Re: Host vs. Raptor Jesus, Round 3: FIGHT!
Before we begin the proper, meaningless trash-talking, I want to say with entire honesty that I liked you. To me, you were “That pretty cool guy I argue with”, and while I did indeed dislike basically everything about you, I still respected you - in that way that a villain can respect a smart hero, or two warriors who hate each other will still fight honourably and compliment the other’s fighting style. But with this statement of yours, I can no longer. I find what you’ve said so downright wrong that I honestly cannot even begin to think of you as a proper member of this forum anymore. And I find
that to be
truly, and
totally, saddening. Still, I may simply be quite horribly wrong, and when you correct me things will go back to he way they were. Hope always exists, regardless of the situation.
Now the arguing and meaningless trash-talking begins, you scum-eating false-prophet!
I've certainly been meh, just like you about it, but that's mainly because of the influx of new, unmentionable people replacing the old, well-known/friendly people.
SHIT. HAPPENS.
Old members die, or loose interest – as you’re experiencing first hand – and new members arrive. If the old members didn’t leave, the new people would still come. If the new people do not come, the old members will still leave. If we had no new members, the forum would eventually dwindle sadly out to nothing- and personally, having seen death come to a forum before, I can distinctly say I prefer a forum with life in it to a dead forum with no members posting. This does not require a university diploma to figure out, and if it is enough to make you want to leave a forum, particularly at this currently incredibly light level of ‘new vs old members’, than you probably shouldn’t be on any individual forum for more than a few consecutive weeks (and then never go back to that forum again). What’s more, you haven’t even given a legitimate reason to dislike the ‘new people’; you just called them ‘unmentionable’. You might as well have said, “I ate a cake today,
and that’s terrible.”
'Everything Else' does seem to be becoming the dreadful 'off-topic' of many other forums, filled not with random, derailing things, as Host put it, but stupid statements, and ignorant comments.
To start with, ‘stupid’ and ‘ignorant’ are too difficult to define objectively, so lets change them into ‘pointless’ and ‘offensive’, which mean quite similar things but are far easier to pin a meaning on. Now, with that in mind, would you happen to mean ‘
pointless statements’ and ‘
offensive comments’
like these? My point is, of course, that (most) of those were from some time ago, showing that this is hardly a new problem, and thusly, not the cause of Everything Else ‘going bad’, if at all it is.
Toxic is the only one I see who makes, at the very least, entertaining posts. Whether it be with sarcasm, or a joke. And even with informative input.
Not entertaining.
Not informative.
Not informative.
Not informative (second part).
Not funny.
This one is so exceptionally not funny that Chibi, who understood the reference,
had to comment on how funny it wasn’t.
Not funny, considering the context.
Not funny or a little damn creepy.
Not an amusing response to the above.
And MOST DEFINITELY not funny, you sick, sad person, Phoenix, you.
There’s definitely a fuckton more that I could add, but that would take bloody
years, so I’ll leave it there.
Of course, proving you wrong in this does not actually prove you wrong in the overall. You say Everything Else is going to trash because you think it’s going to trash; and if you think it’s going to trash then for you, at least, it
is. However, this should have so far shown that what RJ is complaining about is not the root cause for his waning interest in ULMF, but merely a symptom of it that is affecting his perception of the forum. (It also shows how he has been known to engage in the same behaviour he so vehemently hates, which is only further proof.) As for what this ‘root cause’ could be, look to the next section.
LDF: “The actual forum goers themselves have, to an extent, isolated themselves into different sections, only briefly crossing over if something piques their interest, which generally isn't much.”
Like before, I blame this on all the new comers, which may not be fair, but it's true in my case. When it was just us, each of the dozen or so members hanging around would make their own posts/comments regarding whatever the topic concerned, or whatever off-topic discussion arose at the time that we thought would be amusing to entertain.
But, when I see many new posts, I don't see too many familiar names, just a bunch of people with odd/complicated names, who're better off having no name at all to which they can be recognized. This makes me feel a little ostracized, and makes me feel a little unfamiliar as well with the territory.
There are three main points in this quote.
1.“I stopped caring about the Everything Else section because new people appeared and I didn’t want to have anything to do with, *scoffs*, ‘new people’. Instead, I hope really, really hard that they all go away, because I could never just read their posts, most of which are actually quite alright, or wait for the natural progression of things to make them into good members and strip the ‘bad’ ones away through inactivity, especially since some of the more active ‘new posters’ could easily become ‘old members’ in the future.”
I don't see too many familiar names, just a bunch of people with odd/complicated names, who're better off having no name at all to which they can be recognized. This makes me feel a little ostracized, and makes me feel a little unfamiliar as well with the territory.
2. “Oh, also, all new members should burn in the fires of eternal damnation and don’t deserve the chance to live or post on the forum, because they indirectly and unintentionally make me sad.”
When it was just us, each of the dozen or so members hanging around
3. “Last, but not least, we certainly haven’t had at least a good 50ish active members who joined before a year ago.”
