Caltrops - Battlefield 2





	[quote name="Zsenicorpse"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Bill Dungsroman"]PS this isn't somebody else pretending to be me. ICJ can confirm the proof: I've always thanked him at the end of every email I've ever sent him, and used my real name.[/quote] Yes, he was very polite and a pleasure to run a website with. He had not been a fan of the fact that nothing of importance can be discussed on this website for quite some time. I wouldn't expect anything less than braying and cackling that another one bit the dust, but this place is becoming very boring. Not that Zseni, for instance, leaving because one nobody wrote "LEAVE!!!! NT" over and over again wasn't stupid, but the collective loss of everyone adds up. I'm down KThor, Mao, Zseni, 95% of Fussbett, curst, cNo, ceep, Koba and now BDR. I was hoping that if someone who liked everyone's posts paid the bill and just shut up that nobody would be compelled to leave because, after all, it wasn't the "administrator" telling them to shut the fuck up. This didn't turn out the way I'd hoped. ICJ[/quote] I totally saw this for the first time today! So anyway every time you make fun of something, you make a new rule. Whole swathes of human behavior become unacceptably gay! Caltrops is all about criticism and making fun of things; we can model Caltrops very well if we think of gayness as a zombie and posting as attacking zombies. Caltrops is a survival horror game with a limited ammo supply, degrading weapons, and infinite zombies. It's a game that rewards wrench-wielding purists like Fussbett and people who can kill zombies just by looking at them real hard, like Creexul, and people who don't mind losing a lot, like Worm. But it's hard on people with shaky aim who blow ammo misfiring (BDR), or keep attempting to play Mario Paint using the Caltrops interface (mrs johnson), or people who are used to playing everything on God Mode (Zseni!) I was always confused that people liked Caltrops but didn't like System Shock 2. I liked Caltrops <i>and</i> SS2, I just wasn't very good at either. I thought Caltrops should have been easier, but I usually got shot down on that point. Nobody wanted Caltrops to be easier and, worse yet, we kept getting Unreliable Narrator DM's like SB and BDR. BDR may have been very polite, but he's better suited to moderating big forums that are actually about talking. Not viciously intimate PVP affairs like Caltrops, because he's such a huge personal fuckup. You can fly with "huge personal fuckup" if you're on a big board where people are interested in getting along. You don't have to be all there to delete crappy posts and yell at people who get out of line. But you can't fly with it when the (sensitive, committed, polite) board admin is at least as likely to get attacked as anyone else. ICJ, you're a great admin for this place - you keep all your huge personal fuckups offline. We never hear about them. That's perfect. It could have worked out better if the Fussbett/Creex/INC axis wasn't so assfuckingly dominant and tight. They just whipped everyone! Nobody else could compete! In fact, nobody else was even close! And so the lesser orders did much better playing along with whatever they thought Fussbett, Creex, and INC would like: war stories, porn, trolling, FPS games, liking the right movies and the right music, that sort of thing. It wasn't so much that Fussbett came down on anyone who posted about liking poetry and kittens as that anonymous tards and second-string posters would pre-emptively assign Fussbettian judgement on the post and poster and attack accordingly. Everything would have been cool if, you know, people could just not give a shit about what other people say about them on the internet, but when you've spent years saying things back and forth with these people? Or when they stink of cool kids or get your jokes? I always thought the best way to level the playing field would be to have a seriously bent administrator - not somebody polite and hands-off, but a raging tyrant, a fantastical abuser of power, like Chet or SB but worse... and fun. Fun to hate, fun to fight, and of course someone who would not actually fucking delete the boards for fun. So that was the idea with Cabaret Voltron. As it turned out, nobody was in the market for things that were crazy and gay - I was shocked. Maybe the problem was that it was <i>Zseni's</i> crazy gayness specifically! That's what I like to think. And of course there was no reason whatsoever for Fussbett, Creex, and INC to post there, where the architecture and subject matter of the forum were designed to work against them, instead of here. And without them I couldn't get anyone else to stick around either. Posting volume always spiked when Chet or SB was on a rampage, too. I still think the crazy administrator is the best solution to the problem of the Caltrops endgame. Which is of course where Caltrops is at now: the endgame. Highlander-eque, posters fall away one by one and their powers revert unto Those Who Remain. The ultimate problem is that Creex, Fussbett, and INC aren't going to bitch out each other, but everyone else who could be bitched out is either gone or worthless. There is less and less to talk about at Caltrops and fewer and fewer people to talk about it. I don't think this is actually <i>bad</i>, but it is <i>dull</i>, and especially <i>unnecessary</i>. But one can't expect Fussbett to start posting sloppy or Creex to stop being Creex. Nobody wants Fussbett to post sloppy or Creex to start acting like an upright young fellow with a future anyway. What is needed is more space for the less excellent and more numerous ranks of posters to do show up and do their thing. In fact, I'd settle for more posters period. At OMM the draw was the content and, as it turns out, Caltrops just isn't producing stuff on that level even if the general quality of posting in the forum is way above any other forum's. So there's a second problem: even with a crazy administrator, how would you get more people to show up? I don't actually have an answer for that one. Advertising? Providing additional services? There's plenty of in-house talent even if it is split between precious few people - why aren't there Sluggers and Deus Ex office remodelling successors here? A lot of the AIM log stuff just needs a little more cleaning up and editing before it's saleable article content - that's a good schtick all on its own, the only game review site that reviews everything in AIM. I would turn many more posts from the forum into permanent articles, or make the "game reviews in the forum" section more navigable, and possibly add user ratings or something. Anyways I'm still the best poster ever. I keep telling you this but it's still not sinking in. [/quote]