The reason why this thread isn't locked yet is because Mal
wants to continue his story. And I say that he should do so. Read the posts again, Mal. The posts specifically are not saying that you suck and have no talent. They are saying that you had a bad patch, and wrote some plot twists that were not foreshadowed anywhere and seemed random and a bit forced.
You ask for the benefit of the doubt, and it is yours. Yet naturally there remains doubt. There are too many questions and what seem to be potential inconsistencies. If we proceed, then the story must try to explain how a culture without advanced metallurgy got these things, and why they used them only on one occasion. This stuff wasn't foreshadowed. That oversight was an avoidable mistake that can be acknowledged and improve your narrative skills in future. Even with the benefit of the doubt, it remains true that certain traditional authorial best practices were not followed.
I suggest you read the remarks after a good rest without indignant defensiveness and we use this bad patch to improve later on. And if I could pinpoint an exact place where I should apologise for my remarks, I would gladly do so. I expressly have said that you are usually full of good ideas, but that these updates broke narrative rules concerning the importance of foreshadowing, and gaming rules about allowing the players to feel agency in the character's outcomes.
If the thread doesn't restart, then I read that as an admission that the thread was simply at the end of its natural life-cycle. Every story has an end. Yet threads ought not to end because some people point out objections to narrative flaws that can be learnt from. If that happens, then there were hidden underlying issues that made an end inevitable.
Anyone lnow of ay other nice forum games?
Nope. Not realistic and well-written ones. And the usual suggester pool is committed to irony and quirkiness in a way that ruins most games on page 4 when the quirky novelty of their suggestions wears off. Without this thread, personally, my interest in these forums shrinks to lurking on Other Games.