Sweep wrote:LittleViking wrote:For what it's worth, the "in-crowd" you refer to pretty much only comprises of Kablizzy. No one knew their games were going to stall, although Kablizzy could have guessed it. No one really had troubles with Mare and Raigan, except maybe Kablizzy on occasion.
Haha, I must say, it just makes me curious to find out what happened. I'm nosy like that.
LittleViking wrote:As for taking on the community - why would Mare and Raigan want to? They struggle enough to get new games done without having to manage this place. Besides, we can hold this place up fine without having to distract them from their work. And while I think it would be cool to have them around a bunch, I can see how this community would be hard to break into.
Taking on the community ≠ managing the community
I find it odd that the forum feels so separate from Metanet Software, as an entity... because, right now, without kicking M&R while they're down, it's 50% of what they have going for them. Their website may link here, but only out of obligation (actually, just the N website that has a link, and even then, a cursory one). I'd never really thought about it before - whenever I'd communicated with them before they've been more than helpful, and heck, they even gave me an award :P But I guess they don't encourage the community as much as they could do. I don't think it would even require any significant participation.
When I think of Metanet, I think of two great things. The ninja game. And the community.
The way they present it, they have one great thing, the ninja game.
And let's not forget, the Neditor is hardly user friendly. I'm very computer literate but it was intimidating to open for the first time, let alone use. This community grew in virtue of the brilliant game they made, but in spite of the barriers they put up.
I think they missed an opportunity.
This is a spoiler for a towerpost rant. If you're sick of them coming out of my maw, don't click this. It'll be better.It was really a combination of things - Their unwillingness to do anything with their own community is a sizable part of it - For instance, I have yet to fax in some paperwork about my student loans and I have yet to get my tax forms from my company. It's been nearly a month. Honestly, how long would it take to get something like that done? 10 minutes? Why the Hell haven't I done it yet? Beats me. Maybe I really don't care to do it. So why don't they browse here a bit? 10 minutes a week. Would it really be that much of an output? One post a week? Really?
Now taking on the community was an entirely different matter altogether. Our My goal was conglomeration. Have the forums on their website - we pay for hosting, we keep staff as-is, The Real N is entirely separate. They refused. I can't fathom why. I mean, I guess this place has always been separate from Metanet itself, but we're the hardcore fans. We're the greatest supporters of the game and the company and everything. We've I've offered to help them on a number of occasions, from everything ranging from the X-Box forums all the way up to Marketing, Contests, PR... *Everything* relating to anything, I know a lot of people have supported them on.
The games that they've released was always another point of contention for me. Raigan had told me back when v1.4 released that, in all honesty, it'd be a long, long time before another N release, and that Robotology was at a standstill. Am I gonna tell the community that? Heck no. We all put up the front as though it was going to be just a short while. This, I don't care much about. They do this for fun, and it doesn't pay the bills. But if they could have ridden the wings of N (And even N+) popularity, think of how ginormous Robotology would be. I just saw a retail copy of Plants vs. Zombies in-store the other day. Retails for $20. Jesus Christ. What a payday they'd have if they threw down a retail version of a PC game, right hot on the trails of N+. I dunno, if it came down to money and wellbeing, I think I'd be putting obscene amounts of time and energy into something like that. In fact, we forum-goers *did* put obscene amounts of time and energy into Metanet-related projects. I look back at the past six years - six *years*, and look back to all the freakin' *stuff* we did. All the planning, all the Legacy stuff, all the contests and hyping and keeping the community active - Just a little longer - until their next game threw down. Go back now and listen to all the Mare and Raigan award recordings and you'll see a bit more clearly what I'm talking about here.
