Let me present RPGStash.com total rebuild

I have been working as managing director on rpgstash.com since 2005. It was originally a post nuke based site with only Diablo 2 items for sale. I used to handle both Europe, USEast and USWest all by myself without even a refresh bot to help me. I can still hear Deckard Cain ranting about Horadric lore in my dreams. Those were the days.

We added a few games over the years but the only one that has been on the same level as Diablo 2 in terms of sales has been Runescape. Much thanks to there being a huge item market and no Grand Exchange at the time. Other games like EVE Online, MU Online and MapleStory showed some promise but never really took off.

In accordance with the world wide economic depression business has been dwindling since 2009 but I held on with a firm belief in the future of my website. With the right cms, SEO, content and customer support I believed I could hit it off.

So by the end of 2011, with little money to spare, I started working on a new version of the website to facilitate content expansion and user interactivity. It took a year but the new website is finally completed, and it looks and operates fantastically so far. It has full social integration, blog, full fledged stores, payment by credit card, phone and sms, and a growing number of technical safeguards that will protect users and increase credability. Now it’s all about great content, SEO and social sharing.

The different versions of the website from 2004 to 2012 can be viewed below.

RPGStash 2004

RPGStash 2006

RPGStash 2012

It looks brighter does it not?

What to do when adding domains in cpanel does not work

When you have a new dedicated or virtual private server running with linux and Cpanel there are many settings that may need configuring before everything runs smoothly. I recently had problems with a vps where I could not add any add on domains in cpanel. The error message was:

Sorry, the domain is already pointed to an IP address that does not appear to use DNS servers associated with this server. ease transfer the domain to this servers nameservers or have your administrator add one of its nameservers to /etc/ips.remotedns and make the proper A entries on that remote nameserver.

The solution was to enable a setting in WHM under Tweak Settings:

Allow Creation of Parked/Addon Domains that resolve to other servers (i.e. domain transfers)

[Edit 23 Feb 2013] On the new version of cpanel/whm the setting is called:

Allow Remote Domains

EVE Online is a promising market

EVE Online is the biggest science fiction themed MMORPG with over 400K subcribers worldwide. Originally released on May 6th 2003, the game has gone from clarity to clarity with a long list of expansions:
Inferno

Castor
Exodus
Exodus: Cold War
Exodus: Red Moon Rising
Bloodlines
Revelations I
Revelations II
Trinity
Empyrean Age
Quantum Rise
Apocrypha
Dominion
Tyrannis
Incursion
Incarna
Crucible

The most recent expansion, Inferno, was released on the 24th of April 2012, adding a variety of interesting features to an already great and full fledged game of impressive size.

The EVE Online universe is incredibly huge – roughly 100 light years across – with over 5000 star systems and 2500 wormwhole systems. To traverse the EVE universe would take forever with ordinary space flight. Fortunately, there are shortcuts in the form of jump drives, jump portals, jump bridges, jump clones and wormholes. Still getting from one end of the universe to the other takes several hundred jumps and probably around 5 hours of play time, give or take depending on your type of ship. To visit every single one of the 5000 star systems takes around 7 months out of which maybe 1500 hours are play time. To visit every planet in every system would be a daunting task for even the most dedicated of pilots.

The size of the game, and the amount of time that must be invested to get anywhere, are the reasons why it’s such a promising secondary market (real world trading). Trade between players plays a huge part in EVE Online. Players research, mine and manufacture goods for eachother. Every commodity, product and service has a value in ISK, the in-game currency. Due to time constraints, not all players have ISK to buy things with or significant amount of goods to sell. In order to get anywhere in the game, these players must turn to real world trading. They must locate a webshop outside of the game that sells ISK, ships, blueprints, implants, minerals and other stuff and then purchase these goods with real money, typically via PayPal.

I have recently brushed up and search engine optimized the EVE Online Shop EVEwiz.com where you can buy EVE Online ships and other useful things at affordable prices. That which distinguishes this shop from many others is the delivery service. The goods are delivered to the buyer’s station of choice. Customer can choose any system with a security of 0.5 or higher for delivery. This saves the customer precious time and the potential hazard of space pirates and armed conflicts that infuse the EVE Online universe. Once this shop starts ranking properly on the good keywords, the financial success will be a fact. At least I hope so.