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[Teneb]

DOOM I say! The end is nigh! Save your favourite shitposts before it is too late!

[Enemy post]

DOOM I say!

EXCELLENT IDEA!



RAAGRH!!!



Rip and tear!



HGRAA!!!

Anyway, what were we talking about?

[Imic]

Laughing hysterically in the corner
... Sorry, I was watching something. I do not find your reckless shenanigans amusing in the slightest.

[SalmonGod]

download stats (which aren't public, are they ?)

There's download counts on DFFD.  I'd wager most people who sustain more interest than a passing download and glance end up using it, so it might be a decent indicator.

I do think another community project on the level of Matul Remrit would be a good thing.  I don't think anything noteworthy of the like has come out of DF in a while.  I've wanted to do a DF comic for forever, but fuck if I'm likely to have time in the foreseeable future to work on something like that.

Still not really worried about DF dying, though, since donations are doing so well.  As long as they keep rolling in, Toady will keep developing.  They've been on a mostly steady upward trend for forever.  No reason to believe that will stop anytime soon.

[KittyTac]

DF and Bay12 are symbiotic. As long as one lives, the other will never die. B12 has an interesting community that attracts people into DF. Some people just come to ask a few questions, then stay here. Even if activity slows down, it will never completely die as long as DF lives.

My estimate:

http://prntscr.com/iikr0d

We seem to be at the lowest point or popularity or nearly so, but because the Myth release for df will come soon (within 2 years), the hype will gradually build, causing DF, and by extension, bay12 to slowly become more popular.

[bloop_bleep]

Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but the reason for the long-term slowdown in Community Games & Fortresses (and to a slightly lesser extent the DF forums in general) is that the list of possible things left to do with DF has slowly run down. There was in fact a thread in that forum on this topic. Playing a community/succession fortress normally, with no restrictions or goals, has fallen deeply out of favor. Doing special or restrictive community forts, like evil glaciers or entirely aboveground forts, have also become less and less in number. Huge !!SCIENCE!! projects like computers and necrobacon and the sort have nearly finished up all there is to do. Of course, some new ideas become possible with every new release, but at this point ideas are being consumed faster than they are being created.

I hope, as you do, that the mythgen release will reinvigorate the DF community, because not much else is going to save it.

[KittyTac]

Millions of possibilities will definitely invigorate the community. Then we'll get procedural laws and customs.

[TamerVirus]

there's a lot of people who have just kind of mysteriously disappeared (KingofstarrySkies and TamerVirus spring to mind.)

heh

[KittyTac]

We just have to hold on for 2 years.

[heydude6]

Hi, just wanted to pop in here. If I saw this thread sooner I would have posted then, but I guess I’ll have to make up for lost time.

For me, I first noticed a downturn in forum activity when Neonevik got banned. Obviously from reading this thread, it had been happening for a lot longer, but that was when the changes effected me the most. After he was gone the place felt a lot, calmer...

There was less volatility and arguing, and I myself started to suffer less headaches, but I miss the frequent discussion prompts he would post. Neonevik was the kind of a guy who was rarely afraid of saying what was on his mind, and even if some of it was uninformed and poorly articulated, with enough time and effort, I would usually be able to understand where he was coming from at least.

Still, that’s enough talking about Neo. He wasn’t the sole keystone of this place after all.

I originally joined these forums due to masterwork, where I quickly got involved in an over ambitious modding project. It was fun to work on it for a while, but eventually I moved on from that and started lurking in mafia. I then clicked on FreeFormSchooler’s sig and got introduced to “The Warrens of Oric the Awsome” and forum games as a whole.

What I saw blew my mind! Stories that adapted to the actions of you the player. More freedom than any open world video game ever made! The ability to be an active part of something truly great!

Of course most games didn’t really live up to those lofty expectations, but I managed. Eventually though, school started to get tough so I had to take a break from those kinds of things. I then moved to general discussion and that’s where I’ve been hanging since. I don’t post ridiculously often (ever since my first crush rejected me, I haven’t been the kind of man who takes the initiative), but if someone starts an interesting discussion such as this one, I’m not afraid to chime in. As a result, the health of my own posting activity is directly linked to the posting activity of some of the more thought-provoking forumites. If they go, I guess I’ll go too, but for now I’ll enjoy my community. You’re like a second Corner Pub to me.

