I have to play devil's advocate here. Beyond the obvious reasons of brand awareness, etc. why do we care what Warhorn rates Shadowrun Missions?
We don't, really. Beyond getting more people excited about Shadowrun Missions, there is no point. But marketing the campaign in every way is important, and someone could look at Warhorn, look at the Shadowrun statistics, and go 'Nah, Shadowrun is not important because it has such a small share here on Warhorn', and you might loose a possible event or player.
I'll break down the conventions & events I have run at or will run at since last October through this fall (at least as it stands now).
- Save Against Fear, Lancaster PA - con organizers have their own system
- CritCon, Columbus OH - Warhorn v1
- Charm City Game Day, Glen Burnie MD - uses EventBrite, was Conplanner
- GADCon (Games & Dice Con), Baltimore MD - own system
- GaryCon, Lake Geneva WI - own system
- 1d4Con, Winchester VA - Warhorn v2
- Origins, Columbus OH - well, this will be my first Origins since Baltimore in '91, but I believe they use their own system
I am impressed, sir. Aside from a home game I started after last Dragon*con, I generally don't GM too much Shadowrun except at Dragon*con.
This doesn't include the weekly Missions game I run (two weeks a month Season 4, two Season 5) at my FLGS in Glen Burnie. The Season 5 group got big enough that I had to recruit a second GM so we could run two tables. These are listed on the store's website, Facebook page and event calender, as well as dead-tree calendars they create for each month.
In a perfect world there would be some sort of master place one could go to find games, gamers and conventions, but the reality is that it's horribly fractured. For finding individual gamers there's GeekTransit, NearbyGamers and other specialized sites, but I frankly hear of more people connecting via MeetUp. And convention listings are just as bad; my old book marks didn't survive my last PC rebuild but I had four or five different sites with listings, none of which were anywhere near complete.
What I'd really like to see that seems realistic is for Catalyst to put the effort into the CDT program that it deserves, but that requires dedicated resources which don't seem to be available.
Meetup is definitely a place to go. Frankly, I didn't even know that there were other sites that competed with Warhorn. I never thought of Warhorn competing with meetup. I have seen Messageboards used a great deal.
Technically we have our own infrastructure as well antiquated as it may be http://catalystdemos.com/
I somehow managed to miss that we had one of our own, even though I have been posting events on there for years. Hmm... You gentlemen make me think.
So far, I have:
As places to post Shadowrun stuff.
Now, back to the Original topic:
Well, everyone agrees that the situation is terrible. Listings are fractured. The advantage that Warhorn has over many of the other offerings is that PFS also utilizes Warhorn a good deal - if a small con uses Warhorn to organize PFS, we can usually use the same site to list our Shadowrun games. I am not saying it is ideal. I am not saying that there are not better options. But, Warhorn is here and they are working on improving. Why not work with what we have until something better comes along?
Also, keeping up lists of conventions and dates, etc, would be Hard work.