08-25-2011, 06:47 PM | #1 |
Pokemon Trainer
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I can't believe this place is still around...
Wow...
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08-25-2011, 06:53 PM | #2 |
我が名は勇者王!
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Are you the real Jaxel or a figment of my imagination?
Because it seems like whenever I casually mention someone from old UPN (Namek, EK, Chaos) they appear to say "hey" or "wow UPN". I'm pretty sure I said Jaxel in a post yesterday or the day before. o_O
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08-25-2011, 06:54 PM | #3 |
Pokemon Trainer
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I dont know. Maybe I'm a doppleganger.
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08-25-2011, 06:57 PM | #4 |
我が名は勇者王!
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Snap, for a minute or two, I was thinking you might mistake me for Archaic.
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あなたの勇気が切り開く未来
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08-25-2011, 06:57 PM | #5 |
Pokemon Trainer
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You act like I remember who any of you people are.
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08-25-2011, 06:59 PM | #6 |
時の彼方へ
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Lafayette, Indiana
Posts: 20,578
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Wow, that was fast! We just finished talking like twenty seconds ago!
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08-25-2011, 07:00 PM | #7 |
我が名は勇者王!
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You don't because I only posted on one of your boards for a month or two, I was far more active on Chaka's and now Kuno's UPN.
Several old time members are still here. Talon, Kuno, McSweeney. Uh, I don't know anyone else, maybe Morg qualifies too. Also, ChaosRocket x PiccoloNamek shipping is real. Would you believe?
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あなたの勇気が切り開く未来
ふたりの想いが見つけだす希望 今 信じあえる あきらめない 心かさね 永遠を抱きしめて |
08-25-2011, 07:01 PM | #8 | |
Pokemon Trainer
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Quote:
I run a Soul Calibur community now.
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08-25-2011, 07:02 PM | #9 |
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Join Date: May 2008
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Wait, your the guy who ran Universal Pokemon Network, right? Also, nice Soul Calibur website.
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08-25-2011, 07:06 PM | #10 |
Pokemon Trainer
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That would be me... then in August 2000, the internet bubble popped. And then my hosts (the guys who owned the domain) forgot to renew the domain name, and it was picked up by cyber squatters... and everything was lost. Back then, it was costing close to $50 a day to keep the website running (we were #6 on Alexa), so without the internet bubble to pay for it; we just decided not to bring it back up.
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08-25-2011, 07:07 PM | #11 |
我が名は勇者王!
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It's young, too.
I envy the youth. I can't post a ten times a minute like I could back in the 56k days. Even considering broad-band internet.
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あなたの勇気が切り開く未来
ふたりの想いが見つけだす希望 今 信じあえる あきらめない 心かさね 永遠を抱きしめて |
08-25-2011, 07:09 PM | #12 |
Pokemon Trainer
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Youth? I'm 27... just bored... leaving for Summer Jam tomorrow and I'm all prepped and nothing left to do.
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08-25-2011, 07:19 PM | #13 |
我が名は勇者王!
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I mean your community is young. I play on a particular browser-based MMORPG for the same reason, there's lots of "energy".
You won't find topics like "Gay or straight" or "You know what really grinds my gears??" here anymore. Or on AP, SPP and BMG, either. We were, however, privileged to entertain an ObviousTroll in 2010.
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あなたの勇気が切り開く未来
ふたりの想いが見つけだす希望 今 信じあえる あきらめない 心かさね 永遠を抱きしめて |
08-25-2011, 07:26 PM | #14 |
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Join Date: May 2008
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That's awesome. I really appreciate the work you did creating and running UPN in its heyday. It's not nearly as big, but activity is always steady and it's a pretty cool and mature community for the most part.
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08-25-2011, 07:26 PM | #15 | |
Pokemon Trainer
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Quote:
The community I run was founded in 2002, it's history is almost as long as UPNetworks. However, the transfer between each era (there have been 4) has not been as "cordial" as it was here at UPN. In fact, doing some vanity searches here on UPN; it seems you guys actually have a high opinion of me.
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08-25-2011, 08:21 PM | #16 |
我が名は勇者王!
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There hasn't been much turn-over here. Outside of UPN I "work" at Arlong Park, the internet's largest One Piece fan forum, and it suffers from a community crisis every few years.
