SoGamed is a community website focusing on gaming and eSports. It provides extensive reporting on eSports, supports forums and IRC channels, and refers to itself as "the CNN of e-Sports". It is mainly a gathering point for Counter-Strike players around the world, but many other FPS games are supported. Over the past few years, SoGamed has developed itself the one of the premier homes of the casual and elite e-Sport player.
In this community, eSport players from the whole world meet, interact, share news, talk, download demos and store online profiles. By 2005 there were over 400,000 members on SoGamed from more than 60 countries. SoGamed offers forums for nine different languages: English, French, German, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.
Members can post local news from their country or major news for the entire community. As such, all major news gets out on SoGamed before all other major eSport sites and has thus become the "market newspaper" where the other sites turn to for the latest news. SoGamed also indexes the news of all the major eSport sites, listing them under the "Gaming News" section; this makes SoGamed very useful for finding out what's happening in the world of eSports.
With such a large user community, news that gets posted on SoGamed often reaches over 250,000 unique visitors within 24 hours. Also, since all the major eSport players are represented on SoGamed the discussions often influence the way eSports evolve, even the big event organizers often take part in the discussions and learn from it.Content
- Profiles: Like most forums each user gets their own profile. Interestingly, while the user can specify any country, there is an IP check which compares the IP address with an internet service provider database. If the specified country does not match the country determined via IP check, it will be displayed in the profile as an extra entry indicated by 'Real Country'. The profile also offers a guestbook where other registered users can leave a message. The profile shows the 20 latest visitors to that profile and displays the user's buddy list (up to 85 users). There is also a function to upload a person's configuration file (the game settings a player is using for a game), for other people to see. Finally, each profile includes statistics on: logins, messages, forum posts, news posts, comment posts, demos uploaded, forum threads, spotlighted threads and how many times the profile has been visited by other logged-in users. SoGamed lists the top 100 profiles, sorted by hits - some members have had over 250,000 visitors whom have examined their profile. The diary function was introduced in March 2004. It allows people to have their own diary on the site which is visible to other users as well.
- Clubs: The club section allows users to create their own clubs. Each club has a specific topic (e.g. Cinema, Music, Sports, Game Help). It is also the place for non-gaming related interest groups to have their own room for discussion without getting disturbed or interfering with the usual gaming-related discussions going on on the site. A club is a way to have a closed mini version of SoGamed for yourself together with the people you choose to invite. You can also choose to list it in the clubs database for other members to browse and then apply to join.
- News: The site contains sections on site news, featured news (gaming events, particularly tournaments), community news ('Local Community News' and 'Major Community News'), interviews, SoGamed Watch (live event news), and gaming news (based on an RSS feed). The Gaming News section displays the latest headlines from news/articles on other gaming related sites and offers direct links to the news item/article.
- SoGamed Features: The feature section holds content exclusively written for SoGamed, such as tweak guides (how to improve the performance of games), a movie tutorial (how to create a movie based on captured material from games) and more. This section also hosts the so called 'Speakers Corner' articles which allow people to submit their own articles and discussing it with other users.
- Multimedia: One of SoGamed's biggest sections is the demo section. A demo is a recorded match, very much like a recorded football game (or similar sports) which you can watch after the game was played. SoGamed can be compared to an online archive of all the big matches that have been played around the world. Since December 2001 there have been over 3.5 million unique downloaded demos from SoGamed, each demo being 5-10 MB on average. SoGamed offers demos from games such as Counter-Strike, Quake III Arena, Warcraft III, Unreal Tournament series, Day of Defeat and Call of Duty. In the 'Frag Movies' section, you can find reviews and download links to movies based on games. SoGamed TV was a feature of SoGamed version 3.0 (no longer active) and allowed people to spectate multiplayer games live.
- Cafe Watch: A list of user-submitted internet cafes with detailed information such as the homepage of the cafe, opening hours, address and contact information.
- Polls: SoGamed conducts polls that change on a regular basis asking for the users opinion on certain issues. Sample polls include 'Would you risk going for a fulltime pro-gaming career?', 'How often do you play online games?', 'What's your CPU MHz speed?'. These poll results used to be shown on each users profile and SoGamed is working on bringing this feature back.
[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for SoGamed ]
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