- But don’t let
me tell you that last one; here, take
this list, start counting all the people with more than [whatever arbitrary number it is you think a person needs to have posted to be an active member] posts, and have posted in the last [however long you think a member needs to post in to be ‘active’] time period, and joined before whenever it is you think they need to have joined before to be ‘one of the old members’.
But you don’t need to go out of your way – here’s one I prepared earlier!
Using the 200 for the needed number of posts (though I would get a similar count for 300), and ‘less than one week’ for the time needed from last post for them to be considered active (though really I could have used 2 days and got about the same result) there are:
47 active members before you, (Note that that is
over a year ago),
51 before me (29 March last year, almost a year ago (and also my birthday, which means it’s coming up again! What are ya getting me, guys?! =D),
57 before Alias (14 June last year),
62 before hero-in-the-dark (17 October last year);
After that, Archer and Tentanari, both good members, with now over 500 posts each, joined – so, exactly at what point was it that we started having our ‘proper members’ outweighed by the ‘less proper members’?
Now, the
real reason for your loss of interest in the forum is thus: you aren’t accepting new members. This is likely either because:
a) The Everything Else section no longer appeals to you, and thusly you don’t visit it often, meaning you don’t see most of the new members till after they’ve become good members. When you do see them posting everywhere, the ‘strange new members’ confuse you.
I.E., the reason you feel like you’re being left out of the group is because
you took yourself out of the group.
Or:
b) At some point you stopped thinking of new members as being able to become proper members. Maybe you lost faith in humanity; maybe you became a crotchety old man without noticing, unable to change their mindset - maybe a new member broke your heart and you ‘can never love a new member again! *sob*’. Whatever the reason, the outcome is that you stayed away from their posts, expecting the rest of the forum to do the same. When they became proper and ‘old’ members, and were posting in all the threads, you had to practically leave the Everything Else section because of ‘all the new members’ making boring threads and boring posts.
I.E., the reason you feel like you’re being left out of a group is because you actively ignore members of the group that the rest of the group does
not ignore, and as more and more of their conversations involve ‘new members’, it leaves little for you to do with those you accept as ‘old members’.
In the case of b, we will likely never know what the root cause was for RJ’s loss of interest; there are simply too many overlapping possibilities. In the case of a, though, something must have made Raptor Jesus boycott the Everything Else section. Some event, which, considering the human ability for misinterpretation, could be anything, made him switch from ‘EE is good’ to ‘EE is in decline’. Eventually, he was pulled out of the loop for long enough that the way he thought of EE (in decline) and what he saw on EE (lots of people he didn’t know) lined up, making it almost impossible to change his mindset.
I've seen [bad roleplayers] to[o], but haven't been too bothered by them. It just seems to me that they're searching for a game similar to my own AWMBI, except for the fact that such a game is either unavailable, or not updated often enough for their tastes, and so they join the RP's, where they really shouldn't be trying to inhabit (for the lack of writing experience and art).
At the moment, I’m not even going to bother with the fact that you made up random definitions for ‘RPs’ and ‘PBPs’ that have nothing to do with what is generally thought of as an RP or PBP. AWMBI was one of the most brain intensive mind screwy drama fests ever created as an RP. It is not for bad roleplayers, especially when the GM is as ruthless as you tend to be. What the ‘bad RPers’ are after is simple enjoyment without much plot, i.e. largely gameplay, ero or otherwise. Also, some of those you’re probably thinking about as ‘bad RPers’ are more likely people whose first language is not English.
Those people can still be good RPers. (Though, the only reason I say that is because I tend to confuse the two a bit myself.)
Not to mention, the unfriendly members who often hang around more than the likable members. You know who I talk about, Loli, I'm sure, who only contribute to the problem of all of the good, familiar members slipping away.
Sir, I’m going to need to see some evidence for this charge that proves it to be more than baseless accusations. I know of very few members who are legitimately ‘unfriendly’. Unless you lack some sarcasm detecting part of your brain, (and considering how much you tend to use sarcasm, I find that unlikely,) I can think of no (-or almost no-) instances of a member legitimately being unfriendly to someone… and certainly no instances of members who are
wholly unfriendly, as you are so claiming.
If it wasn't for the RP section, honestly, I wouldn't even log in as a member.
Then you’re not a member. EE is the heart of the forum. The RPs are the arcades and brothels and such where we go to play and to be creative; the hentai section is basically our work district. But the residential area, that’s EE. You’re a guy who hangs around at the brothels of our town; just like the immigrant workers up in the hentai sections, you’re not a proper resident of this forum.
Personally, I think the majority of our problems with unhappy members stems from not having enough/good RPs. People are getting upset because the entertainment district is looking a bit run down; most of the establishments don’t meet the needs of the residents, and everyone without sufficient entertainment is way more on edge, making everything look like shit without that happy pink fuzz of RPing to pretty everything up.
Now, even after all this, there is one thing I will give you. We currently aren’t as funny, or quite as random as we used to be. That said, we still have a lot of threads and posts that are ‘interesting’ or enjoyable to discuss, as well as a number of threads and jokes only funny to people who know of a certain source material.