[SalmonGod]

Dunno if this has been mentioned before, but the reason for the long-term slowdown in Community Games & Fortresses (and to a slightly lesser extent the DF forums in general) is that the list of possible things left to do with DF has slowly run down. There was in fact a thread in that forum on this topic. Playing a community/succession fortress normally, with no restrictions or goals, has fallen deeply out of favor. Doing special or restrictive community forts, like evil glaciers or entirely aboveground forts, have also become less and less in number. Huge !!SCIENCE!! projects like computers and necrobacon and the sort have nearly finished up all there is to do. Of course, some new ideas become possible with every new release, but at this point ideas are being consumed faster than they are being created.

I hope, as you do, that the mythgen release will reinvigorate the DF community, because not much else is going to save it.

I haven't read much in the community games area in a long time, but that sounds to me like a lack of imagination.  As in the emergent gameplay of Dwarf Fortress is awesome, but of course there are limitations to the sorts of things that happen.  The same can be said of the storytelling tradition in general.  If you strip down almost any story told today to its core plot structures and tropes, you can find a story from 2000 years ago matching the same.  That hasn't slowed down engagement in the act of storytelling.  Because details matter, but more importantly, how the story is told matters.

DF is a story generator more than a game that is played in any traditional sense.  It generates the core elements of the story for you, but the details and narrative are left so heavily abstracted that there is endless potential to write the game's events into our own stories.  Players just need to see the potential in that abstracted space and fill it in.  And make something more of it than a series of forum posts in journal format describing what happened every season.  I'm gonna drop Matul Remrit as the shining example again.  DF needs to keep building its legacy on projects like that.  New releases bring existing players back, but entertaining stories are what draw interest from new people.

Edit:  Come to think of it, I think this is the main reason that I stopped paying attention to the community games section.  Most everyone sticks to writing the same in-character journal format to describe the same in-game events and player decisions.  The personality of the character writing the journal may vary, but that's about it.  Reading the same narrative approach to the game over and over again gets boring.

I'm going to shamelessly plug a community fort I participated in, and fucking loved it - QuakeMortal.  Was so sad that it died so early.  Great example of one where we we had lots of posts that broke the journal format.  Detailed descriptions of events and conversations.  Lore that broke away from game events.

[wierd]

I fully expect "conquer the world" fortresses to become a thing in the near-future, once the framework for it exists.

It could lead to an interesting development:  Cascaded team play. (One team successions one fortress/civ, the other team another. The two bounce back and forth with control of the save, sending raiding parties, conquering towns, and throwing the world into chaos. Occasional forays with adv mode to go interview residents about how they feel about the situation-- etc.)

[Telgin]

Come to think of it, I think this is the main reason that I stopped paying attention to the community games section.  Most everyone sticks to writing the same in-character journal format to describe the same in-game events and player decisions.  The personality of the character writing the journal may vary, but that's about it.  Reading the same narrative approach to the game over and over again gets boring.

I'm going to shamelessly plug a community fort I participated in, and fucking loved it - QuakeMortal.  Was so sad that it died so early.  Great example of one where we we had lots of posts that broke the journal format.  Detailed descriptions of events and conversations.  Lore that broke away from game events.

I've been part of several community games that broke away from the journal format and injected narrative unrelated to things that happened in DF, and I agree that it's a nice change of pace.  We got kind of carried away with it at times though, to the point that it became impenetrable to anyone who just stumbled across the threads and at times I wanted to get back to basics.  It was bad enough that I got burned out on the whole idea, and even now, years later, I don't think I'd do another.  Not like those, anyway.

It can be a lot of fun, but I think it's also more work than most players are willing to deal with.  At that point, it really does become more about collaboratively writing a story, with DF occasionally handing you events to work into it.

Anyway, I do fully expect that the new raiding and razing features in DF will lead to renewed interest in community forts.  Imagination certainly counts for a lot, but I do feel like previous versions had a bit of a problem of being boring.  There was one release where invasions were insanely rare, for example, and to be blunt, if you're not fighting off things DF can be pretty boring.  Being able to go looking for trouble if it doesn't come to you will be fun for a lot of people.

[nenjin]

I tried a community fort with a some RL friends a couple years ago. And I was really surprised how quickly it went off the rails. Even working with people you know, a cooperative narrative can be hard to pull off. Especially when everyone has their own ideas about what the fort needs.

[Imic]

I tried a community fort with a some RL friends a couple years ago. And I was really surprised how quickly it went off the rails. Even working with people you know, a cooperative narrative can be hard to pull off. Especially when everyone has their own ideas about what the fort needs.

Once, that very chaos was the allure of many forts.