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| Topic Started: Sep 6 2015, 01:18 PM (1,846 Views) | |||||||
| Eevachu | Sep 6 2015, 01:18 PM Post #1 | ||||||
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Overlord of Trains - GRUNTY GRUNTY GRUNTY GRUNTY
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This is the end of Alternia. As of September 6th, 2015, the site is officially closing down. There will be no further attempts to remake or revive the site, at least not from any of the current staff. In an attempt to be transparent with everyone, this announcement has been coming for a while, if it wasn’t apparent from the state of the site. The primary reason why it is delayed is because I could not get a clear consensus on certain details I mention below, so it delayed me in posting this, then other matters came up for me as I started back school that distracted me. Regardless, now I will explain why we have chosen to do this, instead of trying again to revive the site. The very nature of the site is entirely staff oriented. Even with the less staff dependent rules we added with the revamp, members are still heavily dependent on getting refs to continue their journey(whether due to preference or the requirement for it), and the RRT typically had around 30 posts in it at a time. While this was always flawed, in the past it generally worked for Alternia(and its predecessor, Tohea) because they had a large working staff. When Alternia had dips in staff numbers, reffing speed slowed down dramatically, and even with a large staff it could still take 3-4 days per update. Of course, most members did not mind this, myself included, as Alternia always had a strong community to keep people engaged and waiting, hence why it always thrived. However, after the revamp, our staff numbers were incredibly small, with only a few individuals reffing primarily. Reffing speed was actually fairly fast for the month or two afterwards, but they were quickly burning themselves out, and when they finally did, the number of staff who were reffing was almost none, and the other staff members for their own individual reasons were not reffing. This is where the problem showed itself most; we weren’t getting any new, active staff members. Some applied, certainly, but overall they did not contribute a lot to the flow of the RRT, and the site went back to being completely dead. It was at this point, which was around January-February, that I started to consider the site dead. We had given it our best shot with the revamp, and we did a good job in the end, I think, despite how long it took(Which is another matter entirely I won’t get into here, but you could say for similar reasons). However, we just didn’t get the active staff that we needed for the site to thrive in the long term. Some people disagreed and didn’t want the site to die, so we were at a bit of an impasse; of course, this isn’t to say any of us wanted the site to die, none of us did, some just came to the conclusion that it was not possible to save now. I, at least, decided to let those who wanted to keep trying do what they wanted instead of being adamant about pulling the plug; if they succeeded, great, but if not, it was of no consequence to me. If we fast-forward to the summer, obviously nothing has changed. This is where some of us start to be more adamant about ending the site officially. We discuss possible alternative systems, such as going completely freeform, but choose against that in the end as we all agree it does not mesh well with Pokémon and would completely kill the identity of the site. In the end, to make a bunch of long conversations short as you can see from me writing this post, we all agreed to kill the site. You can chalk this all up to whatever you wish; the laziness of the staff for not doing enough(or any) work, the complexity of the site and its fairly intensive workload, or whatever else, but personally I say it is a combination of all of them(And of course, I am not excluded from the laziness). So what does this mean for the site? We will not be closing down the board itself. All of the site’s information will still be viewable by anyone (including guests). If anyone wishes to use any of the content “owned” by Alternia, such as the region, mechanics, or etc., that is fine. We only have two requests for this; first, if you use any of Alternia’s content, let us know! This is more of a personal request than a requirement for permission, but if you do choose to do anything with it, contact me(or another admin if you wish) via message, email, or some other method (preferably not a PM as I will likely not see it) letting us know. If you wish to use one of Sora's fakemon, PLEASE contact me or another Admin and let us know before you do! While we have no problem with people using them, we absolutely want to know where they are being used and in what cases, as they do still belong to Sora (which means they belong to the current group of Alternian Admins as a collective). If you choose to use them, please respect his original creations. While relatively minor updates are fine, such as changing movepools or sprite updates, we ask that you do not drastically change his fakemon, such as changing the design or concept of his fakemon. This is out of respect for Sora, and if you feel the need to do so, we ask that you please not use them. If you wish to use any other Fakemon on Alternia, please contact the original creator and ask for their permission. Please