can say ‘I was there’. That’s been difficult for even me this year. Motivation when things are quiet are always hard and even more so when you gather energy to go again, only to bumped back by a personal loss. But we all hold each other up, like the absolute Champions that you are. And amidst all the anguish and despair some encountered, we’ve still created lots of stuff to do, fun and ‘Feel Good’ moments for as many as we could last year. In facts we had:

9,452 posts posted
802 topics created
30+ Videos made by you and uploaded
5 Quizzes you’ve got involved in
40 Events created and attended
2 Crispy Controllers fixed
External Hard Drives, Multiple PS4 Games, PC Game Codes, Annual DLC Passes and 1 very shiny state of the art PC from the Forever Gaming Feel Good Fund (FGFGF)
1 very big FG Meet Up

If I didn’t mention two things in more detail before we move on, that wouldn’t be quite right. The first was how everyone rallied around for our favourite part of the furniture, PlumberDave. Being able to chip in together, buy the parts we could and have an amazing trip to Ipswich to surprise our awesome friend was a moment to treasure (last time amazing and Ipswich go together though, sorry Dave). And finally for 2019, there was the first ever Huge FG Meet Up organised, in a remote location in Hereford. To have over 20 people come from all over the UK and even other countries too was truly incredible. We don’t take enough time to look back at these wonderful moments, so please do this more often. I don’t think anyone couldn’t get an amazing boost from the memories made on that weekend. If you didn’t make it…let’s hope and work out ways you can get on to the next one. Make it happen.

Giving Something Back To Gamers

As the last decade departs, I’m such a big believer and getting off your arse and doing better than last time. There’s some amazing facts shared above and you were incredible in 2018 too, actually even more so which can remind you that we are capable of so much more than what we do today.

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If you're not reaching back to help anyone then you're not building a legacy.

- Germany Kent

We’ve had for a while an identity crisis, not dis-similar to some games out there ironically. This ‘thing’ that we/you do here is a pretty cool gig if you ask me. So if someone asked me to put ourselves out there even more, I say yes. Yes we should. We must. Forever Gaming is you. And all of you deserve to leave a Legacy. Something to be proud of.

‘Giving Something Back To Gamers’ is what we do best. We’ve helped so many people that we must continue to help as many more as we possibly can and spread what FG is all about. The Feel Good Fund couldn’t do as much as we wanted too last year and that’s okay. We have to find different ways to raise funds and ask people to help others. At the same token, I want to gain more support. This does mean more funding because I don't want us to be in a position to not things like Xmas Giveaway (because we didn't raise anything) but also there are many other ways to support. Creating events is helping as much as putting a fiver in to help someone out. Creating spaces for gamers to get together is something we should do more of and join in. We’re not scary, well not much anyway, and you guys can teach a whole load of people about some new skills to learn or hidden items to find. We need to create new videos to show this. Things that anyone can be a part of.

The base of games out there on consoles and PC I feel is in a decent state right now. Some really solid titles since September and some long-standing ones mean we can do a whole lot more this year than before. So we have this place and I want to utilise more of it. I want you all to utilise more of it - but I need all your help. If theres something you think you can help out with, shout up. If you don't really know what but you are still really keen to get involved in any way SHOUT UP.

Let's make:

What's in store in 2022, FG?

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 16:38:22 +0000

You don't know? Okay. Let's have a chat about it then. First though, Happy New Year to everyone at FG. You're all fantastic, awesome individuals that deserve all the good luck and fortune that we can wish for.

To look forward, we should always recognise looking back for a moment to see how far we've come in the last 12 months. With the world in still great difficulty, I think we pushed forward in many places and did many good things, to give FGers and all that are connected to us a bit more purpose and fun in their lives. Some stats I suppose help as always to back that up!

