Blame the Mayans and the general feeling of impending doom society seems to nourish.
I think www.cataclysmdda.com is probably the easiest, but I have to say that the WoW conflict is a bit of a pain (when I’ve talked to people in the past about cataclysm they do always say ‘do you mean that WoW expansion?’. However, I think the world cataclysm is needed both to acknowledge whales work and also because this is a continuation and anything else would be confusing to people that have come from vanilla cata to this one.
I’d say go for cataclysmdda unless someone else can think of a really inspiring ‘dark days ahead’ web address that isn’t already taken.
Variant, not continuation 
We’ve strayed pretty far from Whales’ plans and ideas for the game already, he always wanted it to be more about wandering and avoiding hordes than building uberforts and reclaiming the land.
I just discovered Cataclysm “vanilla” about a week ago, and searched for DDA soon after, figuring “Hey, might as well try a mod”. Turns out Vanilla had been abandoned awhile ago, and DDA just officially “launched” about a month ago. Discovering this situation in the manner I did, I have some input into how I, as a new user, finally found my way here.
Given the abandoned state of the original, I feel you guys are correct in your desire to create an entirely separate, re-branded identity. The changes to the original are substantive enough, the majority of new content development occurs here, and you are faced with a (currently) fragmented web presence due to the newness of this long standing development being only currently “official”. Time to take command as the go-to destination for current *ataclysm development.
-
Name the game straight up “Dark Days Ahead”. With the simple tagline “Cataclysm Continued”. Think Sprite: Obey your Thrist. McDonalds: I’m Loving It. This will establish the game as it’s own seperate project, while respectfully aluding to the past. Brand-wise it has the following benefits.
-
The name Dark Days Ahead is elegant, poetic and perfect. Despite domain registration difficulties it should be kept present. It’s really just a perfect name IMO.
-
I actually love the domain “cataclysmcontinued dot com”. It is catchy, easily remembered, and descriptive. Again, it goes to the slogan / tagline aspect of identity. While it’d be perfect to have DarkDaysAhead.com it won’t happen. CataclysmDDA also has problems IMO. It’s more difficult to remember, it ties this project too closely to the vanilla build, and, to paraphrase another comment, “it’s just not as sexy”.
I believe I had more thoughts, but I had them at 3am last night while preparing for sleep after reading the forums. 
But these should suffice for now.
Keep up the great work, and TDW you are completely justified about wanting to identify this “Variant” as it’s own seperate creation. The amount of changes to the core game are impressive, and expansive.
P.S. That reminds me - the use of “Variant” in the branding (as TDW suggested) is also not as “sexy” to me. I believe it dimishes the scope of this effort, and in general it’s just not that sexy of a word taken out of contect of the Roguelike development community.
- Asciigod
just a random tidbit that may or may not be helpful:
‘darkdaysahead dot org’ and ‘dot us’ are unregistered. (Or atleast my DNS couldn’t find an address to ping.)
[quote=“dotASC, post:24, topic:171”]Keep up the great work, and TDW you are completely justified about wanting to identify this “Variant” as it’s own seperate creation. The amount of changes to the core game are impressive, and expansive.
P.S. That reminds me - the use of “Variant” in the branding (as TDW suggested) is also not as “sexy” to me. I believe it dimishes the scope of this effort, and in general it’s just not that sexy of a word taken out of contect of the Roguelike development community.
- Asciigod ;)[/quote]
The main reason I want to focus on calling it a Variant is to leave it open for Whales to come back to development without any issues. It’d be strange to have a ‘Continuation Project’ and the main branch going at once.
If you want to get google crawling up in your business appropriately, cataclysmdda or some variant is best.
Personally, I think you should go with the group/project style URL though, as it gives you more room to expand into other projects as time goes on, and lets people sort of “cross promote” their different works under one big happy umbrella.
[/quote]
The main reason I want to focus on calling it a Variant is to leave it open for Whales to come back to development without any issues. It’d be strange to have a ‘Continuation Project’ and the main branch going at once.
[/quote]
Fair enough.
So have the team come to any consensus yet?