And I wholly agree with you Asherkin, someone such as yourself who has
spent so much personal time to this project should have some sort of
feel such as I do. I guess what I am trying to convey is long gone are
the days of communities having some sort of code. Whereas you wanted to
kick the other communities butt by populating your servers, getting your
admins on and actually playing and socializing. Building your community
in that fashion, with hard work, time and personal commitment and
investment.
There was an unspoken rule that you told your admins you don't go to
joe blows servers in an effort to recruit, rather, you put your efforts
in to ones own servers and build your user base. Sure on occasion you
had that one server operator gone rouge that started DDOS'ing your
servers, or that one persistent stalker and it went away in a day or
two. Now its script kiddies gone wild, quick-play and server farms
popping up to run ads.
Downward descent started when the hats and weapons came in drops versus
achievements and became too numerous versus an occasional treat. In-game
ads for money is just was the bitter cherry on top. Now we have the
equivalent of TF2 WalMarts popping up on every corner and it has
destroyed the foundation of a communal effort that supported Valve. Look
at the ratio of updates and what they pertain towards and whats normally
listed at the top of the list in an update. Valve felt like a grassroots
effort that has now gone commercial. Oh hey, nothing wrong with
inventing something cool and along the way getting rich and popular. But
you can do it while keeping in touch with the independent guys that
helped make it a success.
Mayhaps Valve has lost touch.
--
Hutch
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