Man this place really needs the traffic... It makes me sad to see not many people online :(
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Man this place really needs the traffic... It makes me sad to see not many people online :(
Some of the names in there bring back memories.
MANDRAG GANON - Love this guy. Made the Dark Link quest. Also was known to have the hook ups back when ZQuest was still private.
JayeM - I considered her to be one of my most dear online friends before she disappeared. I would come to chat, she would call me big'un and I would call her old'un. Miss ya, Jaye.
fmehmobile - Would later become theplustwo. Made an interesting post about how to partition a system to dual boot versions of windows, back when ZC was incompatible. All around, a cool guy.
Theres a number of other interesting people there too. I miss the good old days.
To be honest, I'm not surprised about the little activity it is getting. For a long time, AGN attained a nasty reputation for being hacked and elitism running the place and I would assume that this reputation stands today, even if it is groundless at this point. What we need to do is to continue promoting ourselves as a peaceful, open community and as the home of Zelda Classic in order to get more attention. It won't be easy, but it probably will be worth it.
I tried that, but I think at the time we were trying to garner in new people, so the constant reminder that "hey we're not *that* place anymore" was a bit unappreciated.
The golden age of internet forums is behind us. However, I feel that there is quite a decline in social media as of late - a good portion of my friends agreed that it's just too saturated and chock full of businesses anymore. Basically a message board in it's own right. Then we lamented how things like forums and AIM are most likely to resurface in the next few years to come.
I, for one, love forums. I still associate it with being a pseudo online rpg, with stats and shit. I've also been a lot more into ZeldaClassic over the past few months, so that helps a lot. But I generally just really enjoy the community here - perhaps even the elitism; not because of ego, because I feel it made the place more intelligent. And without that elitism, we would've turned into 4chan level of maturity a long time ago. That's why stuff like zelda64gld was funny, because it was basically a benny hill scene, or a scooby-doo doors scene.
I feel like I came into it all too late.
AGN has had an identity crisis for a number of years now. At its height, it was a social gathering place with a vague, Zelda-fan/classic-game-emu/friends-of-friends theme. At the risk of sounding like a Negative Nelly, ZC will never be the draw it once was. Too much competition for too small of an audience at this point in time. And then there were the waves of spammers that made just checking in to chat with the die-hards too much trouble. Tech' changes also played a part.
Do we really want more traffic? We would need to change the scope of the site a bit. In the past, I have considered asking to bring one of my guilds and towns to AGN. If this is a gaming site, why not expand the scope of the games we discuss? K. is very active in table-top games and has voiced an interest in having an online venue to discuss them. Is anyone else interested in strategy table-top gaming or should AGN just be about video games?
Forums are a dime a dozen and there is crapbook with which to compete for a while longer. Do we want this thread to be a wake or a resurrection?
Extending the scope of the forum would be amazing. I for one would love to discuss various table-top games without the elitism of canon-lawyers you encounter on their official websites. Such would require transplantation of people from other internet communities, though; I've tried to begin topics related to table-top at AGN and they do nothing but gather virtual dust.
I think we also have to accept the fact that many of us are now older, in college or finishing up college, starting careers, starting families, and honestly it's just hard to find the same amount of time to be on here and do all the other things in our lives. I was in my first year of grad school when I first found this site back in 2004 and I was just on the tail end of the time when there was major activity on AGN. I just know as time goes on we start to fill our plates so much that we get spread thin. I love coming on here to read the updates that everyone posts and occasionally join in the discussion, but I can't spend the hours I used to sometimes spend working on ZC and chatting with the community. I am sure many others are in similar situations as well.
You guys realize we could basically host online tabletop games via their own threads, right? Sure it's not the same as playing in person, but it's also fun in its own right.
I remember War Lord added that bit of the Arcade Collector's Club stuff in here a few years back. Didn't seem to catch on, but it also seemed a very niche interest. But whatever we do, it definitely needs to be more than purely Zelda Classic.