I tend to check here a couple of times a week between like... Month long breaks from remembering the site even exists. And I do have to say It's kind of amazing how consistent the community seems even with those long breaks. Other communities I've been a part of before taking similar breaks from tended to completely and totally change whenever I left that long, even ones I thought were maybe even MORE enduring (RIP doom community).
With that in mind I think this place seems pretty safe and stable. Barring something like toady giving up on the game, which I feel like would even deflate the mostly disconnected lower boards.
wait what happened to the doom community, i've been counting on them as a sort of ancient lighthouse for user-made content and i'd hate to hear that's gone
did they go the way of scoredoom or what
I'm not sure. Some particularly bad, drama filled communities (skulltag and zdaemon) died painful deaths, but the doom community is still producing tens of maps and mods. In fact,
just look at the cacowards.
As for the upper boards, we're in a little bit of a predicament with DF right now, where both modes have visibly broken, unfinished features key features that are sometimes too thin to write on or experiment with. Adventure mode has lost its gameified progression and has a quest and rumour system that frequently breaks (inability to spread rumours of your glory or report kills), and the political systems, such as insurrection, basically are empty frames and can lead to another leader being elected the moment you retire. Fort mode has, of course, the glitched psychology system.
It's pretty hard to discuss the game when your glitch isn't something cool like "My dwarf accidentally cut his wife's head off in sparring" or "My medical dwarf accidentally removed someone's lungs when they had a broken leg", and is instead "I had just destroyed an entire bandit network and planned to recruit an army, but could not because the fame system broke and I couldn't spread rumours about the attacks" or "My cool dwarf committed suicide because she was caught in the rain 2 years ago".
The first post 40d releases had game breaking bugs, too (T34 tier armour and acid rain), but I can't recall anything as structurally altering to the game as what we have now. Especially for adventure mode, where real life days of effort can be undone because of a kink in the speech system. You could always turn off weather or mod armour, you can't mod the speech system into not bugging out.
The biggest problem is that out of game communities tend to attract the !!SCIENCE!! types nowadays (mostly Reddit and /vg/), who are often unaware of the wiki and never contribute to it, effectively meaning their discoveries are forgotten with time. Unlike everything above, this is worrying as hell, as documentation is all DF has in the way of learning and mastering it. Imagine how incomprehensible the magic release will be if nobody documents it.
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Topic: The future of the Bay12 forums (Read 19700 times)