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Kelandon

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I could not countenance this tender occasion passing without extending my congratulations on your intense tenacity and persistence and ultimate retention for such an enlightened tenure, and your having endured the intermittent discontent and extended muteness of these often kindergartenish boards... not to mention the tentacle crepes and the fluffy kittens... with no sustenance but your own tenability.

 

I wish you a most ostentatious hootenanny!

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In a Spiderweb game, you start out as an unbelievable wimp, and within a few weeks, you're a god. Real life doesn't quite work that way, but the idea that you get better with time isn't totally wacky. After ten years, you can look back at some distance covered. Milestones are fun.

 

What if an RPG worked the other way? You start out at very high level, and get slowly worn down. That would be horrible, unless you could somehow reinterpret it so that the loss was also progress. You paid prices to gain things, or just to pass obstacles that needed to be passed. In the end you save the world, by killing one goblin — because you have struggled so far, to reach the goblin at the end.

 

It might not be such a great game. That's probably why games aren't like that. But maybe real life sometimes is.

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What if an RPG worked the other way? You start out at very high level, and get slowly worn down. That would be horrible, unless you could somehow reinterpret it so that the loss was also progress. You paid prices to gain things, or just to pass obstacles that needed to be passed. In the end you save the world, by killing one goblin — because you have struggled so far, to reach the goblin at the end.

 

There is 1 shoot'em up where char starts as ultimate killing machine and after each level char loses some weapon or it gets downgraded and enemies get downgraded too but still game is difficult.

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I suspect we'll see a lot of these in the next couple years. If I was Aran, I'd do an analysis of top posters to see if my gut sense is correct, but I'm not so that's just a theory.

I just did a search of the top 40 posters to see what's up here, and there were two striking things. First, a LOT of them aren't around anymore. Second, of the ones who are, there are more from '06-'07 than I would've expected. If I had a little bit of time, I'd do a numerical analysis, but for the moment, I don't.

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I just did a search of the top 40 posters to see what's up here, and there were two striking things. First, a LOT of them aren't around anymore. Second, of the ones who are, there are more from '06-'07 than I would've expected. If I had a little bit of time, I'd do a numerical analysis, but for the moment, I don't.

In that same vein, holy cow, I'm the 14th most prolific poster. How did that happen? Just imagine how high up I would be if I hadn't used so many different accounts. :p

 

Congratulations, Kel. Here's to 10 more.

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That list appears to omit both Alorael and *i. I don't remember *i's postcount, so you're either 15th or 16th, Tyran.

 

But yeah, a number of people in said top 40 haven't been around since 2006 ish. That just goes to show how much forum activity has dropped since then.

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Some decline in Blades activity, and some decline in cyclic posting because of the slower pace of game release for the last couple of games. The biggest culprit, though, is just much less activity on the boards. We post less for whatever reason, and in fewer active threads.

 

—Alorael, who will chalk it up to aging. His fingers just aren't quite as nimble as they used to be.

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Way back when there could be a dozen active threads in General (or even farther back, Miscellaneous) alone. And with more active posters, each posting more frequently, you could reasonably post very often in any one topic because an hour or two could bring five or ten new posts to the thread.

 

—Alorael, who can even recall, back in the primeval days of Spiderweb when it was all on punchcard, helping in a thread that was more or less just a vehicle for spam so that someone could spree into being the second person to have 1,000 posts. Now that's hardly even notable anymore. Post inflation runs rampant these days.

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Back in the day, there was a lot of sparring and disagreement. Think of three or four different topics along the lines of SoT's "Why can you get a degree in fiction appreciation?", but much more heated and with many more participants, and think of all them running at once. This led to a higher posting rate, but more hurt feelings, too. For some reason — possibly having to do with the departure, voluntary or involuntary, of certain members — those stopped maybe 6-8 years ago, and I think the posting rate in General slowed around that time.

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—Alorael, who will chalk it up to aging. His fingers just aren't quite as nimble as they used to be.

 

This may be joking, but I think there's a lot more to this for a subset of posters that includes Iffy and me. We both joined with others as kids, essentially, and have grown up with this forum. I actually remember for a long time being proud of being able to hold my own with some really smart, grown-up people on these fora. Anyway, though, as time has gone on we've grown up to have more responsibilities and less free time to post (or game, for that matter) which has led to a decrease in activity. That, compounded with other things mentioned, can help explain it.

