2010 Q4 News Archive

Thanks to our buddy Jay we've added a new battle type to PG-HQ: Paradrops. Though there are only 6 scenarios currently identified as featuring paradrops, that is precisely the sort of thing the battle type classification was meant to highlight. So thank you Jay!

In other news, the PG-HQ RSS feed is alive and well. Clicking the doodad in the bottom right corner of our banner at the top of your screen that looks like this will take you to our RSS feed. This is a site news feature that will notify you when:

• site news (posts like this one you're reading) are posted
• new plays are recorded
• new AARs are published
• new errata is submitted
• and new members join

There are a variety of ways to subscribe. Because I have RSS subscriptions to many different sites, I prefer using a free standalone application called Feed Demon. If you have a Gmail account you can use Google Reader. There are about a million other possibilities as well. You can even subscribe directly within Internet Explorer or Firefox, and it'll notify you when we have new content.

I hope you all find time to game during the holiday season!

I hope the holidays are treating everyone well! They don't give you much time to enjoy Christmas in China, so I'm headed back to work tomorrow, but before I do I've got some serious site updates to unleash.

Firstly, dear old St. Nick has given PG-HQ a new feature for Christmas: Annotated Rules. Features include:

• 241 rule nodes, 74 clarifications, and 5 kick-ass diagrams
• always up-to-date PDF version
• web and print views
• hotlinking between rules
• one man to rule them all and for this HQ clarify them

Creating this feature was a masterful effort from Alan and his crew, and I'm oh so very proud to reveal it to the rest of you. I'm confident it will serve you well!

Secondly, a tiny but immensely popular feature has returned in upgraded form, as promised. If you visit any scenario's page, you'll see that the Rating area has been slightly modified. Whereas it used to say "Rating, Avg, X Votes" it now says "Rating, Avg, X Votes (who?)". That last bit is the kicker.

If you hold your mouse over the (who?) a new window will pop up listing all the users who've rated the scenario and what ratings they gave it. You can click the usernames to go directly to their profiles, or if you move your mouse away the window will automatically disappear. Fast, simple, clear, and logical: this is ideal design!

Thirdly, a long-standing and very frustrating (for me!) bug has been fixed within the Your Collection Status section of My PG-HQ: Home. Basically, if you had 0 plays for any game in your collection, the Deviation from Global rating would be totally hosed for any games lower in the table. It took me far longer than it should have to sort this one out, but I have and now things are running accurately.

That's it for now... but I have yet still more (still yet more?) new stuff to announce later today! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Panzer Grenadier Headquarters!

As promised, Mike Bennighof has faced-up to every possible question I could throw at him.

Grab a steaming mug of coffee, or a cold brewski, and join us for A Fireside Chat with the President of Avalanche Press.

The future of Panzer Grenadier is in your hands!

For those of you slow on the uptake, Mike B., president of Avalanche Press, posted a worrisome article about the state of AvP's finances on Friday, which ended with an urge for everyone to stock up on a few (or a dozen) PG titles to help AvP make their ends meet.

While the peanut gallery on CSW has been shockingly silent up to this point, I have heard from many of you privately over the last 24 hours. PG's fans are concerned about their series, they're concerned about their money, and they're concerned about the future of Avalanche Press. While Mike's Ode to Finance was illuminating, it created a lot more questions than it answered.

That's where we come in!

Mike Bennighof, Ph.D., President of Avalanche Press has agreed to sit down with PG-HQ for a no-holds barred interview. This is the big one gents.

The interview will be posted by the end of the weekend. If you've got a burning question for Mike, you've got my ear.

See you soon!

Would you look at that header! 22 Panzer Grenadier scenarios take place on December 16th -- nearly 2% of all scenarios ever released. Not bad at all! Anyone going to get a Bulge or Elsen on the table this week?

In other news, Unit Errata has been added to the database, and old game and scenario errata that covered units have been spun-off where appropriate. This also presented a good opportunity to overhaul the errata system, which had been installed pre-launch. The new errata form offers some half-decent guidelines that should preempt a few common issues with errata submission.

First, my apologies. Member rankings are based on unique scenario plays to avoid situations where someone plays a tiny scenario over and over and thereby gets promoted based on less than varied battlefield experience.

Unfortunately, up until today the "Next Rank" prompt located on your My PG-HQ Home Tab was calculating remaining plays without ignoring repeated plays of the same scenario. This resulted in at least one person being told they were due a promotion and not receiving one. That's one too many. The rank calculator has been fixed to only count unique scenarios and the wording has been changed to clarify this somewhat.

In other news, recording plays when there are no games in your collection used to screw things up. I know of at least one member who has apparently been happily encountering error messages related to this bug for several months. I say "happily" because he never felt the need to alert me! Anyways, that bug has now been squashed. On with the show...

PG-HQ has a favicon now: . These are the icons that show up in your browser when you bookmark a site, and also generally show up next to the URL in your address bar.

Nothing groundbreaking, just making the site a little more polished...

Panzer Grenadier Headquarters turned 6 months old this week - time flies, huh?

In addition, I've been discussing the future of PG-HQ with a few of you via email over the past week or so. There's no reason that information needs to be privy to only a few people, though.

If you're interested in what changes we have in store for the future, fetch a comfy chair and read PG-HQ's 1st "Six Month Plan".

This feature suggestion comes to us from PG-HQ member giambota, aka Ron.

Ron requested that PG-HQ provide complete counter inventories for each game in our system. As a (fictional) example:

Eastern Front, Germany

• 12 x GREN
• 8 x HMG
• 4 x ENG
• etc.