2021 Stats

New FGers registering - 199 - Up 2.58% (figures against year before)

Unique Contributors - 114 - Down 12.31%

Users Who Reacted - 72 - New stat last year, no comparison available

Reactions Given - 12,078 - Down 2.77%

New Topics - 561 - Down 23.05%

New Posts - 8010 - Down 19.88%

New Events - 257 - Up 110.66%

New Quizzes - 2 - Down 75%

New Quiz Plays - 41 - Down 66.12%

New Articles - 14 - Up 366.67%

New Guides - 8 - Up 300%

New Tournaments - 1 - First ever one

New Teams - 17 - First teams created

New Videos - 73 - Up 135.48%

New Video Reviews - 28 - Up 16.67%

New Raffles - 1 - Down 96%

1 Huge overhaul to our Home, with a brand new homepage and new sections

19 gifts via the FGFGF (FG's Feel Good Fund), inc. 2 brand new PS5s

So, with all that exhausting our minds, what should we do this year? I'm a firm believer of building on good things, dusting ourselves off and giving it everything you've got. So I think we should this year after a few years of all our lives sitting virtually in purgatory with COVID dictacting every step of it.

I think a good way to try and start somewhere is let's bring it back to what we great at - Games. Let's bring the togetherness back online and especially on here at FG. One way we'll look to do this is through Community Goals. This can be collective goals that we all work together and try and aim to achieve by the end of the year. I'm busy trying to create a page to store them all on so we can return here and see how far we've got as a team. If you have any good ones, let's hear them out in the comments below.

For this to work though, it will need some support - like a lot of support. I'm urging all of you, to keep FG updated with everything you're up to. This is a great place to share after each session; how many raids you did, the best bits about your CoD battles, how many races you won, or lost in my case in Gran Turismo, goals we scored on an FGFC FIFA night, how many Zombies were killed in our 7 Days horde nights....the list could go on but I hope you get the jist. This helps me and others helping me a track of how we are doing towards our community goals as I won't be able to get everything from automated places. Let's make a real good go of it and do what we can.

Next stop is Achievements. Mentioned this quite a few times and we've been terribly delayed whilst we waited for the software to be in place. And whilst its not 100% perfect, I want us to give this a go and improve as we go live. To support this, we have brand new FG Ranks to help everyone 'Level Up'. We spent a while designing these, and truth be told we couldn't do any of these without the talents of Christine AKA @WildeThang . I'll be asking her to help out with some medals and badges that we hope to give out over the course of 2022 and beyond. Stop by to make sure you give thanks to her fantastic work!

I'll be trying to work on some form of an infographic with available badges soon, with some hopefully hidden for you all to find for yourselves. The main thing is to try and be supportive and engaging wherever you can. Not just on the forums, on videos, quizzes, events and even online games with FG. Maybe we can get some special FG Friday ones for all to try and obtain too 🤩

Outside of this, and with the help of all of you, we're also going to make sure we more sustainable moving forward. Some technical points are being changed behind the scenes and we'll hopefully see some great things that will help you feel like its super easy to come here and more often too. I don't want to say much on this part just yet, other than keeping watching this space...

As the above are just a couple of things to highlight, you know the score with everything else. "What? We have a website?". Yes, yes, we do. The joke is something that should be one that I hope to be turned around with a mic drop saying, "There ya go. Enjoy." Come on, I need your support this year to make the best one we've ever had.

FG Achievements is finally Going Live!

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 14:24:59 +0000

Well, the day has finally come! 😅

If you've wondered why i've been reasonably more quiet of late and not updating a few events, my PPR, etc its mainly because whilst my own work has been extremely manic since the back end of last year, kids schools and work on the house just needed to happen now rather than later unfortunately. Every moment i did have spare though, I've stuck it into this place and tried to create something that gives you all a nice fuzzy feeling when you come to FG moving foward (even though, you really should feel that way already 😎).

So, enter the room, FG Achievements.

As a reminder to all, the objective of Achievements (with Medals) is to help us all interact more and have fun with each other on FG, and on Games we all play - Resulting in all of us using more/all of the fun features that FG has that you might not have even explored yet.

This FG Achievements system breaks down into the following parts; Ranks, Points and Medals.

