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[Wanoah]

You know what I miss? Forums. Yeah, you heard me!

All aboard the Nostalgia Train

Last night, I was talking with my SO, and we were both caught up in a wave of nostalgia for All Things Eve. A lot of what I miss is the interaction with other players now that I have this Eve-shaped hole in my life. A big part of that interaction was through various forums.

I started my Eve trial in 2004. As I recall, the tutorial then consisted of undocking then and being told how to mine a veldspar asteroid. Thanks CCP! I went to work that afternoon somewhat bemused, but with a sense that this game might have some of the atmosphere of Elite. At work, I started reading the forums to try and get a handle on this odd game, and thus began a long-term blight on my productivity that persists to this day.

The Eve-O forums were still pretty usable in 2004 as I remember. Well, CAOD was likely a joke from Day One, but the other areas still had a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio. General Discussion was already on its way down, though, and as time went by I began to notice that the moderation left much to be desired. The mods slavishly followed the rules laid down for them but had no remit to moderate for quality. All sorts of rank shitposting and idiocy not technically against the rules was allowed to stand while perfectly decent posters clocked up warnings for having signature images one pixel too wide, or bytes over the size limit.

For the record, The Intergalactic Summit was always shit.

The major alternative to the Eve-O forums was a site called EVE-I. This featured a number of useful tools for Eve pilots (and a few not-so-useful ones too) several guides and a very active forum. It became the de facto replacement for the official forums. Importantly, it also had regular posts from people that had been arbitrarily banned from Eve-O.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Like many people, I was shocked when EVE-I disappeared from the web overnight one day in 2005, never to return. There was never an explanation. The guy that hosted it disappeared too. It seems unthinkable that such a successful and active hub of the community could go like that, without any kind of succession plan, but it did. What was left, was a gaping hole in the Eve community and no immediate contenders to step in as a replacement.

EVE-I died at just about the time I joined Ushra'Khan and was starting to get into EVE RP. I guess I kept busy with the alliance forums for a while before someone (Khaldorn Murino?) linked me to the OOC Forums. I think I reached a forum-whoring peak on the old OOC Forums. While there were frequent gripes and moans and spats, it was largely confined to the infamous Bitching Section. For me, the worst excesses of the Bitching Section were more than offset by the collection of passionate and opinionated people that posted in the other forum sections. I was inspired as often as I was aggravated. YMMV.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

With a change of host came a change of name: The Chatsubo. The Cosmopolite took over the running of the site from Pulgor, and he continued the laissez-faire approach to moderation. In retrospect, despite fully supporting unbounded free speech at the time, I think it was a mistake to continue unchanged. Numbers had grown, and that inevitably leads to an increase in conflict. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that. The real change in character, however, came as a result of events in Eve itself. Jericho Fraction / Star Fraction wars with various other RP entities seemed to result in a lot of OOC friction over time: friction that often erupted on the forums. Ultimately, I think that there were maybe half a dozen people with egos and histories that meant they simply could not get on. Cosmo, who always seemed to try his hardest to be reasonable in my experience, found himself in a difficult position. Although he continued to pay the bills, he no longer wanted to be responsible for running the forums and dealing with the endless hassle that it entailed. I took over as admin. How hard could it be?

Looking after The Chatsubo was fucking terrible.

It really was. The amount of shit you had to deal with was immense. Within a couple of weeks, I could see why first Pulgor, then Cosmo had wanted out. By this time, it had already acquired the alternative moniker of Crapsubo, and the problems were numerous. There were several regular trolls and several not-quite-trolls who were nonetheless controversial. Threads would start, the usual suspects would wade in, and the drama would inevitably kick off. There were several people that never posted except to post in the drama threads. They would then complain loudly elsewhere about how bad it all was. I lost a lot of respect for one or two "pillars of the community."

I had three people in my mind that I wanted to ban immediately. Three people that generated maybe 80% of the problems. The drama would have been epic. I have this inconvenient sense of fairness, however. I figured that I'd introduce some basic rules and then give these people enough rope to hang themselves. Amazingly, they didn't. One stopped any kind of trolling overnight. The other two...well, they were clever enough to never overtly cross the line. Things did quieten down quite a lot, but I was still relieved to hand back the reigns. Sadly, I think it was all too late: the damage was done and too many good people had been driven away. Once people have an idea in their heads, it's hard to adjust that. A reinvention or a fresh start was needed. This place is that fresh start, but it does lack all those old threads.