note, however, that Sen has requested that the site's skin not be used by anyone, as it is a custom skin he created specifically for this site (along with the other site coding enhancements that exist). The rest of us are in agreement with him. To close, I want to honestly, sincerely thank everyone who is reading this and who spent time roleplaying on Alternia, whether you are one of the people that came from Tohea or you joined post revamp. Alternia has honestly been one of the best things I have ever been a part of; I’ve met so many close friends as a result of it, I’ve learned so much about how to design, lead, and work with a team, and I have had a tremendous amount of fun. Even if the site was far from perfect, all of you, the members that made up this site, are what made it perfect for me and made me stick through all of the hard work and drama throughout the site. Even as I’m writing this post, I still love this site and I’ve given it so much. I’m sure all of the other staff members feel the same, too. So again, sincerely, thank you for playing on Alternia. I hope you enjoyed your time here. |
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| Seenter | Sep 6 2015, 02:06 PM Post #2 | ||||||
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For some reason I can't get on Chat to make this request. But I would like to reclaim my title of co-founder of Alternia and work to rebuild the site from the ground up. I know I haven't been on in forever, but personally I didn't like the direction the board was headed from the beginning. I would like the chance to change that, and bring forward what I had hoped for from the start. This would be a complete restart, a break down and build up from the ground. Even the foundation will be changed, and I hope for the better. If you don't want to, then I understand. I would like a chance to try and show what I believe, and if it doesn't work then (shrugs) the site is already closed. | ||||||
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Chris Seenter's Profile Chris Seenter's PC The Journey Most Desired
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| Eevachu | Sep 6 2015, 02:22 PM Post #3 | ||||||
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Overlord of Trains - GRUNTY GRUNTY GRUNTY GRUNTY
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Well, we will not be giving you the current site to use, if that's what you're asking. The current site will remain as is, as a sort of graveyard of memories for Alternia. However, if you wish to make a new site, no one has any qualms with that. As I said in my post, you are free to use anything on Alternia as you wish(if you wish), and I wish you the best of luck in it. Besides, it seems like from what you have said, a fresh site would be the better option. If you make a new site, you are free to advertise it here as you wish as well(as long as you don't spam the board with tons of posts about it, of course). As an add-on, Sen has requested that the site's skin not be used by anyone, as it is a custom skin he created specifically for this site (along with the other site coding enhancements that exist). The rest of us are in agreement with him. |
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| Mezmo | Sep 6 2015, 04:03 PM Post #4 | ||||||
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Alternia's Old Man
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Good game everyone. I've been around for around 10 years and grown to truly enjoy this site and it's community. This is as lose to an "I love you guys," as I'm going to get. -M- |
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[item=poketech red] | | | | ![]() Old Links
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| Faust | Sep 7 2015, 08:17 AM Post #5 | ||||||
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D E A D L Y V I S I O N
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Seenter, I would be honored to help you with creating a new board. Through Tohea, and in turn, Alternia, I have spent many an hour enjoying the many things these boards had to offer, and I would hate to see the ideas go to waste. I'm willing to put a lot of time into rebuilding what we are losing here, and I hope to see everyone else join in on creating a better board! If you want my help, please PM me or shoot me an email. dom3piec3@gmail.com I hope to hear from you, mate. And to those of you who will not be joining in the new project: I love you all and I have to say, it was a good run... I'll miss everyone, and most of all, I'll miss this board. |
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P O K E M O N Spoiler: click to toggle M O S T -- W A N T E D Spoiler: click to toggle Godra Region fan game topic | |||||||
| Xia | Sep 7 2015, 09:01 AM Post #6 | ||||||
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-Screech-
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I'd rather not have my fakes used by others on a willy-nilly like basis either. They were for your guys, but seeing the reign of Alternia is coming to an end, I'd like to have my original ideas to stay with me. All sprites I made for others are theirs. But my fakes are supposed to stay mine. If that's ok. | ||||||
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.:Not to forget ! #66AA33:. Info | |||||||
| Ashy | Sep 8 2015, 04:04 PM Post #7 | ||||||
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Life is not a fairytale and there are no happy endings.