This solves two problems - first, as Ron correctly pointed out, some units do not appear in any scenarios, despite being included on counter sheets. This makes it impossible to identify from which game they came if you stumble across them in the database. Second, it allows wargamers to verify the completeness of their own games, or any game they might wish to purchase. As far as I know, this sort of listed inventory is not available anywhere on the internet for the Panzer Grenadier series... and that makes it a perfect target for us.

How you can help - the first step is to get all these inventories neatly organized in a standardized spreadsheet. Using this spreadsheet, I can upload everything needed into the database extremely quickly. I need data, though, so if you're in the mood to count your counters for the betterment of Panzer Grenadier players everywhere, drop me a line and let me know what game(s) you'd be willing to provide data for. Once I've got a volunteer list assembled, I'll allocate responsibilities and distribute the spreadsheet.

Hope to hear from you soon!

We're nearly done loading Indian Unity into the PG-HQ Library, which means we now have a new nation: Hyderabad.

I'd appreciate some help locating a period photo of some Hyderabad forces to use on the nation page. I suspect this will not be an easy task. If you find anything, please send it over to the usual place.

Thank you!

Another proud day for PG-HQ as 4 recruits graduate from Basic Training and join the real ranks! At the other end of the ladder, we've got some Grognards in a bit of a game of one-upmanship!

November's site traffic set records across the board:

• Unique Visitors up 8%
• Total Visits up 30%
• Total Pageviews up 41%

In non-geek speak, we're attracting new people, those who know about us are dropping by more often, and those who drop by are diving deeper into the site than ever before.

PG-HQ is still in its infancy, and many of the features originally planned for launch have yet to be realized, but we continue to steadily build our community.

We're here for the long haul, and it's only just begun!

Can't get enough stats? An exhaustive analysis of our first 1,000 plays has just been finished - come walk the PG-HQ: Road to 1,000.

By the way, someone tell AP that I'll waive the market research report fee if they send me a gratis copy of each Kursk! ;-)

Seeking some respite from bug-squashing duties, I've returned to working on the PG-HQ Library.

At the request of a certain Jay Townsend the Battle Conditions list now includes Illumination rounds, flares, star-shells, etc.

Furthermore, with the dependable help of a certain Tracey Love I added 60+ new unit images to the library today.

Unit artwork, I feel, is highly under-appreciated. Not only can it be almost unnecessarily intricate, the discrepancies that we've uncovered are wonderfully entertaining.

I bet you didn't know that we currently have identified seven different images for the German Heer Gren! Or that the American Army M5 comes in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors!

Silly discoveries such as these are all in a day's work here at Panzer Grenadier Headquarters!

errebi15 just submitted Panzer Grenadier Headquarters' 500th after action report! While play results drive the stats, the AARs are where you can find our real value.

Five hundred after action reports neatly organized in one place - take a minute to stop and consider what we've all accomplished.

PG-HQ cannot compete with BGG's multimedia content, nor can it provide CSW's direct access to company reps... at least not yet! But this site has really begun to bring out the best the PG community has to offer. To understand that one need only watch that AAR counter tick upwards day after day.

It takes only a few seconds to record a play, but AARs take time. AARs take someone wanting to share a private experience with the community, for the greater good of all.

When I launched this site on June 6th, I was proud of my small team of selfless volunteers who donated dozens of hours of their lives doing tedious data entry to flesh out the database.

Today, I'm proud of everyone. In only 5 months Panzer Grenadier Headquarters has laid down remarkably strong, deep roots. Without question, we're here to stay, and the future will only get brighter.

Bug hunting, mostly.

As PG-HQ creeps towards 300 recruits, the site's daily traffic has gradually grown and people are exploring dark, dank corners of the site heretofore untraveled.

These dark, dank corners often contain bugs. Bugs are bad. Finding bugs is good. Fixing bugs is even better!

The past couple of weeks I've spent most of my time making tweaks and fixes that 99% of our members will never notice, but nonetheless ensure that PG-HQ continues running like a well-oiled machine.

If you uncover some odd site behavior, please let me know!

There is new content on the horizon. We'll publish a new article this weekend, and I've got a literary masterpiece from Mike Perryman under review. One major feature is inching towards completion, and several others have completed their design phases and are just waiting for their chance to be implemented.

See you soon!

Congratulations David Riddle, you will forever be remembered as the owner of the 1,000th recorded play!

Avalanche Press and Panzer Grenadier Headquarters have joined forces in order to commemorate this momentous event, and an AP representative will be contacting you shortly to discuss your prize!

To the rest of the PG-HQ community, my heartfelt thanks to every last one of you for helping to make us such an outstanding success! Panzer Grenadier Headquarters is nothing without its dedicated members. You keep playing, and we'll keep growing!

Now about that Play Coverage... ;-)

To Play was unloved from the beginning. I tossed it barebones into the system right before we went public and never went back to flesh it out. The little value it offered was not immediately obvious, and it has languished as the least used tool on the site for the past 4 months.

But that changes now! To Play has evolved into Want to Play. As part of the redesign process, the top of every scenario page in the PG-HQ Library has been overhauled.

New features are:

• a prominent average rating and total vote tally
• a (still somewhat ugly) graph showing how many votes have been cast for each rating
• AARs have been resorted according to rating, and are linked from the graph, so if you want to read why someone hated/loved that scenario, one click will take you there
• the Scenario Status selector has been added

Lastly, if you're listed in the Player Finder you'll also be listed as Looking for Opponents on the page of every scenario you've marked as Want to Play.

I hope this redesigned feature serves you well, and also that you keep coming back as Panzer Grenadier Headquarters continues to grow and evolve!