Caltrops - Battlefield 2





	[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Zsenicorpse"]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. [/quote] Who said you weren't very good at Caltrops? Anonymous people? The same two or three people who used to post three dozen different times as Mysterio? People who naturally hate everything? [quote]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.[/quote] I appreciate that, but I believe this place can be much better than it is and I take the full blame for it not being that way. To 'administer' this site, in all of its various iterations, you have to be willing to walk away. For a day, a week, a month, whatever. For instance, I think that Entropy Stew would be a perfect admin (at this point) if I got hit by a bus tomorrow because he just doesn't have all that much emotionally invested any longer. It puts two opposing mindsets together, though: you have to care enough to update the main page and format articles and so forth, but not care so much that you'll take it personally if somebody - reg or Mysterio - tells you what an enormous fag you are. [quote]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? [/quote] I would definitely maintain that, yes, to actively keep up with this place, you can't take anything you read personally. You may even get dismissed and called an asshole months later and ALL THE WHILE the person can think that he and Caltrops are "cool." That means that every possible new poster is going to end up asking himself (and sadly, it's almost definitely a he) "Why should I bother with this shit?" With OMM it was obvious: for their articles. I don't know that there's a really good parallel for this place, if only because you aren't going to instantly know that the Fussbett/Ray/Whorebach/Whoever posts are hilarious and worth keeping around for. [quote]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. [/quote] I can't argue with this at all. [quote]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>. [/quote] There are some things I have considered changing to try to help. While I think the current About page is hilarious, it wouldn't hurt to actually tell people what the forums are for and that there are hundreds of them. I believe that the average would-be reader comes to the forum, sees 10 active subforums (Gamerasutra, Half-Life 2, The Zionist Media Conspiracy and then something random like Carmen Sandiego or Xenophobe) and assumes the place is dead. A buddy of mine who is fairly fluent in BBSs assumed as much when we were on opposite sites of the phpBB-being-garbage debate. I don't think it would hurt to have the messages and bases scroll off after a month instead of 8 days. And personally I'd just make the default color of the forum purple and give those people who need the blue version a separate URL. [quote]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? [/quote] Exactly. I was once told that the average page of an OMM article took a day to write. I don't know the actual history of Chet and erik at that time, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that, ah, at least one of them had their days free to come up with that stuff. My last bit (on Postal 2) took a week to play what was a shitty game and then a couple days to whip up some writing on it. Even after all that I still needed proofreading from Ray. I imagine that many of us don't have that kind of time. And who wants to hear about all the great fun I've been having in Oblivion? Who gives a shit? [quote] 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.[/quote] You're ABSOLUTELY right about this. I agree completely. [quote] 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.[/quote] The only problem with this is on my side - it takes an evening to get something ready for the site. I get about three hours of free time a night by the time I get home and have dinner with my girlfriend due to my commute. But I am hoping to fix that by the end of the month. I could probably post a template for people to use, though which would go a long way towards stuff getting uploaded at a faster clip. I have run out of things to say, but I am not done thinking about this. Thanks for taking the time to write out what you did. It's appreciated. the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey![/quote]