Ranks

Shortly today/tomorrow, you will start to see that you will have an XP bar with your profile:

The more you interact with FG, the better it is for your own personal FG Rank. You'll also be able to see all the ranks and how many you've got to unlock on your own profile.

As a reminder of the FG Rank Badges shared on the previous article I did in January, are below. Each one will have a specific name with them that you can find out, when they're live:

Points

So, how do I get to rank up, Lee? Ah, thought you might ask that 😅. Pretty much nearly everything you do to interact with FG, will gain you points. Replied to someone's post? Rack up a point. Put up a video in the Video section? Grab 10 points. Vote on a Poll....or even someone voting on your Poll? Maybe even just logging in every day will get you something...👀

Points totals aren't shown anywhere as the main objective with points is to see how you can get your next rank. You'll see from your XP Progress Bar how many points you have until your next FG Rank (see first picture above) so its a good way to know where you are in the world of FG!

There is well over 200 different ways to grab points (and the following medals) so please do try and interact and get as much out of this system as you can!

Medals

Every loves a shiny thing don't they? Well, to aid your task to reach the top of the hill at FG, I've created an absolute shed of Medals - in fact, there is the best part of 200 Medals for everyone to try and achieve. They are broken down into two parts - FG Website and FG Games.

FG Website Medals will cover off all the following activity, and beyond:

Posts
Topics
Events
Videos
Polls
Visits
Follows
Reactions
PPR
Guides
Merch
Quizzes
Articles
Memberships 👀

FG Games Medals will initially cover 5 of our top games played in the community, however I want more added over time so will be asking for lots of feedback...and lots of help too!

Destiny 2
FIFA 22
Gran Turismo 7
7 Days to Die
Valheim

To help you understand what is available from a visual POV, I have created the following Infographics of all the medals so far. I will look to try and make a few more infographics along the way if people want to see what each medal gets you - I would encourage you all to take a look at people's profiles which may give you hints on how to obtain certain medals!! For Game specific ones, i'll create some form of Guide to help you all know what each one is, either in Guides or pinned in their forum section.

Please remember, this is an initial launch - if we can hit the ground running and everyone is enjoying the fun out of obtaining Medals, then we will absolutely be creating more across the board for both FG and the specific games we all play

Website Medals Infographics

FG Games Medals Infographics

PLEASE TAKE NOTE

Its a brand new, never done before FG System. We will have issues problems from time to time so please share your thoughts and help us make it better!
When its first turned on, it may take upto a few days to register everything - it has to run through every single rule i've created for every single FGer. Hopefully you'll see your Medals grow over time!
We may tweak the Ranks and their respective points targets after going live if we find they are imbalanced in some way.
Most Rules for points will be retrospectively activated when Live. There may be rules we add at a later date that will only look forward (e.g some Quiz ones will be created soon but look forward, not backwards) unless I rebuild the system...which may mean you get 're-awarded' automatic points and medals you had.
Games will not look backwards - this is to help give everyone a chance to focus on starting out how to get them all and create some buzz about bringing FGers together.
Most Games Medals are manually awarded with the help of the FG Team here. I expect us all to start talking and sharing information about our escapades as FG online in all of our games. It helps bring to life what we're all achieving together and it speeds up the validation time to award Medals.
I will NEED HELP with this. If you're interested in supporting the cause in helping, please let me know. Its about doing things here but also encouraging FGers to get involved across all aspects of what we do.

I really would love for you all to explore what we have available here. It's took me an absolute age to get it in a position to launch it as I wanted to give this the best chance of hitting the ground running. I'll set up a separate topic on the forums to capture any feedback and questions you may have about it all. We can then have separate topics where we can post up gaming updates to support the awarding of medals.

Its a great thing to finally do something I've wanted for here for years. Its like our internal mini FG game, with lots of fun and interaction. Keep an eye out for when you start getting awarded points, medals and ranks - it may even be worth turning your browser notifications on (check your 'Bell' icon next to your profile and enable them!) so you can start seeing them pop up on your phone and other devices 😎

The only thing left is for you all to enjoy!

