girlyboy wrote:QUOTE (girlyboy @ Sep 29 2010, 10:08 AM) Is this post meant to be ironic and amusing?
yes and no.
I have actually already see this happen. (short version at bottom of wall of text, if you dont want to read this)
There is another game, Tremulous, and it had a very popular mod, TremX. The development of this mod was abandoned by the original creator, yet the mod was still played. One of the clans |KoR| which hosted a server with this old mod started playing with it, and started updating it with new stuff. (we ended up with a Mod, of a mod, of a mod, of quake)
Since everything was nice and compatible, everything was fine. The |KoR| TremX server was one of the most popular servers in the game, and by far the mos popular mod server.
Then, the clan, fragmented, into a band of "leftovers", and a group of the "original" clanners, which renamed themselves "RK". RK, in an attempt to get people to move over to their servers, hacked the KoR servers, and left the updated tremx mod in a 1/2 finished state, and started their own development. in a "serious" clan.
RK, was certainly a serious clan, and ended up being shortlived. Their server, even though updated, remained empty, as the player base didnt move. It almost moved, but something happened.
Somehow, person left in KoR, took up the reigns and managed to fix the KoR servers, get things stable, and even managed to once again begin updating the tremx mod, changing its name, to the KoRX mod, to differentiate it from the RK tremx development.
the old serious claners ended up preety much quitting the game as their servers remained empty, but they continue to amuse themselves by occasionally reopening their backdoor to the KoR servers, and attempting to destroy what they can.
but there was significant damage. When the clan split, the serious people left, which left alot of rather non-serious players in charge of what was left of KoR. The number of servers that KoR hosted decreased due to lack of $$$. (there used to be 4 servers, 3 of which were filled with players, and 1 reserved for clan games, now there are 2 servers, one of which is chronically empty, and the KoRX server, which tends to be moderately full). So the clan survived, but KoRX had changed, because it only had input from effectively 1/2 the previous dev team, it grew to fit the very non-serious gaming style of the remainders. The result is that most KoRX games have changed from a quake mod, to more of a playground.
Its hard to show you what the difference is, but while the mod continues to get "better", with all sorts of cool new things, the game play has gone stale.
I hope I have kind of drawn the parallels visible enough so they can be seen, but the the short version is this:
Dev team splits along a boundary.
One team plays dirty, and hacks other dev's servers.
Only one community ends up surviving.
Surviving Dev team continues to update servers, but server drifts away from middle ground, and falls towards the ideological extremes which the dev team split over in the first place, and the resulting product being not particularly fun, causing player base to shrink considerably.
I have another, Real Life™ example as well, where once again, a health group of people suddenly split, and a very similar thing happened. Though, I dont think you all really care for another wall of text.