They've always been awful about correspondence. Anyone on staff and anyone who worked on Legacy stuff knew that. LV, how long did we wait on a response for those first Legacy E-mails we sent to 'em? Four, five months? It was a while for something that they could've responded a simple "no" to. Maybe they took some time to think about it and forgot about it. Humans do that. When I was helping out with the N+ release, instead of contacting me where they knew they could find me (Durr), they sent me E-mails to an E-mail that I never check. They knew how much time I spent on the forums, we had lengthy discussions about my 18-hour days just clicking "refresh" on the Main Page of the forums. In either case, the E-mail they sent was to ask me to stop helping out, that this was their project, and we weren't a part of that. Which is okay, they're entitled to that. But on the XBLA forums, they never registered there, so when I asked them if they wanted me to help out, I was met with an emphatic "Yes!" So I dunno.I helped 'em for a bit until they asked me to stop, and that was all good.
I dunno. Them refusing Legacy and calling down mods but then turning around and supporting Unreality out of the blue and not being active here, and not even ever linking to the new forums (I still can't find a link on their site to The Real N forums, let alone these ones. I highly doubt they know these exist [Someone find a link for me to either the old forums or the new, if it exists]), to their slow and ineffectual communication on anything relating to *their company* for *their community* has just kinda rubbed me the wrong way. I think I am the only one who's actually had a falling out with them, and it's all been just little stuff, mostly.
I mean, sure. They made the ninja game. When they make another, years down the road, I don't think it' can be nearly as well-received. The shine's off the apple, so-to-speak. I long for a company with this much perpetual power. And they're not doing anything with it. They've swept it under the rug like a dirty little secret, and in all honesty, if the forums die out, who's gonna check the Metablog every day for updates that don't come but bi-monthly?
So far be it from me to be Debbie Downer here, but let's wait and see when Office Yeti drops. If it's in 2010, I'll be shocked and awed. The last release of N was *MAY* of Two-Thousand-and-FIVE, ya'll. I have personally produced more games doing absolutely nothing than they have "working" on stuff. It's something that's already *done*, and it's been five *years*. We've floated on v1.4 for five *years*, and why? This place. This community, dedicated to holding their project aloft, and dedicated to keeping people interested. Everything from the old forums to NUMA to Legacy to the NTTS to Unreality to The Dronies - Everything that's been done here has ultimately been done with the (unwitting) goal of keeping people interested. And that's been my only goal here. The drama, the forum puzzles, the games, the contests, Legacy itself - Every last bit of it was based upon the premise that we weren't going to see another Metanet game for a long, long time. Mostly because I don't think anyone knew that the game would stall for this long. When Raigan said "A long, long time," I thought maybe a year. Considering that it had only been a year since the *first* release of N, I figured a year wasn't that crazy of an expectation. But once 2005 ended, and we still didn't have anything, maximo and I sat down and talked about the "Come-back Mappack" that he was working on with LV. And when we brought tktktk and nevermore on-board, he and I saw an opportunity to keep the community going nearly ad-infinitum on just the steam of a side-project. When we started conglomerating The Dronies and InsomNicon, and *every* project the big rollers had done, we had people who came around every January 1st just to see what Legacy had cooked up. Sure, it was a bunch of marketing and bullshit posturing. But it worked. And we threw down damn-near the best map-pack twelve of the greatest mappers in the community could have thrown down (There were thirteen of us in Legacy, but let's face it - my mapping is mediocre at best).
And LV's right - I'm the only one who did have any problems with Hippie and the Horse-Woman. Like I said, I think I'm the only one who had any type of regular contact with them. Dave's crusade to distance ourselves from Metanet was also mostly based on these same thoughts - Metanet *isn't* a part of this place. We're not the Metanet community. Look at how much stuff has been based around Legacy or blue_tetris or IRC or Vent or Worms or Gunbound or any of the other crap that went on here... Why do you think the community evolved the way it did? Because it had to. IRC was bringing the community closer. And that was its saving grace. Why did we move on to Google Talk, and then Skype, and then Vent, and then meeting one another? Because Metanet was *old hat*. Janet Jackson said it best, I think.
I dunno. In the end, I don't have much of a problem with either of them. I think my problem lies in all the effort that the community put in to keeping their dynasty alive until the next release, and knowing that the next release isn't coming, and that all the support that's come from you guys is being left as though you don't mean anything to them. That bugs me.