GGFG

FG in 2023

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 20:37:06 +0000

Can I get away with Happy New Year still? 😅 We're still in January aren't we? (just!) HAPPY NEW YEAR FGERS! I sincerely hope you all had a wonderful Christmas time and had some well earned breaks from working to spend with the people you wantd to - or even just catching up on some much needed gametime.

As you may have seen from the logo, we now enter our 100th year...sorry, 10th year of FG. Yes, TEN. In August this year we'd have had 10 amazing years of this place and I'm grateful we can celebrate with so many of here, new and old.

So with that in mind, we've been busy doing a little refresh to FG that I hope you may like. I've listed what this article involves upfront so you can skip to the ones more interesting if you CBA to read this entire lovely epilogue 😉

New Homepage Refresh

New Ideas Feature

New FGers Group

New monthly FGFGF Raffle

Steam Game Keys for FGers

Display my Medals

Embed Google Documents

Created FG WhatsApp Community feature.

Changed Default view of Forums to Table

ReWrite URLs

Removed Events/LFG from Forums

RSVP Auto-Enabled for Events

Cleaned up Members

Cleaned up Pinned Topics

Fixed Unread Content

So lets get into whats new and updated!

New Homepage Refresh

A lick of paint is always handy, and what better way to do it with some snazzy moving Infographics. It also shows off how much stuff that we do together and thats not even all of it! I'd encourage you to go and search stuff across all those areas on the Homepage and join in the fun where possible.

We also have a fantastic updated logo for this year, special thanks goes to @Greboth for his awesome skills in helping create what you can see at the top of our Home.

Finally, there's a quick way to see what's the new and latest information on FG. The tabular format reminds everyone what's not only new on the FG Forums, but also whats new in Videos, and loads more. Underneath you can also find some historic viewed FG Content and it will be good to see what breaks into these Top 10s across 2023!

New Ideas Feature

Just because we've been going for so long doesn't mean we can't have new and fresh thoughts from everyone! If you have anything in mind for us to do, across any of the sections across FG, please shout it up here. From as little as a new forum section, to maybe something bigger like a tournament, a game server or some merch ideas - we just want to hear them all. Others can then like an idea and comment to help it gain traction too. >> IDEAS SECTION

New FGers Group

In order to support some new features, it was time we gave everyone that is in FG a lovely new group name so they can advantage of these features, including making you all look fancy with a new title. When you are a new Member of FG now, you start as a 'Member' and once you hit Apprentice Rank (Rank 3), you will be promoted automatically into the 'FGers' Group. As we all know you can increase your rank in multiple ways and not just by commenting on forum posts.

New monthly FGFGF Raffle

The Forever Gaming Feel Good Fund is going to continue its good work with everyone's donations through a monthly raffle for all FGers. Some months may differ in prizes but hopefully a nice way to give something back to everyone here. We'll be utilising the FGers Group new feature so no worries about anyone signing up and just being able to enter these ones. Keep a look out for when they go up 🙂 >> RAFFLES SECTION

Steam Game Keys for FGers!

A brand new feature to FG and yet another way to give something back to FGers. Once you have been promoted into the FGers Group, you will see under the Merch Store section a new area called Games. This is where we will add a bunch of steam keys whenever we buy and obtain them. Some games will just be one available, whereas others there could be multiple so more than one FGer can enjoy. You'll only be able to grab one code per person. This is a thank you to all FGers so grab a code when you genuinely want to give the game a go. We hope to add more each month, yet again all through the amazing support we all give to the FGFGF. The more donations we receive, the hope is we can add more and more as time goes by. >> MERCH SECTION

Display my Medals

This next little addition is a nice shiny addition to all your profiles. If you're reading through the FG forums, you can show off 3 of your own medals and also see other people's medals too. Whilst set to show the latest 3 medals achieved you can update this to choose whatever 3 medals you want to show off! You can do this either via your profile on the Medals section or just clicking the medals when reading on the forums. It may even tempt others to grab a specific medal they haven't unlocked so far!

