Damien 1,514 Report post Posted March 21, 2014 Icy Veins is 3 years old! We have been a bit silent lately, so click and read some more to find out what we are up to. 3 years ago, we were launching Icy Veins with a couple of class and raid guides. What initially started as a very modest World of Warcraft fansite slowly evolved into a much more comprehensive resource, to the point where, last year, Vlad and I switched to working full time on it. We still have many plans for the future and I am going to talk a bit about them here. News As you may have noticed, we have not really posted anything in the past 2 months. The reason is that our strength lies in writing technical content (guides) for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, not writing news. So, we kept copy-pasting the announcements published on battle.net, grew tired of it (especially with the emergence of the battle.net launcher, which presents players with all the announcements from Blizzard), and eventually stopped. The news section will live again soon, but in a different form. We do not plan to provide our readers with news, in the strict sense. MMO-Champion already does that and they do it well. Our goal is to have articles of interest to our readers published on a regular basis. By articles of interest, we mean interviews, world first race coverage, important changes in the way classes are played, important strategy changes after hotfixes, new transmogrification sets, Hearthstone-related stuff, etc. We also want to have mini-guides (professions, farming, etc.) featured in the news section. Finally, we will do weekly recap of the important news from Blizzard and will post a website changelog whenever we feel that we have made enough updates to the website to warrant an article. The idea is to provide readers with articles that have synergy with the rest of the content we have on the website. Updating the guides on the website and working on new features is already a full-time job in itself for Vlad and I, so we hired Miyari, former Content and Community Manager at Wowhead (from 2008 to 2011). This is pretty exciting news for us and we hope that the first articles will be released next week or the one after! Hearthstone In early November, right before BlizzCon, we published a few basic decks for Hearthstone to see if they would attract new visitors. The experiment was very successful and we decided to keep publishing more guides and decks. Eventually, we reached the same situation that we reached early last year with WoW when we started having all our class guides reviewed by top players. We realised that we needed someone with a lot of experience in online card games to help us make sure that the Hearthstone content we were providing was of the highest quality. At the time, we were looking for a new Protection Warrior reviewer (Sco no longer had the time), so we reached out to Poyo, Guild Master of Envy. It turned out that he is a former Magic the Gathering player and that he competed in many international tournaments, so we started collaborating on Hearthstone content. This collaboration has proved very fruitful and Hearthstone now accounts for 25% of our traffic. Other Projects In the near future, we are going to busy ourselves with 3 things mainly. First, we are soon going to release profession guides for WoW that will blow your mind. Second, we intend to cover Heroes of the Storm as soon as the beta starts. Third, we are pretty excited about Warlords of Draenor and we cannot wait to start writing about it. Thanks Keeping Icy Veins going would be incredibly difficult, if it were not for everyone who helps us on the forums and the support we get from our visitors and the WoW Community Team at Blizzard. We also have very healthy relations with other WoW-related websites, such as MMO-Champion (and the folks over at Curse, in general) or Ask Mr. Robot. 14 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LordEddie 1 Report post Posted March 21, 2014 You guys are awesome, and thanks so much for the class guides! The only thing i miss now are PVP guides! :) 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Orthios 271 Report post Posted March 23, 2014 Can't wait for prof guides and Heroes of the Storm as well. Loved the guides here and soon after joined the community where I'm glad to say that I've been both helped and a helper here. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
caguari 3 Report post Posted March 23, 2014 Keep going :P! 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
LobbyBoy 37 Report post Posted March 24, 2014 Happy Anniversary! And keep the good work going! 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mythryll 1 Report post Posted March 25, 2014 Happy Anniversary! We don't mind if you don't sit down and write news if there aren't any to write.We are thankfull for all the hard work you have done, which saves us enormous amount of time. Also you are the guys we trust when we want to look something up, whether it is tactics, or class mechanices, builds, glyphs, rotations, etc. Thanks to you I finally got to do some decent damage with my paladin after all those years (somehow it seemed simpler with the other classes, but never with pala..)Also you were the guys I always consulted when I wanted to learn tactics for 10 man material so, thanks again, keep it up, don't give up and we will be here when you got news to share. I am following you at the various social networking apps (twitter mostly) so I won't miss anything you have to say. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Oreoxd 165 Report post Posted March 25, 2014 Woo go IV! I joined this site not too long ago myself looking for help, and since then I've learned so much on my own and have evolved to helping others frequently and learning new things about other aspects of my class. Thanks Vlad and Damien for all the hard work you two have done and here's to many more years! 2 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Fouton 266 Report post Posted March 25, 2014 Thanks for the opportunity to bring myself into the WoW community and help those who seek knowledge :) Can't wait for the years to come, with groundbreaking content in the future! 3 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Marco 51 Report post Posted March 26, 2014 2014 will be awesome. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Gwenymph 414 Report post Posted March 27, 2014 Happy Anniversary I-V 2 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Geoda 253 Report post Posted March 27, 2014 Happy Anny IV!! 2 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Drift 3 Report post Posted March 27, 2014 Kudos to Poyo who is already making a huge difference in the quality of the Hearthstone decks. 3 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Egzo 4 Report post Posted March 27, 2014 Keep up the good work guys!!! Before WoD please expand your class leveling guides from 1 to 90.... Thank you so much.... 3 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
codered81 2 Report post Posted March 27, 2014 Can the Changelog forum be updated even when say changes are made to a class guide? Seems like this was never really done. Thanks! 2 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Damien 1,514 Report post Posted March 28, 2014 Can the Changelog forum be updated even when say changes are made to a class guide? Seems like this was never really done. Thanks! We will keep doing a changelog once the "news" start coming. The thing is that I did not want the news section to only contain changelogs. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mankeybone 1 Report post Posted March 29, 2014 Congratulations on three years! It says a lot about the quality of the site, and your dedication to it, that Icy Veins is now regarded as almost a compulsory "go-to" site for people wanting to learn, or improve their understanding, of classes and specs. A really well done site - may there be many more anniversaries! 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Varkaaf 2 Report post Posted April 1, 2014 (edited) Happy Aniversary! You ppl are doing great job. As Lord Eddie mentioned maybe some more pvp info would be nice. Edited April 1, 2014 by Varkaaf 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Damien 1,514 Report post Posted April 1, 2014 Happy Aniversary! You ppl are doing great job. As Lord Eddie mentioned maybe some more pvp info would be nice. We tried to put some on the forums, but it didn't really take off. The problem with PvP is that neither Vlad or I play that game mode, so it is hard to produce anything of value. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Mendenbarr 7 Report post Posted April 3, 2014 Here is to many more successful years! 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
