Somewhat expensive. I think the one bragr was renting came to around $50/month, or $300 every 6 months, as he paid it. Owning our own server is more economical long term and would give us multiple game servers, but obviously the up-front cost is hard to get together. Plus it's really painful to pay that kind of money regularly when the server would probably be inactive at least 75% of the time--and that's assuming it was played for 6 hours every evening. It's just not a good cost-to-gain ratio.

I can expedite getting a new website online if we rebrand things. I'd abandon my ground-up CMS coding which I'd wanted to do for a long time, but realistically that's not going very fast. The software I started from and ran a few communities on is old, but useable. And I can continually update that as needed. I can look around for newer software but there are pros/cons to that, the foremost con being that I'm not familiar with its code, which would limit customization.

There'd still be some challenge, of course, in rebranding things.
I still have gamersyndicate.com, if we wanted to build on that. I'd just like to get some graphics for it, maybe a mascot akin to our cigar smoke'n penguin, or some other recurring imagery/theme that fits the ominous "syndicate" name.

That's my fear. In fact, if we don't actively have a way to recruit, I suspect a new site/brand would actually hurt things. People would take it as a sign it's not even the "old fart's club" anymore. Especially when so many people who post here have been gone for a long time and just hit up wdfnews.com randomly. Even if we redirected it to a new site, they'd be less inclined to post.

Like you said, we need a rally point. Which means game servers, and preferably enough of them that they can cater to the likes of different players. Honestly, just having a single server running official maps won't cut it. If not for the 24/7 2Fort server wdfnews.com use to have, I doubt I'd even be here today. We need to be able to target the different niches at the same time to really find new blood.

The site lacks a purpose now.

Most of us were brought here by TF2 which, while still technically around, is not the community draw that it once was. Even as TF2's popularity waned, the site was bolstered for a time by the social connections that had been built up around it. But when no successful replacement came around and the conversations here became slowly more infrequent, the regulars showed up less and less. Whut's dramatic departure/return/departure added some needless instability to the vision for the community, but for a site that lived and died almost entirely in the sunlight of a single game, this end was inevitable.

It may just be me in my progressing maturity and lack of time to obsess about games, but I can't see a way to revive this place. Every time I visit, I expect to find that it is now offline permanently. It's sad, but there are too many similar sites and too little to recruit new people and retain them.

I'll be sad when it's gone for good. I've had good times here, fun times, childish times. I've written heartfelt game reviews for the news section that I put passion and invested serious time into. I've made MS Excel graphs to prove points about HLStatsX tweaks and argued endlessly about now utterly meaningless rules and community policies. But the site has lost its purpose, and without vision or funding won't ever do so again I don't think.


It's been fun though! Don't forget about me! nate. mallory@gmail.com, and if there ever appears to be a resurgence of our former members, either here or elsewhere, hit me up and I'll be right onboard.



tl;dr summary: we can't fix it.

That settles it. I'm an old foggie (though you're 8 months older than me, Rik, I believe).

I'm not all that interested in the next great gaming community or trying to revive this one on the back of TF2 alone. I'm not sure I can articulate what it would be, but I want a place to come talk about OTHER things besides map rotations.

But I'm not even so sure what you're suggesting would be possible. "When TF2 went F2P..." more than six months ago? Do you really think there's a community's worth of life left in that 5 year old game?? Maybe I'll be totally proven wrong and Valve will create an entirely revolutionary TF3 that brings everyone back to the watering hole, but I doubt it and we're left with the same problem.

Ooh, good point, Valve did say they were planning on including some aspect of multiplayer in all of their future games.

I know a few of us play LoL and Drakhen, Frostbite, and Porgon play HoN.

DotA2 might be a good reboot point for us.

I also like the idea of Guild Wars 2. Can you imagine how many people we could bring in we were one of the first guilds in the game? Booyah.

This is exactly why we need to start talking to people and getting feedback. figure out where each of us are in the community and start laying plans for the future. If we were to migrate to another game, or even another genre altogether, we need to decide how to approach it, going all the way up to changing our name.

One fine little point that I realized behind the Moba/MMO scene is that we wouldn't have to pay for servers, which given our current size would be a major plus.

Either way we need to start talking and laying plans a bit more; sitting on our haunches and just waiting for something to happen won't fix anything.

The problem I have with trying to recruit outside of a TF2 type game is the atmosphere that TF2 has. Its completely relaxed - you can goof off in TF2 and lose and still have a good time.

I freaking love BF3, but its much more stressful to me if my team is getting rolled. I still love TF2 because of how laid back or hardcore you can make it.

I do like the idea of rallying behind some sort of MMO. That could be very useful, but regardless of the game we try to get involved in, we need a team of leaders that are willing to put in a lot of time and energy to keep the clan image exiting! "I want to join that clan, they seem like fun people!" needs to be the overwhelming image if we're going to recruit people. Retaining people is another thing, but we seem to have that down pretty well - communication about things other than just games helps mesh everyone tighter. Even if I don't always contribute to serious discussions on this site I still feel like a member of the old farts club, even if I'm still a young'un.