Embed Google Documents

A technical update which will hopefully help showing any stats in teh future if kept via Google Documents - or any other Google document for that matter! You need to ensure you select the 'XXXX to Web' link as per teh picture below for the link to work effectively.

Created FG WhatsApp Community feature.

Recently found a new feature on WhatsApp called Communities...so we now have one! Given it is still used to grab people to come online, just like the FG Discord, it brings together all the random groups i'm aware of with an Announcement channel at the top. This way, one message to update everyone in the Announcement channel can be done rather than multiplying updates to check something out on FG. As always, anyone is welcome and it will always be said that this place is the Home of FG, so we need to keep using this as much as possible rather than being the lazy ones sticking to separate groups.

Changed Default view of Forums to Table

Updated to show forums in more of a traditional way. You can still change the view to suit your needs via the option at the top of the Forums page.

ReWrite URLs

A technical update to help allow us to have better and quicker redirects if we share content from FG to other places.

Removed Events/LFG from Forums

Sub-forum no longer needed as we now are fully adopting the Events section to create online and IRL gatherings.

RSVP Auto-Enabled for Events

RSVP system will be set to 'ON' when anyone creates an event. This will help avoid Events getting accidentally created without the user selecting RSVP every time.

Cleaned up Members

We had years (and years!) of old bot members inflating the numbers so corrected all of this. Won't stop new bots but we'll try and keep on top of it moving forward.

Cleaned up Pinned Topics

Probably way overdue but finally done now. Had far too many Pinned topics in most sub-forums. Now we only have a handful to keep upto date info and activity right at the top.

Fixed Unread Content

A problem occurred at the start of 2022 where the 'Unread Content' stream which some of us use to read all of FG was broken and not showing any 2023 FG activity. This is now fixed so normal service resumed.

And More TBC...

Well we can't just stop there for 2023 can we? Theres lots more I think we can get ourselves motivated for, especially as its 10 years in August for us. Some stuff on the roadmap we know we'd already like to get over the line this year...

10 Year Anniversary Plans

Guides

Game Hubs Rework

Grammarly

Releases / Game Patches

Achievements and Medals 2.0

Community Goals Relaunch

Servers 2.0

Pick Scores

Charity!

And much much more!

I think I'll leave it there for all the info. Thanks for reading this far as its more than I realised when looking back! I really hope we can make this year an extra special one. Don't ever be a stranger. Being around FG, checking out cool stuff and checking in with people, even if you don't know them as much, is something all of us can at least do once this year, and you really could be making someone's day, month, year by doing just that. Lets help others understand why FG is the best place to be on the World Wide Webz.

Would love to hear all your thoughts below! What do you think is the best update?

GGFG!

FG Save The World? Nah...but actually maybe? Why not, eh?

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 11:06:14 +0000

Where to start? In fact, that's a good point in itself because I have no idea where the starting point is for 2024 now we're already in February! 😅 Life has seriously flown by from what I've experienced, even when it has certainly been busy (Yes, 'busy'. The common phrase we all fall into using most days...I have also been one of those victims 💀). With 2024 already well on its way and started it would be awesome to see the energy pumping back up again across the board.

As you get older I've realised that my purpose in life is really to make others feel happy and that they have meaning too. Seems cheesy, like, really cheesy doesn't it. 🧀 But sod it, I don't care. And it matches what FG does and already has been doing for years and years.

Depression, Loneliness, Illness, Loss, Sadness...I could go on. Think of all of the things you can you think of that aren't a great feeling to have in life, FG has been there in some way to help people with this. We should do more of it. We need to do more of it. Someone said to me recently you can't change the world...yeah, yeah, I know that. But I woke up today thinking, well is there any problem if we did give it a go? 😎

So, rather than go on and on as I know you all love it when I do 😘 lets be far briefer than previous articles. All I ask is we make one promise together here at FG in 2024 - to put in as much effort as humanly possible making our FG Home alive and kicking more than it ever has been. No metrics, just pure effort.

You'll quickly find you'll be helping more FGers than you realise just by sticking around, getting involved and thinking of others.

GGFG ❤️🖤