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Quite upsetting.. I said this in another thread. I think the original bunch who were here from the beginning got a lot older, more important and time consuming responsibilities in real life. And when this began, the staff should have been rotated with younger and newer people to keep this place alive. Unfortunately that did not happen, and as such it was too hard to revive the place. Wish I could have helped more. Good game everyone, thank you. Met some incredible people here, with massive hearts. Fun times. Take care everyone, good luck in life. And if anyone does attempt to revive this place, or start new.. Let me know. My email is Ash.warren17@yahoo.com Does this mean I retire and Alternias toughest trainer, by the way?
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Profile :: Journey :: Computer Guild Profile :: Captoris Corporation Base; Millenia :: Guild PC Captoris Corperation ~Leader
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| Mezmo | Sep 27 2015, 10:55 AM Post #8 | ||||||
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Alternia's Old Man
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You may have the toughest pokemon Ashy, but my team was getting close. Great teaming up with you. |
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| Xander | Sep 29 2015, 10:37 AM Post #9 | ||||||
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Overlord of Random
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See, there is an underlying issue, there were no newer people to cycle in. We've tried cycling in new people. We've asked for new people to become moderators. We've had a few really well developed members enter and leave staff multiple times. In terms of freshness, both Aria and Viper were our two newest members. There were never enough younger members to take the place of older members, nor were there any that seemed to fit what we wanted as replacements for when we left staff. The site as a whole was only older members who dedicated a large investment towards the development and we either alienated newer members, or turned them off when they saw the actual practice. We've had a few mislead to believing that we had a physical game, which is apparently what has replaced site board RPs like this one. Other large boards are facing the same stagnation or losing a large quantity of members. We have had many defining faults that various members of staff have been against, and questionable faults that various members as well as staff seemed to butt heads over. The site as a whole was great, many of our long standing members have been some of the best people I've ever met. I have still not given up completely, but for the betterment of the site, I had to concede to the notion that we needed to shut down. I've made everything I could do as transparent as I could. Other members of staff have repeatedly attempted to talk me into closing the site much earlier than when we did. I am one of the major factors for stagnation as I wanted to try to do a lot of things that others simply didn't want to do. After Sora's death, even before that, we attempted too much with too little power. Rotating staff wouldn't have done anything more than what happened. We were already on our 5th generation of Admins. Mods dropped out faster than we could recruit, but this was because we had made a very complex and stressful moderating set up. We rotated too much in all honesty. We couldn't get a dedicated foothold with normal moderators and caused a severe backup in terms of work load. The only thing that could physically be done from this point is a complete revamp back to the basic structure of how the site stared. Start simple and slowly evolve the site as time passed. But this would require a new group, a fresh start. I can't imagine many of our older members, yourself and Mezmo included, wanting to sit through another reboot. There were other structures we could have switched to, all of which would have taken more time to build. Like Zygon's Real Time updates using third party chats or Free Form formats. A huge part of why Alternia took so long was because I tried to change the format. Our older format was stressful, but the newer format was unknown to a lot of people and had a lot of extra flair that didn't seem to work over with the short run it had. Our format of RP is slowly dwindling, and the outcome that we came to was an inevitable one. There was nothing that we could have done to not come to this sorta ending. Chu pointed out all of the fundamental flaws that slowly choked the site. There are the questionable flaws, which are personal ideals that we disagreed with. Rotating staff did not help, in fact it was one of the reasons we've had such a slow death. Site started to decline when our decent sized staff level was cut and we quickly became backlogged in the RRT. No one person can be blamed for the outcome. New members not wanting to be mods, older mods not wanting to continue, older staff members not being able to keep up with the stress of maintaining the site, and the admins desperately trying to keep everything together as the ship slowly sank. None of us alone can be blamed wholely on the site's outcome. It was going to happen sooner or later because that was how the fundamental set up and structure have always worked. After some time to work my way through college, I will be attempting another Pokémon RP site. I've learned a lot from running Alternia with Racer, Sora, Shad, Viper, Chu, and Aria. I've learned a lot from the many members who have come to this site. I have made friends, rivals, and something a bit more negative, but not like a hated person. Everyone has grown from their time here, we all have different tastes and expectations. I believe I've learned to adapt better to dealing with various other types of people. Let us not dwell on what could have been, as we have tried everything we physically could to maintain the site. Keep the fonder memories of the site with you. Keep the dreams we once had when starting the site fresh and look forward to a future where we can all meet up again. It should be well known how stubborn I am. I do not give up. I have not given up, on this site, on it's members, on my friends. I'm still learning, still growing. I want to try to bring what Alternia was back, even if it has to be under a different name. When I do, I hope you and everyone else will be able to relive the better times we've had with Alternia in what ever it's new home turns out to be. |
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| Onyx Leo | Oct 22 2015, 10:33 AM Post #10 | ||||||
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Positively scrumptious!