The analogy I use is an "internet chemostat" - a constant fluctuation of new blood into the system that also happens to flush the old blood out before it can evolve and stick around. AP in 2005 was a somewhat small, tightly-knit community, but as One Piece became explosively popular, the older members found themselves marginalized by a community where they hardly knew the posters. It wasn't simply a Dunbar's Number issue either, all mass communities suffered from this. We saw as much during the Pokemon era in Y2K. By comparison, UPN hasn't lost its identity because membership, like Sequoia redwood trees, grows slowly. This allows the new members who stick around to accomodate to the community, so even if people leave, the "regime" established never really dies. It's just baton passed to others. Honestly, I miss the days of EK, Clip Clop, Namek, Kasumi Violet and Chaos being here as regulars. Back when I was young and impressionable, those guys were my "senpais" who knew the world better than I did. And I suspect, still do. It's a pot hole that hasn't been filled by city workers in many years.
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あなたの勇気が切り開く未来
ふたりの想いが見つけだす希望 今 信じあえる あきらめない 心かさね 永遠を抱きしめて |
08-25-2011, 08:50 PM | #17 |
The hostess with the mostess
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Sup Jaxel. I still remember our ICQ chats with the whole old school crew. Strange to hear you're only actually a few years older than me, dang.
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08-25-2011, 09:18 PM | #18 |
Pokemon Trainer
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Yeah, the community I run now works the same way...
During Soul Calibur 2 (2002-2005), we were running at soulcalibur.com. The community was ran, hosted and maintained by Namco directly and they showed an interest in it. Then when Soul Calibur 3 was starting to get announced, Namco shut the forum down and put up some shitty Flash website instead. So for Soul Calibur 3 (2005-200, we were running at caliburforum.com. The problem is this website is ass; and the people running it had no idea what they were doing. Performance of the server sucked, and the MYI tables on the database would crash every other week. After the website had been down for 3 straight weeks; I eventually said "wtf and went to the host and told them I could fix their DB issue". So at that point, I went from being a regular member to an admin. The problem was, even though I could fix the DB issues, the server was still ass. So as Soul Calibur 4 neared release, the surge of new users brought us down again. The week of SC4's release (200, we didn't have a website because the large number of users kept bringing the server down. When we finally got back up, I made a thread talking about getting us a new server and setting up a new website. The existing leadership at caliburforum.com felt very threatened by this (even though I would have retained all positions at my new website) and quickly ousted me from my position. So because of this, a week later I founded 8WayRun.Com and a war started between the two websites. The leaders at CF made up lies about me, claimed I deleted content and sabotaged the server on the way out. Even though, it was one of their moderators who deleted the content, and I couldn't have sabotaged the server because I didn't have access to it (literally, they wouldn't even give me FTP or direct DB access; I had to relay my SQL commands through them). They also said I hired people to troll their website and banned anyone who used CF from my site (really? thats one of the dumbest things I've ever heard). During the first 6 months of 8WR's existence (and SC4's release), 8WR was a barren wasteland. Even though it was a better site, there was no way to get people to actually switch websites. That was until CF crashed hard. Naturally, because they didn't have an admin who knew what they were doing, it took them half a week to type "REPAIR post.MYI;" (lol, idiots). During that time, people were forced to go to 8WR and saw how good it was... and never went back to CF after it got back up. Unfortunately, 6 months of bad leadership at CF took a major toll on the community. Our nationals tournament, which was being orchestrated primarily at CF was falling apart and succumbed to major corruption. And the leaders at CF's, inability to make hard decisions lead to disparity amongst rules and banning for tournaments. So even though I took over leadership of the community; the damage over the first 6 months had already been done. Now its 2011 and Soul Calibur 5 has been announced. During the failure of SC4, almost every dedicated Soul Calibur website on the next went down. Now we have a large influx of new people coming to 8WR, because there is nowhere else to go. 8WR was always a community for tournament players; but now the tournament players are clashing up against casual players and gamefaqs noobs. It's causing major issues and bad blood between members.
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08-25-2011, 09:43 PM | #19 |
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That sounds like a shitload of drama. UPN is pretty damn mellow, although very quiet.
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08-25-2011, 09:51 PM | #20 |
時の彼方へ
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Lafayette, Indiana
Posts: 20,578
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That's weird how you sort of re-lived your UPNetwork experience except backwards.
I have no clue what corruption stuff you're talking about but I've been out of the fighting circle for too many years now. Sorry to hear that whatever tournament(s) you tried to run were littered with corrupt shit going down. Better luck this coming season.