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Back in the day, there was a lot of sparring and disagreement. Think of three or four different topics along the lines of SoT's "Why can you get a degree in fiction appreciation?", but much more heated and with many more participants, and think of all them running at once. This led to a higher posting rate, but more hurt feelings, too. For some reason — possibly having to do with the departure, voluntary or involuntary, of certain members — those stopped maybe 6-8 years ago, and I think the posting rate in General slowed around that time.

Debate threads certainly weren't the only active threads, because I know I rarely posted in the debates at that time yet still had a high post rate. The debate threads certainly helped keep General active, but they weren't the only threads responsible for it. Socializing and weird spam and games were part of it too.

 

---

 

With all the mediums of communication available nowadays, and with many of the members knowing each other personally, like with there being the calref chat, there's fewer reasons to post here.

There have always been satellite forums, and there were fairly frequent chats (mostly on AIM) 6-8 years ago when forum activity was high. Maybe CalRef is different from those things, or maybe not. To me, it originally attracted people who continued to post on SW or who weren't very active on SW in the first place. The chat only attracted a bunch of long-time Spiderweb regulars after Spiderweb forum activity had been low for a long time.

 

Dikiyoba could be missing something, though, since Dikiyoba knows very little about CalRef's early days.

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Though Blades might be an auxiliary factor, I think Lilith's point is most on the money. Social networks became so ubiquitous that nearly everyone did some online socializing there. That meant that a lot of people who otherwise might have turned to message boards (or livejournal, or other small communities) for that outlet, had no need to; and another subset of people who had already been turning to those smaller communities found that they didn't really have the time, energy, and/or desire to be part of so many different social outlets online. Since facebook et al. are more connected to real life relationships, they tend to win those contests.

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I don't think it's a bad thing, having a drop out. We are old fashioned gamers on a conservative board. Even the Angband boards are less crowded.

 

I'd like also like to use this occasion to say thank to you Kelandon for participating in the Avernum encyclopedia project (please correct me if I'm wrong) and the reviews.

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I would be curious if someone with the data mining ability and access were to do it, what the average post rate of the top 40 posters in say 2003 was compared to the post rate of the top 40 posters in 2013. One key point would be to identify the top 40 posters based on posts in that year, not in overall post production. I am sure that both Lilith and Goldenking's points are accurate as to the cause of the reduction.

 

Then of course you have Alorael putting nightmare's in my head about the size of a stack of punch cards that you would have to have for these boards and what would happen if you dropped them, black diagonal line or no black diagonal line. If he keeps creating unsettling images like that, I may have to stop posting :-)

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a lot also has to do with real life catching up and giving out a mugging. i started here as a single high school kid who had loads of free time to play and chat.

now i'm married with kids and up to my neck in college work.

maybe if there was an app to access these boards.....

Theres a crappy IPB app but it reportedly sucks. Havent used it

 

However, the mobile version of the site is pretty slick. The only features i find missing are mod things, so...yeah. Try it out, see what you think

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  • 3 weeks later...

I logged on tonight and saw what happened to "What do I do about this girl at work" before Sylae did the right thing and put it out of its misery. I now better understand how people could get really high post counts in a short period of time. Of course I am now also much happier with my current rate of around 3-4 a week and the fact that like Darth Ernie real life gets in the way of being on line during post battles.

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I logged on tonight and saw what happened to "What do I do about this girl at work" before Sylae did the right thing and put it out of its misery. I now better understand how people could get really high post counts in a short period of time. Of course I am now also much happier with my current rate of around 3-4 a week and the fact that like Darth Ernie real life gets in the way of being on line during post battles.

 

true story, there was a time when there were usually three or four threads like that going on at any given moment. also they could get significantly more hostile than that

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It seems like only yesterday. My, how the time does fly.

 

—Alorael, who is tempted to go back through the PPP and actually see. He has a hunch that things in the past are sometimes closer than they appear in hindsight. The good old days were sometimes not so many days ago.

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Or they were made to feel unwelcome here. and went elsewhere.

My level of activity is greater on more forums with more people. a few curmudgeons converted to friends.

Disagreements galore, but all done at a professional level.

Here I feel shunned, there I am respected.

Go figure.

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