Scrapheap Challenge emerged in 2006. Early on, it was all about Team Minmatar. Later it grew to at least partially fill that void left by EVE-I. For my taste, the character of the place changed for the worse. In the beginning, the main focus was sensible talk about ships and fittings - a much needed antidote to the toxic idiocy on the Ships & Modules section of the Eve-O forums. Over the years, though, it seemed to devolve to a very cliquey environment dominated by shitposting and /b/ memes.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Ironically, Scrapheap died in much the same way as EVE-I did: suddenly and unexpectedly. At least it got replaced by Failheap thanks to the efforts of some regulars. I never bothered to register though.

So, back to the present day and turning to Backstage. Perhaps Casiella's thread started this nostalgia train rolling: http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=3286.0

Only a handful of posts there, but I thought I picked up on a kind of congratulatory tone to some of them. A sense of "We have got it right. We are successful. Yay us." Clearly, Backstage is not a failure (compare and contrast with its predecessor now, heh) but I'd argue that it's not very successful either. It's an active forum but I think that you need to ask yourself: is it as active as you'd like? Are there many interesting discussions and debates on a wide variety of topics that keep you coming back every day? Are you regularly inspired to go off researching things then come back to construct a thoughtful response to something someone has said? Has a thread here inspired you to immediately start scribbling down ideas for a story?

Because I'm not seeing it. I'm really not. I see a lot of threads where people basically navel-gaze about their own characters. I see a lot of topics where people carefully don't say all that much. I visit about once a month and I only see about 2 pages of new posts each time...and the numbers are getting progressively smaller. This is a pale shadow of the place it replaced. If I was away for a week, I'd have two pages of posts to read through on Chatsubo back in 2006.

I think there's a few things at play here. Blogs have had a major role I reckon. People that have things to say - people that in the past would have been frequent topic starters - now say them on their blogs. This is likely a direct net loss to forum communities. Virtually no one would write a post like this on a forum these days. This is a blog post!

Next, there's a general decline in the Eve playerbase and more specifically, there has been a sharp decline in people that created. This is hard to quantify, and I could be way off base here, but it's my perception that quite a few of the old guard that made stuff for Eve, that wrote about and for Eve have finally given up on it all. Many of the RP vets are noticeable by their absence. I assume that they no longer play or post. If I'm correct, I'm also hardly surprised. CCP generally dropped the ball for quite a long time with Eve, and the likes of Tony Gonzales did a lot of damage for people that were invested in the background material. There are only so many setbacks and disappointments you can take before you decide to go and do something else.

Finally, I do think that the policies here at Backstage have had a chilling effect over time. I understand that it was a NEVAR AGAIN reaction to The Chatsubo, but I maintain that it was, and is, an overreaction. It's all very polite and all, but it's also very tame. No one really says anything with any real conviction. There's passive-aggressive behaviour from some people, and that's as ballsy as it gets. From this outsider's POV it's mostly a little clique of people having their own little tea party and telling each other how nice it all is and how great they all are. Slow death, man. Slow death.

Yeah, sure. If I don't like it, I can always...well, what? Where is that feisty alternative? Maybe forums have just had their day now that Facebook inexplicably dominates the world. It's a damn shame.

[Casiella]

On the one hand: I certainly didn't intend for that thread to say that we have it right here, although I am generally pleased with it. Certainly it has flaws, as you note.

On the other hand, things have changed. We have far more blogs now than in the past, and the EVE Twitter community (#tweetfleet) is huge and active.

On the gripping hand: the mainstream EVE RP community is smaller in most ways. I say it like that because more people have an interest in the lore but consider themselves casual roleplayers at best. And they avoid us in the aggregate because they don't want to deal with "our" drama. Witness the reluctance of, say, the Tech 4 News folks or Mark726 (a close friend of mine who writes EVE Travel, among other things) to visit here or IGS.

All things considered, EVE RP is smaller than it was. But judging by how much more I like The Summit, IGS, and other things these days than a few years ago, maybe quality beats quantity.

[hellgremlin]

I hope I wasn't too awful on Chatsubo.

[lallara zhuul]

I was around for the neuromancer days, the chatsubo days and the crapsubo days.

I skedaddled after TEA hit.

I was so deliciously Angry all the time, the flamewars and the drama fueled it all the time.
Passions were kindled because people actually cared about EVE and what was happening in it.

Now its all watered down.