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08-26-2011, 12:19 AM | #21 |
Pokemon Trainer
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Yeah. 8WayRun is a fraction the size as my UPNetwork was at it's peak; 8WayRun peaks at about 40K pageviews a day... UPNetwork was getting 1.6 MILLION. But then again, not only was advertising different, so were costs. When I was running UPNetwork, it cost about $100 a day to keep the website running at peak. If I were running UPNetwork today, with the same amount of traffic and software, it would probably cost $100 a month.
The corruption in the fighting game communities is insane. The Dead or Alive community the most asinine. But this is what happens when the decisions of the community are made in a "in crowd" type situation, without the community or their interests in mind. This weekend I'll be live streaming Soul Calibur at Summer Jam 5 in Philadelphia, PA. You can follow the stream here and check it out when we go live: twitch.tv/8wayrun
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08-26-2011, 07:33 AM | #22 |
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My question though is how does corruption work in a fighting game? I mean like, aren't there tons of people watching the match and so on? I don't really get it. Or is it something other than that. I watch a lot of SC2 esports so this sort of baffles me since it is non existent there.
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08-26-2011, 08:19 AM | #23 |
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I'm curious to know more as well. Much as I love DOA, like I say, I haven't been following the fighting scene for years due to lack of personal investment in the sport (read: no 360 or PS3). I don't remember any corruption back in '06 or '07, just a lot of people complaining about tiering and how DOA:U heavily favored Ayane over most any other character and how (at least in DOA3, people were always saying this, though I didn't think it held as true in U) Tina was the game's most broken character. But that isn't corruption, that's just people nagging that they can't win with their personal favorites. Corruption to me implies:
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08-26-2011, 11:31 AM | #24 |
Pokemon Trainer
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History of the DOA community by my friend Tom Brady:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnvxQqJyXv4 Basically, DirectTV was broadcasting tournaments for the CGL. They went through the leader of the DOA community to select players to compete in the tournament of what was supposed to be the best players in the world. The leader instead picked 7 scrubs, and 1 good player who was a friend. The good player (who wasn't the best), kicked ass and the two of them split the pot (usually around $10k each time). The corruption you didn't see in '07 was one of the worst cases of corruption out there... As for the SC4 community, our nationals tournament organizer "lost" $2000 from the pot.
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08-26-2011, 02:06 PM | #25 |
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Now I see what you're saying. I honestly don't remember that, and I don't know whether that was for lack of personal recognition of the corruption or whether no one really knew what was going on at the time until it came out later. Back in the day, I was not a part of the DOA Central community. I was a pretty prominent member on Neotaku from 2003 to 2004, but not DOA Central. Either way, this is the first I've heard of this. I don't even recognize the particular championship you're citing. The problem with competitive DOA in the mid-2000s, at least in my experience, is that there was no one "cup," per se, but rather lots of competitions held at various conventions, not limited to fighting game conventions on the East Coast.
To be perfectly honest though, Jaxel, if the allegations for corruption are "it's not a representative sample of the very best," I'll say this: even were they to have tried their best (which they didn't) they would still have failed to bring the world's best together into one convention hall. Unless they're willing to pay out of pocket to fly in the very best players from all over the world, any given fighting tournament is going to exhibit regional bias. Even if they claim to be "the Internationals" and have some international representation, they're still going to have a disproportionate number of domestic poorer players and foreign wealthier players. Your average lower-class to middle-class gamer from Japan isn't going to fly out to D.C. and Baltimore twice a year. He just can't do it. So right off the bat, you'll run into problems like that. Okay, thoughts as I watch these videos ... Spoiler: show I'll confess: if I get a next-gen console, just knowing that you run a Soul Caliber site, Jason, has me interested in giving the game a look. I've actually never owned an SC, not one, only having played 2 and 3 at friends' houses. Was never really interested in SC's heavy emphasis on Ring Outs. Didn't care for its lore or characters much either. (Half of DOA's characters may suck balls, but the half that don't really carry the franchise for me.) But ... I'm interested in giving it a try. It would be fun to be in an active fighter community. Only problem is, I wouldn't be paying for XBL should I get a 360 and I doubt you guys would want to run it off of the PSN were I to get a PS3, soo.... I doubt I could play online with you guys anyway. If XBL were like $5/mo, then maybe.
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