Intention: join dino ARTPG to farm good brain chemicals
Reality: I am being Notification-trained like Pavlov's dog by a new website, very unintentionally on the part of its creators
Basically the standard for most games is that when you get in line to get a character rubber-stampled and officially added to the game, most games are running on a forum system such that you can see where you are in line. The thread is right there, you can count how many entries are ahead of you or check datestamps or whatever and thereby rough out some kind of ETA even if it's just "not this week". You don't HAVE to, but my point is you can and it's not hard.
The new game I joined is using a Lorekeeper site1 and overall it's been 9.5/10 very slick very technology very lovely. But since it was made from the ground up to conduct ARTPG tasks properly instead of kludging everything with threaded forum posts, when I get in line I shoot my letter into the distance and then I stand there waiting. No feedback on how long the line is, no feedback on how fast it's moving, no feedback on where my entry is in the line. All I know is that when they get to it, the little ✉ in the site menu will change colors to tell me to go look.
It turns out this is a great way to ensure I go insane F5ing the website in hopes that maybe now? Now? No, but perhaps... now? What about now? I cast NOTIFICATION ENVELOPE CHANGE COLORS and F5 again. Still nothing.
- ARTPGs are majorly located on deviantArt not because it's good (it's not) but because it's a free art gallery host with threaded forums. Every part of that descriptor is surprisingly difficult to find substitutes for, but within the last few years someone created the Lorekeeper framework: a basic, highly configurable website supertemplate that ARTPG staff can grab a copy of for free and then modify to suit their game. The cost in time and money is substantial, because you have to not only buy your own website hosting but also now you need someone on game-staff to edit & maintain an entire website for you. BUT, it's quite well made and designed from the ground up for ARTPGs by someone who clearly knew what they were doing.
Mind you this solves maybe half the website needs even on a good day– dinoARTPG still outsources their reams and volumes of guides (AKA the static assets) to a standalone freehost site (I think it's a Weebly) almost certainly to reduce website host costs. And actually hosting the artwork players make itself is not solved: some goes on deviantArt, some goes on Toyhouse (ugh) some goes on Discord (UGHHHH) and so on. But at least inventories aren't being maintained in Google Sheets...!