I believe that it takes about four years to make a character in EVE that is good at everything.
The content of EVE takes much less than that to experience, after that it is just a grind.
...and EVE players scoff at WoW players for their mindless tedium, there is nothing like EVE for that.

I guess for me it was inflation of everything, ISK became meaningless when you had a few billions in your bank, a fleet of ships and yet another pointless war to lose them in. Already the endless Amarr-Minmatar conflict had left me jaded so FW really did not bring any kind of enthusiasm with it, especially the way that it was introduced.

Then the threads?

There is nothing to talk about, all the arguments have been had, all the points of view have been discussed, all the 't's have been crossed and 'i's dotted because there has not been any new content in the world of EVE since its conception.

It's gone from 'WOOOOO' into 'Meh'.

EVE won't die with a bang, it will fade away like a bad odour.

[Silver Night]

I think there certainly is a chilling effect from the rules here, but that's basically intentional. From the start, at least from my POV as one of the people who was involved in starting (and as the person who currently pays for) Backstage, it wasn't meant to be new Chatsubo, or even better Chatsubo. It was meant to give people another option - but I don't think it was ever really presented as anything but a fairly heavily moderated place. Again, this was all by design, because a lighter set of rules would tend to be circumvented (as the so often were on Chatsubo, which lead to some of us getting quite fed up).

Which, I think, would be fine - except now Chatsubo is (last I checked, quite a while ago) a ghost town. So I think there's certainly a lot of room for a new, baggage free place for more mod-hands-off discussion.

Maybe people will visit here and there, maybe Backstage will end up like Chatsubo and Eve-I (man, eve-i, that takes me back) and be consigned to history. The main thing (and the reason I got involved with Backstage) is that I hope the Eve RP community always has a plae (or places) where they can connect. At the end of the day, I think it's a pretty great community, and these kind of avenues of communication help it be great.

[Jade Constantine]

I hope I wasn't too awful on Chatsubo.

We were all awful on chatsubo, we were also sometimes brilliant. I think thats rather the charm.

[Jade Constantine]

Which, I think, would be fine - except now Chatsubo is (last I checked, quite a while ago) a ghost town. So I think there's certainly a lot of room for a new, baggage free place for more mod-hands-off discussion.

There might well be room, but there isn't the user base any more to support two different RP forums - there just aren't enough of us.

Maybe people will visit here and there, maybe Backstage will end up like Chatsubo and Eve-I (man, eve-i, that takes me back) and be consigned to history. The main thing (and the reason I got involved with Backstage) is that I hope the Eve RP community always has a place (or places) where they can connect. At the end of the day, I think it's a pretty great community, and these kind of avenues of communication help it be great.

Despite my reservations at the founding and moderation choice for backstage I don't mind it really. Its quite a chilled and relaxed atmosphere. All it lacks is a bit of a passion really. But it might be that passion goes hand in hand with explosive drama and that too is kinda what wannoah was alluding too.

[Graelyn]

I don't think so.

I think we just used to care more.

There isn't a reason to do that as much anymore, and many of us feel that well away from the world of forums.

[Ken]

Interest, activity, and players themselves come and go, I guess.  It's telling that you can see the hit Incarna delivered in the Backstage posting stats.  The numbers were cut in half virtually overnight from June to July '11.  EVE (and EVE RP) took a shot in the jollies when Incarna launched, but it didn't die and is now slowly crawling back with the last two successful expansions.

Sadly, the storyline has effectively been stagnant since the Tyrannis/Incursion live events culminated, so there really isn't anything new to get fired up about.  The PS3 exclusivity of Dust 514 makes it harder to cross that setting over into EVE RP, but you never know what could happen.  It's hard for me to say if the Backstage policies are really to blame for any genuine slow down in the community when there are plenty of other reasons for such a thing.  Personally, I think they've been a net positive.  More importantly, I think it's fair to say this community (tracing itself back to the Chatsubo days) has had a good percentage of the arguments and discussions that are worth having when it comes to EVE lore (which grows at a glacial pace) and various facets of RP (a finite topic).  Most of the time, all we have that's new to talk about is ourselves (our characters), and a lot of that potential talk just goes to blogland or is played out in-game.

If it's the slow death, I guess the question whose answer might confirm such is this: Have we told all the stories that are worth telling about this universe?

I think maybe not.  But if so, why not tell them again?  There are still so many who have not yet heard them.

[Lyn Farel]

So yes, you tell it yourself, the slow death of the community comes from external things, and not how the forum is operated, to my mind.

