How are you enjoying the slow death of TWC?

[EU Empire is fubar]

I accept your appointment!

But but I have not pulled a sword from a stone yet.

[Clint_Eastwood]

Been a long time lurker here on TWC and I agree things have changed on here quite a lot. I also was inactive for around 2 years and coming back recently only because of Divide Et Impera mod for Rome 2 and Ancient Empires for Attila mods. The glory days were certainly back with M2TW and Empire TW but since then I have seen a decline in this site and content.

Also it seems a lot of good members have left and I believe admins back in the day were just slapping out bans to people for fun!! I am glad to see these admins are no longer on this site as TWC lost a lot of good people due to "keyboard trigger happy" admin staff.

Moving forward I do hope this site survives for the sake of the modding community as a lot of people spend there free time given us some great mods! However there are many sites they can use if they needed to host there mods (there is no need to list them!), I truly hope this day does not arrive as TWC would be a miss personally for me.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Slow and painful, just how I like it.

[Bo1Bo1Sha3]

......

[Godfrey I of Leuven]

I don't think it's ever going to get more vibrant, though.

EDIT: Maybe if they would add female hoplites, or paraplegic archers. I have the feeling we'd see a sudden influx of members.

[Roma_Victrix]

I don't think it's ever going to get more vibrant, though.

EDIT: Maybe if they would add female hoplites, or paraplegic archers. I have the feeling we'd see a sudden influx of members.

What TWC needs is about a hundred sexy-looking and flirtatious Japanese Anime girl bots (the virtual waifu) that go around the entire forum creating automated posts that praise and extol other members and their posts. It would create more traffic while also buoying the spirits of existing members through positive messaging that is both sexually suggestive and strokes their egos with adulation. For instance, a typical reply post of the bot could read as thus:

"Wow! You're so smart! And strong. How did you think of this all by yourself? This is a great argument. I'm going to share it with all my friends. Tehehehe!"



Some typical avatars that could be used for bot accounts:

[pacifism]

I just popped in and one of the first things I read was that suggestion and I'm already realizing why I left TWC.

[Basileos Leandros I]

It doesn't help that TW isn't as moddable as before..

[Maximinus Thrax]

I believe admins back in the day were just slapping out bans to people for fun!! I am glad to see these admins are no longer on this site as TWC lost a lot of good people due to "keyboard trigger happy" admin staff.

Bullcrap of the highest order. The admin team has been pretty much the same since 2013/2014, before you joined TWC. If by ''admins'' you meant moderators, I can assure you the moderator team has never been trigger happy and has never handed out bans for fun.

[Roma_Victrix]

I just popped in and one of the first things I read was that suggestion and I'm already realizing why I left TWC.

Someone's sarcasm detection meter is broken! You might want to get that fixed. Or not. It's more amusing to me when people don't get that it's a joke.

[Inkie]

I just popped in and one of the first things I read was that suggestion and I'm already realizing why I left TWC.

Too much kawaii? Dang, I never realized Total War was so cutesy.

[Godfrey I of Leuven]

Too much kawaii? Dang, I never realized Total War was so cutesy.

Sore wa sugoi desu ne.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

Totaru Waru Centa wa mou shindeiru!

[ggggtotalwarrior]

It's aight. I went to Reddit most of the past couple years. Miss some of the people I used to talk to on here though.

[pacifism]

Same story here. My interests changed, I stopped playing Total War games, and a lot of the personalities and spirit of this site left right around the time I joined. Now they have been replaced by bland, anonymous hordes that parrot the same talking points of the same boring debates, which they shall continue to do until the heat death of the universe.

Someone's sarcasm detection meter is broken! You might want to get that fixed. Or not. It's more amusing to me when people don't get that it's a joke.

Oh no, I got the joke. I guess I was able to imagine it all too easily. I saw myself deciding to see how TWC was doing, only to find it infested with a bunch of creepy bots. Then I saw my hypothetical self trawling through the Citizen's subforums to see people carefully debate the pros and cons of such a ridiculous measure in a blatant attempt to revitalize the site in the worst possible way.

Too much kawaii? Dang, I never realized Total War was so cutesy.

I don't know what that means. Call me old-fashioned, but I do not see the appeal of Japanese cartoons and its cheap animation style. I thank Jesus that I haven't joined the legion of weirdos who worship it so obsessively. I'm sorry, but I won't apologize for not liking anime.

