Board Thread:Current Affairs/@comment-5585298-20170527161223

'''NOTE: I'm not suggesting this Wiki is ending, which is what a few of you seem to be taking from this. Despite being the highest rank active here, I still don't have the right nor the authority to make any decision like that, unless the higer-ups are truly gone forever. I wouldn't want to undertake something like that. That would fall to either Namj13 or Totechalienrexstar, for now.'''

- Serious talk here. Is it time to accept that this Wiki is dead? I know not everyone has quit (and even those who are inactive haven't necessarily 'quit'), but come on - it's a skeleton crew here.

The bygone days of 2012-13 were glorious. So much discussion, excitement, intelligent conversations, with the mixture of some drama here and there, promotions, running jokes... this place was so good. Not to mention the content in each addon for GoF2 were easily accessible, making cataloging and reporting so easy and... 'fun. Plus we had a responsibility of keeping the fanbase up to date with what was going on. With Alliances it dipped a little, but still remained strong.

Somewhere along the line we lost Namj13, XenoDarth, 8fx and Thunder Luigi, along with a few others. I know I sound like I'm hailing them as gods or whatever, but I remember them as being (partly) the life and soul of this place. I'm not saying those of us here now are boring or anything, but since we lost them, everything has just... halted. Now we've lost Shadowman, Totechalienrexstar and ARK T Maxwell, which has hurt the livelihood of this place even more. (Even Dr Polini, who made things... interesting... ahem)

Compare that to the GoF3 era. No one new is here. There's no buzz. Sure, there was excitement around release time, with new pages being made, new things being discovered and thing to catalog for days. And once we got to... wherever we are now... we plateaued. We're stuck here. The buzz around GoF3 is dead (despite it just being released on Android, which should have brought in more people right...? No.), and what makes it worse is the difficulty to add anything new. Yes, GoF3 is expansive. It's huge. And this isn't a complaint about the game, but it's something I've realised anyway - it's too big.

I'm serious. The game is so full of new ships, weapons, equipment, stations, etc. that cataloging it all is a ridiculously huge task. Even accessing the items is a task in itself, thanks to the pay2win scheme. We just don't have a large nor dedicated enough userbase to undertake such a huge task. NiveliKing - you've done such good work with the Codex (and with GoF1 systems), but frankly (myself included), not everyone has the patience/time to carry out such enormous tasks. We don't have a dedicated fanbase anymore. We have a nice little community of people coming and going (and I love you guys), but it seems none of us are prepared to task ourselves with finding everything we can. Back to my earlier point, the game is just too big for such a small community to handle.

Now back in 2016, this wasn't such a problem. We didn't have anything to talk about besides hype for our upcoming game. The idea was that the hype for GoF3 would bring back more people - even resurrect inactive users - but it just didn't happen. Why? I don't know, really. Maybe because the game wasn't advertised enough. Maybe because people tried it, but weren't interested enough to read up on it.

And here we are. Dead space. Nothing to do, no motivation to do anything, and no one to care even if we did do it. What we talk about is good - 3D printing, little easter eggs we've found and so on - but nothing about the lore of the game. No tips and tricks. No glitches. We've lost those types of discussions because no one is actually playing.

Those of you still here, striving to see a day when this place becomes active again - thank you. You are awesome. And just to let you know, I haven't lost faith in us completely. I know that if this place somehow becomes active once again, you'll be here to support. But for now, I'll be the first one to admit it - our carbon dioxide scrubbers are failing and our oxygen supply is critical.

One more thing. Please don't reply to this with the generic answers of "I'm still here but life is busy, blah blah blah" we've heard this before. While it's true, it's not facing the reality. We need a discussion about the future of this place - and be honest. What is the problem? Can we fix it? How do we fix it? Or are we simply a lost cause?

Thanks for reading this massive post. Now... go wild! — 8100DSTAR

TL;DR This place isn't like it used to be; GoF3 has a problem; I feel we're fighting a losing battle. 