I have never been on chatsubo because I was less present OOCly in the RP community and also because it had an AWFUL reputation. I am perfectly fine with this forum and even sometimes find it too laxist on moderation, but these days most of the few trolls and agressive people I have in mind have vanished or do not post a lot anymore, so yes, I am fine with it. I still remember perfectly the discussions about the new backstage RP community forum on AFC's forums where Scagga invited a lot of people to talk about the things to do, the rules, the vision they wanted for backstage. This is what made me come here eventually. I say, if people want so much to bicker and immerse themselves in an OOC mudslinging contest of what the IGS is, they can still create another forum. I bet it will die soon enough because most people will soon find themselves disgusted of how people can behave, and I am sure I will be the first of them even if I am not even on that hypothetic forum considering how I litteraly despise people unable to show the slighest proof of respect because yarr, we haz internet anonymity. /o\

It's an active forum but I think that you need to ask yourself: is it as active as you'd like? Are there many interesting discussions and debates on a wide variety of topics that keep you coming back every day? Are you regularly inspired to go off researching things then come back to construct a thoughtful response to something someone has said? Has a thread here inspired you to immediately start scribbling down ideas for a story?

Yep to all your questions for me. Works perfectly fine.

[Matariki Rain]

I have some fond memories of Chatsubo. I came in too late to see the worst of it, and caught what turned out to be the dead cat bounce before the end. I've wondered at times about dragging some people back there for certain chats which are unlikely to fit happily here.

[BloodBird]

90% of the time my PC is online. I'm connected to the Internet, optimally, for all of that time. I keep several tabs open at virtually all times.

Backstage has since it's creation been open at all times.

I don't always post, I don't always care to get involved, but I do read 90% of all topics and offer input on most things I consider interesting. And with few exceptions, I'm able to partake in a decent conversation.

On Chatsubo, half the time was spent reading the trolling, flaming, shit-flinging, character-assassination, bitching and general negativity, the other half spent carefully reviewing anything on interest, sometimes bothering to post.

When half the posts and active conversations evolved around crappy flaming and pure bullshit, having an activity-ration twice as big as Backstage does now, becomes an irrelevant claim - on Backstage, you keep it civil or you STFU and GTFO, shortly. Thus; only half the activity, compared to Chatsubo, rolls around. The useful half.

No offense, but if you want the crappy interactions and childish filth again I'd point you in the directions of the Goon forums, SomethingAweful and the likes of 4Chan. If not, here we are. Hopefully we are what you wanted when you caved in from the stress of running the Chatsubo moderation, and I can't blame you cosmo or anyone for that - I only saw a limited bit of that and I was already disgusted.

On the other hand, the lack of activity here, AFAIK, can be blamed on a combination of many factors, most mentioned already. PF takes a dive, TonyG did his damage, blogs, twitter and facebook took over the world, and after Incarna many were convinced to go elsewhere, do other things. I can't blame them either.

In short, my opinion is thus; If Backstage, or EVE RP, or anything we have here, dies - slowly or otherwise - it was inevitable, based on the events of our history so far. There is little I can see done to 'revive' the activity here because there is NOTHING we can do to revive it artificially. Backstage is the 'official' OOC forum for EVE online's RP circle and if that group dwindles and dies this forum will too. Should EVE RP pick up, for whatever reason, this place will be more active as more people RP - all we can do is keep showing people the way here, human social interaction and EVE RP will do the rest.

I never saw EVE-I, I never bothered with Scrapheap/failheap, I regretted joining Chatsubo, and I'm still on these boards. All I need do now is RP more in-game. Or BE more in-game for that matter.


[mod]Rather than remove this post in its entirety, I have changed references to "Crapsubo" to "Chatsubo". It is one thing to use the moniker in reference to the community perception of the site (as Wan did), and another to use it constantly in this fashion. The latter is particularly disrespectful towards the people who spent so much of their own time and effort maintaining the site, and we would expect the same of them when it came to less-than-positive references to Backstage on Chatsubo.  -Morwen[/mod]

[Esna Pitoojee]

Memory lane indeed.   


I'll say this regarding Backstage moderation: While I generally approve of the moderation policies that can be summed up as "stomp flameposting down before it becomes an issue", there have been times where I thought a scalpel rather than a hammer could have been used - that is, if a post starts reasonable and descends into flaming, *snip* out the rulebreaking bits rather than modhammering the whole post into the graveyard.




