Is this place still active?

Disclaimer: The thread title may not be in rainbow colours. The game might be less cheerful than the title may suggest.​

Ooh, sounds colourful

My space empires game is back and running in IoT.

Honestly, in hindsight, I kinda wish I'd posted it in NES forum. Though I doubt it would have half the players it has (though thus it would be easier to update ).

I also wish I had taken the opportunity to co-op something with Thlayli in years past. Maybe, Thlayli, if you're still around in the next few years, we could still do something with the DaftNES2 universe. People made some fantastic empires and kingdoms in that world.

Potential activity is essentially why I'll host mine in IOT, although the game being a brainchild of IOT Chat silliness I kind of had to anyway? Note that the game itself is not supposed to be silly. It's just that the idea came as a result of chat silliness (creating a weeb name for SK's new game).

The people you gain from hosting it in IOT would know to come over here, so I don't think that's true. The main people you're missing by hosting in IOT are NESers who never go to IOT.

If you won't bother going over to IOT, why would people in IOT bother coming over here?

Because they're less stubborn than the Moose.

I guess I could post a duplicate thread on NES. That way you won't even see IoT posts. But it could make diplomacy problematic...

Or Lucky could navigate CFC through his subscribed threads page.

I'm (relatively) new to the sub! What's IoT?

It's another community on this site that does similar history-simulation/roleplaying games. There is a bit of hostility between some members of the two communities, but for the most part we just squabble and get along.

The story of creation as understood by Daftpanzer:

NES had a head start by almost ten years, and evolved from simple games with basic stats into more complex, world-building and simulation type games. NES was born at a time when Civ3 was popular, and originally an off-shoot of Civ3 Stories & Tales. The spark was a story-teller inviting participation in their story. It may have been the legendary figure we call, das.

IoT was a kind of parallel evolution that started years later. This would be around the time of Civ4 transitioning to Civ5. But IoT sprang from the Off Topic forums, hence the name Imperium offTopicum.

For a while, IoT catered for simpler games and a younger crowd, almost all of the games based around 'world conquest', while the NES forum had an older crowd favouring more complex and diverse games.

NES gradually thinned out as the community became more occupied with adult life. Around mid-2014, there were a series of clashes with the forum authorities (best not get into that!) which resulted in most of the remainder trying to build a new home on other sites. It was never quite the same, however.

This leaves us with IoT evolving to be similar to what NES once was, and a few die-hard NESers hanging around on this forum - some having returned from other sites, but still refusing to merge with IoT. We're still unique enough to warrant a subforum, in my opinion (though I have flip-flopped on that), and if enough of the old NESers find their way back here, we can still have a viable community for our brand of games - as Lord_Iggy's MigratioNES shows.

While IOT did spawn off the Altered Maps Thread, the games took off with the Civ4 S&T crowd coming over, to the extent that when I joined in early 2012 there weren't any of the 'original' OT crowd left playing IOTs in spite of continued activity elsewhere in the site.

Daftpanzer said:

Ooh, sounds colourful

My space empires game is back and running in IoT.

Honestly, in hindsight, I kinda wish I'd posted it in NES forum. Though I doubt it would have half the players it has (though thus it would be easier to update ).

I also wish I had taken the opportunity to co-op something with Thlayli in years past. Maybe, Thlayli, if you're still around in the next few years, we could still do something with the DaftNES2 universe. People made some fantastic empires and kingdoms in that world.

Click to expand...

I'd love that Daft! Better idea than my current project. We can talk in #nes about it.

I've been reading the thread.... after years of not going on CFC something struck me this morning. I honestly felt like walking on smoking remains of my own charred house over the past few hours while reading this thread and some of others.

I don't have a lot to contribute. I could just share why I stopped NESing, maybe it is related to what some of the others were experiencing. Mainly, of course, it was the inability to deal with real-life issues and this very real obligation that a mod or a player has to other players. NESing felt like a job where you had to produce content and to remain engaged. When your real life is not as sorted (and it rarely is when you go from school to adult life), devoting time to a hobby that feels like another obligation is difficult.

Secondly, we as a community have had our differences. Long ago I made a private rule where I would forget what people have said in the Off-Topic forum in order not to hold grudges against their personality in games. Game-grudges are very different from political (opinion) grudges, you can understand a person who fights you in every game, you can't forgive a person who disagrees with you politically and uses games as a means to continue the fight.

