Just a quick note to thank all our readers for their support over the past year. If Christmas is your thing, I hope it’s a good one for you with plenty of time to play the games you’re passionate about.

We’ll still be working away over this time: in fact there may be more content than usual! If there’s particular stuff you’d like us to cover over the ‘break’, then let us know in comments! We’ll be having a look back at 2012 and testing some of the predictions we made a year ago as well as making some new ones for 2013.

I also wanted to shout out to the great team that contribute quality stories to The Oceanic Gamer: it’s you folks who make this little gaming site rock in a big way.

[Pic via LiteGamer]

Just a quick post to let you know we’re always keen to expand our writing team. In particular we’re wanting to expand our MMO coverage as well as move into the comics area, a 30+ year passion of mine.

So, here’s who we’re looking for:

1a. Gaming writers: Someone who plays an MMO regularly – you don’t need to be hard-core by any means, but a good familiarity with the game is a must. Which game doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s got an active community. Whether it’s WoW, Rift, TSW, GW2, World of Tanks or anything in between, we’re interested.

1b. Comics writers: Someone who reads comics regularly. Doesn’t matter if it’s superheroes, graphic novels, independent, web comics – you just need to love writing about comics, including reviewing comics you’re excited about.

2. Someone who writes well – don’t be hard on yourself here. Your work will be edited for the odd typo or grammatical error, which is fine. All we ask is that you can string sentences together in an engaging way and not require extensive re-writing / correction by your friendly editor. Nearly every writer we have on our team was convinced that they may not have been up to the task – I’m yet to have one person who hasn’t turned out to be a good writer.

3. Someone who writes regularly – we’d be looking for people that can contribute a minimum of a 400-600 word article each week. Fortnightly gigs will be seriously considered as well, as will guest reviews or opinion pieces if you can’t commit regularly.

4. Someone who has a volunteer sense of spirit: unfortunately TOG is financially a loss-making outfit, albeit a successful one with lots of traffic. If revenue increases, you WILL be sharing in that equally with the other writers on the team. In the meantime, expect the odd bit of swag or attendance at a game-related event representing The Oceanic Gamer, if the opportunity arises. And yes, you do have a byline to tout to much richer publications than our humble selves. Finally, you’re welcome to have a link back to your own blog or related web undertaking in each of your articles.

As far as topics go, we’re looking for people interested in writing on:

1. Games:

– Guild Wars 2: any topic area you like

– WoW: any topic area, would love some class columns but opinion / strategy and the like is always welcome. Will be working with our current WoW guru Luke to cover this game.

– SWTOR: still very keen on class columns, opinion, strategy, guild news

– The Secret World: lore, tips, opinion, news – anything really

– Project Titan / other Blizzard projects: news, opinion etc

– any other MMO: let us know what you’d like to do!

2. Comics: we’re really open on this. In an ideal world we’d love some regular comic reviews or opinion pieces on the industry. We’d also like to give some love to the local creators in addition to covering the big players.

So if you’d like to express interest, here’s what you do:

1. Use our contact form and provide the following info:

– ideally submit a sample of your writing or at least a pitch on what you’d like to write and why

– tell us a little bit about yourself – similar in vein to the bios on our About page. You do not need to be based in Australia or New Zealand.

– what day and time of the week is best for you to submit a column

2. Wait patiently for us to get back to you – it should only take a day or two.

3. See points 1 and 2.

Please, have a think about getting involved – and again, don’t be too harsh on your writing ability. Leave that to us!

[Pic via Cheezburger of course!]

The time has come again to put out a call for anyone interested in writing for The Oceanic Gamer. As we’ve grown to cover a range of MMOs, we’re as keen as ever to get opinionated gamers involved in getting their thoughts out there.

Before you say “nah, I’m not much of a writer”, please read on. Here’s who we’re looking for:

1. Someone who plays an MMO regularly – you don’t need to be hard-core by any means, but a good familiarity with the game is a must. Which game doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s got an active community. Whether it’s WoW, Rift, TSW, GW2, World of Tanks or CityVille, we’re interested! Ok, we’re not totally serious about CityVille.

2. Someone who writes well – don’t be TOO hard on yourself here. Your work will be edited for the spelling or grammatical errors, which is fine. All we ask is that you can string sentences together in an engaging way and not require extensive re-writing / correction by your friendly editor.

3. Someone who writes regularly – we’d be looking for people that can contribute a minimum of a 400-600 word article each week or fortnight. Monthly gigs will be seriously considered as well, as will guest reviews or opinion pieces if you can’t commit regularly.

4. Someone who has a volunteer sense of spirit: unfortunately TOG is financially a loss-making outfit, albeit a successful one with lots of traffic. If revenue increases, you WILL be sharing in that equally with the other writers on the team. In the meantime, expect the odd bit of swag or attendance at a game-related event representing us, if the opportunity arises. And yes, you do have a byline to tout to much richer publications than our humble selves. Finally, you’re welcome to have a link back to your own blog or related web undertaking in each of your articles.

As far as topics go, we’re looking for people interested in writing on:

1. SWTOR: healing, Operations walk throughs, random opinion pieces (we already have a great guild writer – thanks Jem!)
2. Guild Wars 2: any topic area you like!
3. WoW: class columns, raiding, guild profiles, PvP (we already have a great WoW columnist – thanks Luke!)
4. The Secret World: general news, cabal profiles, dungeon tips, PvP
5. A webcomic (if you’re an artist looking for a writer, drop us a line)
6. A machinima column with some good embeds to YouTube / Vimeo etc
7. Opinion columns on gaming in general
8. General news reporting (we already have a great general news guy – thanks Toby!)
9. Any innovative idea you want to put forward!

If you’d like to express interest, here’s what you do:

1. Use our contact form and provide the following info:
– ideally submit a sample of your writing or at least a pitch on what you’d like to write and why
– tell us a little bit about yourself – similar in vein to the bios on our About page.
– what day and time of the week is best for you to submit a column
2. Wait patiently for us to get back to you – it should only take a day or two.
3. See points 1 and 2.

Please, have a think about getting involved – don’t be too harsh on your writing ability. Leave that to us!

This announcement is probably not that big a one for most of you, but it’s a fairly big one for us. TOROZ has been running since early 2009, and over that time it’s consistently reported on everything SWTOR. Since the launch of the game proper in December 2011, a team of great writers have brought all the big news and a lot of great other stuff on a daily basis. All that said, it’s actually difficult to post about SWTOR only given that there’s so much more going on out there in MMO-land.

Which is why we’ve decided to expand our focus to cover new and current MMOs, with a focus on Oceanic gamers (i.e. anyone from Australia, New Zealand or surrounding islands). We’re not big or ugly enough to be covering everything out there, but you can expect regular coverage on the big items, whether it’s veterans like World of Warcraft, through to Guild Wars / Rift / Secret World and so on. What won’t be doing is changing our level of coverage of SWTOR. We’ll still be playing it all the time, the Flash Point Podcast will stay centred on SWTOR, and you can be certain that we’ll still be providing all the latest news, patch notes and opinion on the game.

So here’s what will be changing:

1. The site will now be called The Oceanic Gamer – hence the new logo you see at the top of the page

2. We will be keeping the TOROZ domain so all old links will work in full

3. For every SWTOR story there’ll be another story covering another MMO

4. Our forums will remain as they are now

5. Our TOROZ iPhone / iPad app will not change at this stage

6. For our RSS subscribers, you can now choose to receive all posts or just SWTOR posts

7. We’ll change over the logos for our Twitter and Facebook pages but leave the URLs the same

That’s it! Bear with us as we change everything over.

Please give us your feedback – because none of this matters without you!