World of Warcraft Official Magazine

[Vendetta]

Never mind the croggezine, because there is a REAL magazine!

http://www.worldofwarcraftthemagazine.com/

I looked at the preview pages and it's far more superior to croggezine.
Own stories, own content and own artwork!
It has over 148 page's and NO ADS!

[cruelty]

Let's recap why this "magazine" isn't the "real" magazine, and croggeserver is.

O - Costs €10,50 per magazine
C - Is completely free

O - Can only purchase by a subscription for a year (€42,-)
C - Free download after every release

O - It's created by an external company that creates a lot of magazine's to cash in.
C - Is created by community members who want to create a good magazine for community members.

O - It doesn't really have 148 page's of articles -__-, if you look at the preview you can see that they used a LOT of artwork to fill things up, if we used that amount of arwork croggezine would also have that amount of page's.
C - Has over 40 pages (with some artwork) and lots of quality articles.

My opinion?
This magazine is another great example of people cashing in on wow fans.
There is a reason why you have to subscribe for a year, they have the money, if you like the zine or not.

If you take a quick look at this dutch webpage:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/64593/bli...-de-markt.html
You can see at the tumbs what amount of artwork they used to fill things up.
This "magazine" is more something like a magazine you have laying around your computer to look at when you are flying from gadgetzan to Teldrassil or something.
Lots of eyecandy, little to offer.

Btw vendetta:
"Own stories" > We mainly use fanfiction art of which we asked the original creator if it's okay to use it.
"Own content" > We write our own articles.
"Own artwork" > Some of the artwork is custom made, however our main artist left the team (and even the whole community) and we don't have the financial resources to hire artists.

[Marenka]

The fact that you just copy pasted a story from the internet, claims it to be written by yourself, sends it to us and gets disclined afterwards to be put in the magazine, doesn't mean you have to start promoting another magazine just to try to take us down.

I completely agree with Cruelty. Crogge's Magazine is currently made by two volunteers only, with the help of the community of course. Without the community we would be nowhere.

And yes, 2/3 of the pages of that 'official magazine' consist of fan art and screenshots. It doesn't differ a lot from our magazine, except that we rather have more text than fluffed up pages.

It looks better designed, yes, but our magazine is something of our own. We will improve the design of our magazine every single issue, to make it more attempting to read. But it takes more than 4 hands in total (which are as a matter of fact 20 vingers, unless one of us is a troll or tauren) and way more time to get such nice designed magazine as Blizz has. We will reach their quality of design eventually and make it something even more awesome of it, but we need more people to realize that.

And we were the first, and if I'm not mistaken, the only private server with it's own digital magazine. *Oh me gosh, I'm starting to sound like Crogge, who had the first private server having WotLK running on it. XD*
A magazine about our members, our server and our events.

We do our best to make it really good and make the community look forward to the next issue. But our spare time is limited as well, and even though we strive to reach our deadlines it's not always that easy.

If you ask me you've got the freedom of buying Blizz' magazine. I really don't mind that. It's quite interesting to take a look at their magazine actually. The only thing I wanna know is wether it's really worth 10 euro's for something you would probably read only once or twice.
But don't act like Crogge's Magazine is nothing but thin air. If it weren't a success, we would have stopped making them anyway. We make these magazines for our community, which we really like to do. All we need are smiles and feedback in return. ;P

[Bloo]

Maybe if there where more people in the team there would be more information which is important for the public and more releases...?
ETA on next release?

[Marenka]

Maybe if there where more people in the team there would be more information which is important for the public and more releases...?
ETA on next release?

1. More people - are most welcome! Seriously, we really need some good designers and people with a lot of fantasy and creativity to write articles etc. Plus, they need to be able to work in a team. *Very important*
We even put an application on the forum. But we also have the C4C project, with which you can send in articles and get credits for in return. Those credits can be swapped for coins. We thought it would be a nice way for the community to contribute to the magazine and get a little reward for it.
2. More information - good point. We try to keep up with the latest changes and stuff, like the key web thing, but since we have like 3 issues a year the info is really old already once the magazine comes out.
3. More releases - if I quit school and my job in the holidays that can be arranged. We're a bit short on hand with that one. You know what they say: Good things come to those who wait.
4. We tried that before, but we must not promise things we cannot be sure of. Hehe, we could always put the word 'Soon' as ETA on the back of the magazine's cover, but that won't be much of a help.

[cruelty]

To be completely honest, issue #3 is "done".
However if we would release it in the state it is now, nobody will read it.
The stage's it has to go through at this point are:
- Finalizing (make it look "nice")
- Proof-reading
- Correcting the mistake's
- Exporting to various formats
- Proof-read again
- Publish

So sorry, but neither i can give you an good ETA.

[Ghost]

wohoo! but its near now

[Moya]

We even put an application on the forum. But we also have the C4C project, with which you can send in articles and get credits for in return. Those credits can be swapped for coins. We thought it would be a nice way for the community to contribute to the magazine and get a little reward for it.
:

Great idea