Warning: A derailment is forecast for the 28247 to The Site. I apologise for any delays this might cause.
×Kwakstur wrote:
Hmmm, everybody's gone poof... and we're realizing this more and more as more people return... I still can't get over ErikH2000 leaving. Man!
I hope all these people come back to visit soon, too.
Heh. I have to say that when I heard of Erik's departure, it came as both a shock and a "
I was kind of expecting that"
feeling. After all, Erik seems to have quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit, and it's quite hard to ignore if you've got an itch to do something new.
Somehow I expected this forum to be a static community when I first visited. My logic was that a smaller community doesn't change as much.
I actually think it's kind of the opposite now. DROD is definitely not small; it used to be, but it's grown tremendously since the early days of Caravel DROD (1.5) and Architect's Edition (1.6). Also, the DROD community has been anything but static - we've not stopped growing, people keep contributing to the community in so many different ways and DROD: the concept is still in development.
I think that's been one of our great successes: to continue to grow and change without losing that community spirit.
It was foolish to assume nobody significant would leave, but that's kind of what kept me coming back here, much moreso than DROD; nowhere else can I be in a place full of people without struggling to interpret others' body language and having to control my own. It makes me sad to see it change.
Hmm...
I have to admit, it was the community that finally brought me back here after I realised that I could be filling my time with DROD. Of course, it's not to say that I don't want to have real interactions with people, but when everyone is doing their best to be stupid because their daily lives demand they take everything seriously, I kind of missed the forum because everyone here wants to be here, and people manage both to do a good job in contributing and have fun at the same time.
You can't do anything about it. Interests change, and you can't force people to stay in a community about a game they aren't playing any more. But it still upsets me. There's no denying the fact that I take change very seriously.
It throws me off, and stuff I once understood suddenly no longer applies. The game Final Fantasy VI was a bit more of a roller coaster for me than for most, and the hold Entropy is proving to be the same.
After I played Mother 3 (another game where change is a significant theme), I thought I came to peace with the concept; I thought I stopped seeing change as the loss of what I know, and started seeing it as an opportunity to see an old world in a new light.
That's interesting. For some time, I had considered if coming back would be a good idea because of possible change: how would people react to a veteran newbie who went AWOL? Would anyone care? Would the forum have become a no-man's land of broken links or spam posting? Would the Forum be at odds with how I remembered it?
In the end, I realised exactly the same thing as you: what kept this community going in the past was its links to DROD and the concepts it represented. At the very least, that's one of the things I felt couldn't change. If the forum was here, that's one of the things that I could count on. If it had all fallen to pieces, then the forum would not be operational anyway.
While change is inevitable, the fact that it happens isn't necessarily a bad thing; it's a chance to make a new start and try something (completely) different. As long as we learn our mistakes from the past and draw on that experience (and this forum has had
some experiences) we'll continue to evolve for the better.
So I'm disappointed in myself that I'm now crying just because some people have stopped posting. I don't know anyone here very intimately... some were no more than a name and an avatar to the left of each post to me. And there's new people in their place, too.
Why must it upset me so much?
From my perspective, I had the issue that I felt somewhat inadequate because as the community grew, I felt that I just wasn't a useful part of it anymore. I don't have any natural specialist talents, preferring to adapt my skills to whatever problem I am faced with. So while I am flexible, I'll never be even nearly the best at anything, whether architecture, slaying monsters, or even managing three hundred forumites!
But what I should have thought was that actually, it doesn't matter who the community consists of, everyone here probably does appreciate the contributions of everyone else (whatever they are) in some way, even if people never express it. As long as everyone here continues to participate with DRODistic enthusiasm, we're not going to lose that community spirit that makes our forum so special, even if it seems different.
And anyway, regarding the loss of forumites, I believe this rule probably solves the problem somewhat:
"
The wisp DROD will find you; the
hook forum will follow!"
Or at least that's my spare change on the topic, anyway.
And back on the topic of the bar, I wonder why it's being so quiet? I still haven't seen the