EDIT: I'm not trying to sound self-righteous, it's just a weirdly pervasive subculture that I don't get at all. I don't really want to understand it, honestly.

[Inkie]

Disregarding most of what you just said, what's interesting about our own, dominant TWC subculture of being military history amateurs is that many people looking in from outside would probably see us as a legion of weirdos who worship warfare obsessively. Of course, that's an incorrect generalization, yet I wonder if it was part of the evolution of our site that led to the great Rome II schism:

1) TWC starts as a forum for gamers who happen to like TW games, with something of an RP-government theme. The potential of modders for the success of a game fansite is not yet fully appreciated.

2) Losing out in traffic to other sites, policymakers at TWC seek to aggressively attract modders in order to become a more competitive forum.

3) Succeeding wildly, TWC becomes the main hub of TW-series modding. Mods in turn attract hordes of (military) history buffs interested in more historicity, depth and authenticity in their TW experience.

4) The identity of TWC is slowly shaped into one of people who are both (military) history nerds and gamers, primarily interested in high levels of refined detail, authentic historical realism and the like.

5) TWC's identity becomes so authenticism/mod-focused, that by the time Rome II comes out, the 'vanilla-level' quality of CA's work is no longer seen as an acceptable starting point for a release, as it was in Rome I. Mod-quality is expected from the developers. TWCers, now in their tens of thousands and comprising many of the people who care most about the product, become a seething mass of the most vocal, emotional critics of any of its deficiencies, and of its evolving direction (as is the case with most fandoms, see Star Wars).

6) Feeling that TWC has become an extremist cult, 'casuals' and the broader, more relaxed, less sensitive fandom leave the site en masse in favour of Reddit. Ironically, feeling that the forum authorities are 'fanboys' who are censoring them, many of the passionate TWCers themselves also become inactive.

7) This ties into other phenomena like the coming of smartphones and the (related) decline of vBulletin-style boards and the rise of Steam as a modding platform.

[pacifism]

That is true. Now that I think about it, I don't think I've met any full blown monarchists outside of TWC. The Old World blues is strong here.

The entire way the internet worked seems to have changed around 2012, especially in terms of being commercialized and more "normal" to use. YouTube started to have professionals (which is a whole other can of worms), bulletin boards were in definite decline, and the social media giants really kicked into high gear. I suspect it had to do with smartphones becoming mainstream. They existed for years before that, but it was around that time that I think advertisers finally realized the true commercial power of the fact that there was internet access in almost every pocket. The "good old days" of the internet weren't much of a golden age, and I think that the contemporary view of the internet's capabilities is more realistic, but some people will continue to be fueled by the nostalgia of having simpler problems.

On the other hand, I think that MineCraft was really popular at the time, so you can blame that too for YouTube's "decadence" if you really want. I dunno, the people who complain about "people these days" or "this generation" kind of bore me. It's such a weird sentiment to share on such a thoroughly recent creation like the internet. I know I'm glad that I live in a time where I can listen to so many oldies for free and connect with older people who have similar tastes in music, but it seems that some people always feel the need to say that such-and-such song is "real music" and to lament how nobody makes "real music" these days. Every. Single. Time.

[Inkie]

Or the grumpy bores who proclaim that anime is /weird/for kids even though they have never really watched any

I'm seeing a bit of deja vu here, man:

I dunno, the people who complain about "people these days" or "this generation" kind of bore me.

Same story here. My interests changed, I stopped playing Total War games, and a lot of the personalities and spirit of this site left right around the time I joined. Now they have been replaced by bland, anonymous hordes that parrot the same talking points of the same boring debates, which they shall continue to do until the heat death of the universe.

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

The way I see it every time I take part in a thread or start a thread I am creating new discussion. Trickle down TWC-nomics. The more I keep a thread going the more attention it gets. When a mod jumps in and demands that I stay on topic or closes a thread for not being good enough, that is less activity and I can't give plebeians more jobs discussion. In conclusion government moderators are bad.

As for the anime question... I doubt children watch Berserk. I think most people are put off because they associate anime with lolis. A lot of people who are into Marvel and DC comics are put off by the anime art style. They don't see the designs as being anthropomorphic enough.

[saxdude]

Dunno what your talking about, if anything moderators are considerably less trigger happy now a days. My last moderator warning or whatever the **** they're called was in 2012, and if anything I've only gotten worse.
I miss em.