Regarding whether we are "better" or "more successful" than other EVE or even RP forums: Impossible to say. Personally I find forum activity waxes and wanes; some weeks I'll see absolutely nothing new (or nothing new that grabs my interest) for the whole week, and other days there are 3 or 4 threads in OOC Summit alone that I want to comment in, and I have to slow down a bit to pick one of them to focus on.

Certainly, the chilling effect of the percieved mishandling of the story by CCP has damaged the activity of any OOC forums - particularly among the "creator" class of participants, as Wanoah put it - mainly because, in my opinion, those who took the storyline very seriously found it hard to do so when the storyline ended up bandwagoning from one PLOT REVELATION! to another, with very little filler in between - i.e., it's quite painful to try and put a lot of time and personal effort into creating a culture for your own group when you feel as thought the plot will inevitably be overtaken by the next big thing - first it was SUDDENLY FW, then that was left to languish. Then it was SUDDENLY WORMHOLES, but that was dropped for a good couple years too. Then SUDDENLY SANSHA, and now SUDDENLY SLEEPERS again.

To be entirely fair, I was not an RPer during the early years, and so cannot specifically state that this is any different to how the community reacted to things like the succession trials or the Federal election. When nearly all of the worldbuilding and storybuilding in EVE is left to the playerbase, however, only to have their efforts periodically disrupted by periodic injections of PLOT REVELATION!, I can't help but feel that this foments a sense of "why bother?"

[Ulphus]

I don't think so.

I think we just used to care more.

There isn't a reason to do that as much anymore, and many of us feel that well away from the world of forums.

Sadly, I have to agree. Reading more of the backstory (finished TEA, TBL and T1 now) makes me care less and less about the universe.

It's not somewhere I care about any more, and at least some of that is CCPs fault.

[Wanoah]

Thanks for all the replies.

Just a couple of points on some of the Chatsubo comments. It is worth noting that part of its original intent was for free and open OOC discussion between people to try and settle disputes. That's a worthy ideal in a game where much is at stake and you don't want the juicy IC conflict to be wrecked by misunderstandings and individual grievances. In my experience, a certain amount of OOC friendliness was vital to sustain the forever war of the Amarrian/Minmatar conflict, for example, and a central venue was welcome.

Sadly, in a game where plenty of people have played on or off for almost a decade now, some of the grudges don't wear off due to natural wastage. Some people just didn't like each other, no amount of frank discussion was going to alter that, and the original framing of the rules could not contain such bitter feuds.

While I was admin, I read every single post on the forum. As such, I had a pretty good idea of what was going on and can say with confidence, that most people's perceptions were way off. There were one or two hot topics that would quickly attract the same aggrieved parties to happily go nuclear at each other, but the balance of posting was overwhelmingly positive and constructive. Human nature is what it is, though, and the casual posters zeroed in on the flames like moths. News organisations continue to thrive without reporting the continuing decline of violent crime and the sun sets in the west.

So, anyways, enough of that particular deceased equine. I'm wondering just how universal the decline in foruming is.

That there is a dilution with the arrival of Twitter, blogging, and (ugh) Facebook seems clear to me. I use / do all three, but not in the context of Eve.

I like Twitter, and it's marvellous for pithy commentary and drawing people's attention to things, but it's just not the venue for discussion. I like blogs, but they are mostly one-sided, and the comments under posts tend to be fairly awkward: the software just hasn't had the time and attention lavished on it in the same way that the latest versions of forum software has. Besides, where once you just had to browse a single forum, you maybe now have to browse multiple blogs to achieve the same thing. Google Reader is already tracking more stuff than I really have time to read.

As for Facebook, well, even with its reaction to Google+ circles, it just doesn't allow for the sort of separation I like for freedom of expression. While I lost any semblance of anonymity a long time ago, I still want people (i.e. barely tech-literate management types) to have to work at least a little bit at associating my spare time interests and activities with my real identity.

I like forums, dammit, and I think they work far better than the alternatives people seem to be wholeheartedly adopting. I like the idea of community based around an interest or group of interests, and I like that the discussion is moderated (as long as it's not moderated too much ). I like that the discussion is structured, too.

I hadn't realised how fond I was of browsing and posting in a bunch of forums until they all died, succumbed to a kind of Eternal September level of asinine pandering to the lowest common denominator, or entered a slow death spiral of declining interest. Maybe it's just the places I visited? Maybe...maybe it's me? O.o

So, do you still visit forums that are actively thriving and growing?