Thirdly, I guess, it was our time. I don't know how true this is, but probably we were the last book-reading, text-producing generation of CFCers that started NESing even before we found the forums. I played with paper maps of nations and peoples long before I owned a PC. Yes, there are new players in the IoT forums, but essentially our decline (to me at least) corresponds to general decline of creativity en-masse that was more common before the "age of computers".... I stepped way from CFC in general around 2011-2012 and never thought that keeping in touch with people despite the changes was more important than staying away from the changes. Isolationist approach never works in the long run, you have to be a part of the change at least in some way to influence the general direction in at least the smallest ways possible.

Which brings me to my first point again. I've always felt that we were a part of our own little nation or an organisation. These two require volunteer effort by its members to continue to exist. Real stakes took priority over our hobby over time and now this forum is much less populated than before. What is important now is that the people who are in their creative years could (if they wanted to) pick up our hobby and continue. I wasn't here for many years, but it has always been an axiom amongst NESers that we would never survive if we split apart. It is very sad to see our subculture in this state, but we will always be who we are.

Well Gelion, I agree with a lot of what you said. We are in pretty sad shape. I just returned a few weeks ago and had the same feeling of walking through a ghost town.

BUT

I will say that I was pleasantly surprised that there are still a number of people lurking beneath the surface. #nes is still lively, and there are a handful of NESes still running both here and in IOT. It seems like more and more NESers are trickling back to the subforum as well, which is encouraging. With a couple more returns or an exceptional NES, who knows? We might be able to rebuild this place to its former glory (Or at least closer to its former glory. Cautious optimism and all that )

Ninja Dude said:

Well Gelion, I agree with a lot of what you said. We are in pretty sad shape. I just returned a few weeks ago and had the same feeling of walking through a ghost town.

BUT

I will say that I was pleasantly surprised that there are still a number of people lurking beneath the surface. #nes is still lively, and there are a handful of NESes still running both here and in IOT. It seems like more and more NESers are trickling back to the subforum as well, which is encouraging. With a couple more returns or an exceptional NES, who knows? We might be able to rebuild this place to its former glory (Or at least closer to its former glory. Cautious optimism and all that )

Click to expand...

Could not agree more. Some people are lurking even after all this time, it means we had something meaningful that left quite a legacy. The future will tell

Gelion said:

What is important now is that the people who are in their creative years could (if they wanted to) pick up our hobby and continue.

Click to expand...

Those don't have to end. Interests may shift, but to abandon creativity as a whole isn't a viable option, to some it may even be akin to suicide. The drone of life is kept at bay by the small things, the sparks, the creations, the art, the hobbies. There'll always be room for something, even if it isn't a populated or variegated as it once was. A core survives, and lurkers are never too far away. People like us don't truly ever stop, we pivot, and so long as you don't abandon that driving artistic engine within, you can always build something new.

Lots of people are still lurking about though I haven't played since the split.

Luckymoose said:

Those don't have to end. Interests may shift, but to abandon creativity as a whole isn't a viable option, to some it may even be akin to suicide.

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You are right, I had to learn it the hard way

The drone of life is kept at bay by the small things, the sparks, the creations, the art, the hobbies. There'll always be room for something, even if it isn't a populated or variegated as it once was. A core survives, and lurkers are never too far away. People like us don't truly ever stop, we pivot, and so long as you don't abandon that driving artistic engine within, you can always build something new.

Click to expand...

I was surprised to see so many people I know return here at one point and ask how the forum is doing. Just as I am now. A lot of the people I knew, the mods, some players seem to be offline since around 2014, but who knows which of them still lurk around. I feel as if something died in me when I stopped writing on the forum. A part of me knows that it will never be the same, but another, perhaps wiser part, knows that, as an adult, fun can still be had, while keeping up to date with real life. Hell, fashion comes back every 30 years with the same ideas in new form, why should NESing be different?

Gem Hound said:

Lots of people are still lurking about though I haven't played since the split.

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It really depends on whether the feeling of being in an active game has come back or not. I find a lot of enjoyment in re-reading the GoobNES or stJNES5 for example and re-imagining how great it was to play it. NESing has become a book.

What surprised me on the forum, besides the fact that the recent NESes were stillborn is that few of them were actually historical games, many seem to be either fresh-starts, fiction-based or with even more strange settings. I don't know if people just got tired of historical NESes or if this trend was an attempt to keep modders interest in games in this time.

Gem Hound said:

Lots of people are still lurking about though I haven't played since the split.

Click to expand...

I can get behind that. If the schism was ever rectified and mended, I would love to play a NES again with all of you fine people. This subforum was my home, and I regularly checked it every day, or multiple times a day. The feeling of a new update from my favorite NESes and the like made me feel so happy, but ever since the divide happened, my will to actually play a forum style game like NESing has deteriorated significantly.

Here's to hoping that we can all play together again some day. I would really appreciate it.