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I think this is fundamentally the main thing to take away from this whole experience. Alternia's death wasn't from the fault of the staff, or the intricacies of the RP mechanics, or the amount of time taken to fully reboot. It's not anyone's fault. The death of Alternia was due to the fact that the age of Invisionfree, Zetaboards and Proboards forum RP's as a whole is long gone. The people who are still heavily invested in roleplaying sites now, are likely the same people who were invested in it ten years ago. Thinking "Maybe we should have done this," or "If only we'd advertised more here...", wouldn't have any effect on the state of the site, because this has honestly been a long time coming. While I wish with all my heart that RP sites could make a comeback, there's never going to be another gigantic site with 40 concurrent logged in users, and a fully active chatbox. It's just not what this current generation of able-minded internet users want. (Another issue is that I didn't find out about the site's official closure until only over a month after it happened. xP ) |
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![]() Alright, let's get this train wreck a-rollin'! Spoiler: click to toggle
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| Amii | Jun 4 2016, 08:46 AM Post #11 | ||||||
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Ha, well. So it ends. I recall very well being 13 and loving Tohea with my whole heart. It taught me to roleplay, and it taught me to mod, and I was so proud to eventually become a Gmod. I was less pleased when Munch came about and a schism came... I think that was the end of a major chapter for me. But I enjoyed Alternia, too. I enjoyed it at its peak, in particular, and I adored the stories that mods wove. I especially enjoyed being a mod, as writing stories for others was always the better pleasure... but, as had been said, we grow older. New life-circumstances arise. I've gone from graduating high school, to graduating college, to being married and being on the cusp of graduating law school. I've passed many milestones, roleplaying pokemon in some capacity. I know I have Tohea and Alternia for those countless hours of enjoyment. I'll admit I made my own curtain-call here when it became apparent that the staff team would not be growing or, if it did, would not be dedicated enough to tumble the ref list with any efficiency. I remember being very frustrated with admins and the way their admin-only requests would clog the front page -- a sort of enduring reminder that even if lower-level mods burned the wick at both ends the effort was like fighting the tides. Ultimately pointless in the face of deeper rooted issues. It was disappointing, and I recall our efforts were fruitless, and I was frustrated with the thanklessness of the task. I turned to greener pastures but would visit Alternia incognito, just to check on the old mare, as I did today, always surprised to see that it still somehow trudged along. Limping by the sheer force of will of a small core group of members. I adored Tohea, and I enjoyed my time in Alternia at its prime, and those memories trump the old frustrations. I wish I could remember all the mods and members who gave me such great stories, such great adventures, with all of my old characters. I wish them all the best. edit: ah, if someone is interested in an alternative site, torrenta is probably the one to turn to. it's incredibly active and if you're seeking something smaller new pokemon sites typically link there first. a friendly pro-tip to those seeking to continue the hobby. Edited by Amii, Jun 4 2016, 08:53 AM.
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» pяεττγ ʜ ɑ τ ε мαcнιиε ; ʜ ε ɑ я τ like an open gяɑvε ; moɗ sιиcε: July 14th, 2012 я ε f - c o u и τ: 102 | |||||||
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