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Various exerpts originally posted by El Spamo:
The fact of the matter is, Ares isn't dead. As someone said earlier, Maelstrom is an incredibly old game and it is still played. However, whatever boards or community there was for Maelstrom is probably long gone. This happens.
So, lets just say "its over", sit back, crack open a drink of our choice, and try to make the most of whatever is left. There are some other webboards on ASW in the same state as the Ares ones, yet you can still have quite a "good time" there. Lets get the spirit here rolling!
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I was here in the beginning (relativly) of these boards and their furor of activity. It was great. I remember some of the old RPG's... Starlance, that madcap era before we all decided to scrap and start over.
Hear hear!
Sarg, Sundered, Darkk: Told you I wasn't alone!
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Anyways, there are plenty of things like that that still exist, but they're just now slowing down. Ares is probably going to be moving into the retirement home of games. Activity about that game will slow down, getting less and less fervent until finally (and this takes a while) people forget about it almost entirely and the community all but ceases to exist. This cannot be avoided, for any game. It's like trying to reverse entropy.
What can we do? Not a whole lot of anything really. There's no real reversal of the game's entropy, only retarding the effect.
What may come next? I think anything at all would be a possible Ares II, already mentioned. Perhaps also an Ares plugin for EV Nova. If done with quality, it would make a fine remembrance of Ares though I doubt it'd revive the forums.
Oh yeah, and speaking of the forums, if they want to remain robust, they must become varied. Dedication to one game is admirable, but ultimatly doomed. Discussion about other games, other topics and the such is the last hope for the boards.
Same with stories/RPGs. We could try branching into other areas than ares, though not too far. (Say discovering new races/empires/planets, like the old rpg did) Strictly Ares rpgs themselves will tend to get boring rather fast, there being not a whole lot to do; in other words, they'll be okay but will suck up new ideas faster than a sponge. If we really wanted to stretch it, we could make a big cross over between several games with an RPG or some chronicles. Have some characters you have in an RPG on one board get trapped in something and have them end up here, or a different board. And I don't mean just EV/Ares blending. (Imagine the possibilites of say a Habnabbit experimenting with technology he doesn't begin to understand, as he's trapped up in some big plot he's unaware of)
There are ideas for what we can do, and it doesn't mean we just mope around whining that the board is dying. We established that fact a year ago, and not much has changed. Members have left, and new ones have come.
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"I'm a controversial figure. My friends either dislike me or hate me."
"Sometimes I get confused whether I'm posting on ATT or in the War Room. But then I remind myself: If it's moderators acting scatter-brained and foolish, then it's the War Room*.
*Unless it's Avatara, of course."
-- From the memoirs of Sundered Angel