Barry's Bar

[Agamemnon]

The girl I'm smitten with lives there and I did exactly the opposite of what you told me yesterday and drove over to see her.

[Watercress]

At the castigation of Fry, I return! Probably not for very long though, as Uni (I'm off to Oxford to study History) begins in just over a month. I'll do what I can to help revive things here while I still have time though.

To be honest, I wouldn't say the problem of decline is exclusive to IH - it's afflicted the entire fourm. A radical solution is in order, perhaps the community's relocation?

[Barry Goldwater]

(I'm off to Oxford to study History)

High five, my fellow student of history.

To be honest, I wouldn't say the problem of decline is exclusive to IH - it's afflicted the entire fourm. A radical solution is in order, perhaps the community's relocation?

Hmm, what specifically do you have in mind? Like, a transplant to an off-site forum (Invisionfree or w/e) akin to what I've done with some past RPGs? (the two Tribulations, Conspiravision before that...)

[Watercress]

High five, my fellow student of history.

Hmm, what specifically do you have in mind? Like, a transplant to an off-site forum (Invisionfree or w/e) akin to what I've done with some past RPGs? (the two Tribulations, Conspiravision before that...)

Not quite - the problem with a creating an fourm all to IH's self is that we're never going to get fresh meat. I would suggest relocating to another popular gaming/history forum (e.g. Paradox), where the communities are larger and perhaps more open to our quaint little games.

[chesser2538]

Guys, I just got a copy of my associates degree in the mail. I finished my Associates of Arts in History. Wahoo this feels so good. Now I just have to get my Engineering degree out of the way. If only descriptive geometry was as easy as western civ.

[Barry Goldwater]

Not quite - the problem with a creating an fourm all to IH's self is that we're never going to get fresh meat. I would suggest relocating to another popular gaming/history forum (e.g. Paradox), where the communities are larger and perhaps more open to our quaint little games.

An interesting proposal, though we do have a ton of stuff in the archives that we may well lose if we make the move, and I must admit some degree of sentimental attachment to TWC - this is where we all first met, where I joined my first forum game (an Alliance game long, long ago) and where I first ran into people with politics wildly divergent from my own back in '08 after all What does the rest of the community have to say, and if you guys are in support of this idea, what sites do you suggest we use as our new homebase?

[Xion]

I'm personally against the idea as I feel there would be more risks than benefits.

[chesser2538]

I think that a complete move would cause more problems than It would solve. But, a possible solution would be to form a sister forum on an alternative site that can be used to provide secondary gameplay as well as atract fresh players into the community. The main forum would still operate as it has and games would still go on.

[Celsius]

To be honest, I wouldn't say the problem of decline is exclusive to IH - it's afflicted the entire forum.

I can attest to this. There are people on this forum, I just have no idea where they are. People have found niches for themselves and probably won't expand to see what else is out there. We didn't have a lot of activity here during the summer, but it wasn't just us. There was no alliance game or any new RPGs that went up, which is extremely unusual for summer. I think our player base that we once relied on is just growing older and having less time to put towards games and activities on the web. I certainly have feel victim to this. Now, I can hardly play a game of any sort for more than an hour a day.

[Agamemnon]

Same here. I've thought much the same regarding the RPG forum and even some mod forums I frequent still. We're jut the old vets now, and unfortunately the Bar is now just about the best part of TWC for me at any rate.

[Dan the Man]

I think that a complete move would cause more problems than It would solve. But, a possible solution would be to form a sister forum on an alternative site that can be used to provide secondary gameplay as well as atract fresh players into the community. The main forum would still operate as it has and games would still go on.

That's actually the way we started. We are the sister forum of the original IH community at totalwar.org. Though afaik they've also been inactive for some time.

[Agamemnon]

And our games have nothing in common with the originals. And we kind of sent our old king into exile.

[Dan the Man]

Gondor IH needs no king.

[Agamemnon]

Does that make Barry Oliver Cromwell?

[Barry Goldwater]

That's actually the way we started. We are the sister forum of the original IH community at totalwar.org. Though afaik they've also been inactive for some time.

I wouldn't go that far: outside of Fred's attempts at an ACW IH over there we've never exactly had much, if any, contact with the totalwar.org IHers (at most warluster pointed us there like four years ago, and even he more or less vanished soon after that), nor have they made much effort to contact us. Warman basically set up shop here & started his own thing on one forgettable day in 2009, evidently completely independently of totalwar.org's community - I remember his first-ever Sengoku IH running into a stone wall when dudes from totalwar.org actually contacted a mod here and tried to get him to shut said first IH down for being a clone of their Sengoku game, so in hindsight it looks like what he tried to pull with the first BaW definitely wasn't without precedent - and not long after that the board basically died for a couple of months before we revived it in early 2010.

Then of course there's the fact that the format of our IHs had already massively diverged from theirs by the end of 2010; by late 2011 (1642 & the glory that was RB) I don't think you could even begin to draw any useful comparisons between our games and theirs, we may as well have been playing entirely different genres. If you have the time & are so inclined you can just stroll into the archives & compare WEF 1.0, DoM or even the RCW game to 1300 (the first IH I ever hosted, so it was still pretty similar to what Warman was doing) or Warman's Sengoku game, or the Concert of Europe game they had going for a while over on totalwar.org. You can practically feel the gulf between them

Oh, and yeah we also lasted longer than they did - evidently their activity tapered off in 2013, and for years before that (as I'm pretty sure we often said to Warman when he compared us to them) they were updating like once a year. I suppose it's safe to say that in our case, the child outlasted & outshone its distant parent.

And our games have nothing in common with the originals. And we kind of sent our old king into exile.

Technically speaking, Warman got banned for a long time for reasons that had nothing to do with us (he got banned just after we revived the IH section in 2010, I'm pretty sure; he was around for 1300 but not the RCW game and beyond) and didn't come back for 3-4 years, by which point we had already gone through at least three of the RB games and were close to BaW 1.0 I think. The ECW isn't a good comparison, it'd be more like...idk, if Britain were to have lost the Thirteen Colonies to France, the states in turn win a revolutionary war against France 10 years later, and then the British tried to roll back into the USA 200 years after that.

[Agamemnon]

I was grasping at straws for historical parallels. The other possibility would have been if after Napoleon was exiled to Helena the French had gotten their crap together, elected a new king, and remained almost perfectly happily under his rule for the rest of eternity, and when Nappy came back he found that no one liked him.

[chesser2538]

so has IH seen its glory days and is now slowely dying off as everyone either goes off to college or starts their life in the real world, or has it just taken a long haitus.

[Barry Goldwater]

Perhaps neither. A lot depends on BaW 2.0 and any games that may succeed it; if they're successful, I'd certainly find it a reason to be optimistic about the future. To that end, try reaching out to other parts of TWC and probe other folks for interest, I've been doing just that with some of the older IH players who might still be around (like empr guy, who participated in the 1300 IH back in 2010) - just drop a friendly PM/VM containing an invite to BaW for starters. As for going to college, well as proven by the last couple years Kip and I managed to juggle IH well enough with our college experiences So hopefully the fact that more & more of our playerbase is aging & going to college won't put too much of a damper on the prospects of our continued survival.

[Celsius]

I remember his first-ever Sengoku IH running into a stone wall when dudes from totalwar.org actually contacted a mod here and tried to get him to shut said first IH down for being a clone of their Sengoku game

Oh my God. Barry.......we're old. I had forgotten about Sengoku.

[chesser2538]

That is a good idea Barry, i'll frequent some of my old stomping grounds and try to recruit some friends in from other forums that I know of with similar type of games. Can't make any promises but I will still try.