Soooo...
Once the there was a website called slownewsday.

It's purpose was to make developers look gay.

But when the going got tough, and their heads they had to tuck...

Everyone threw a hissy-fit and now it's a clusterfuck.

Thoughts on what happened?

moron

All I know is that I stopped reading it for a week and came back to check today. Boom. Gone. I had been fearing that something like this would happen for a while, but I had hoped that everyone would see through the b/s and pull it together. Now the community is out a remarkable website. Too bad everyone couldn't pull their collective head out of the collective ass.

- Neko, from Ltm, then SND, now nothing...

"Once the there was a website called slownewsday.
It's purpose was to make developers look gay.
But when the going got tough, and their heads they had to tuck...
Everyone threw a hissy-fit and now it's a clusterfuck. "

Great, I'll be singing this at work tomorrow. =)

Y'know, I checked there the other day, saw there was a big hoo ha over a comments thread about a mediocre rant. So I read the thread (well, most of it, it was 11 pages long).

I didn't understand what everyone was getting so upset about. It was a lame rant. The guy who wrote it even prefaced it with his opinion that it was a lame rant, but he wrote for a rant site, and by golly, he was going to rant whether it was lame or not.

I'm bumming, because I have never played EQ, AC, UO, AOC, or DAOC. I have never played a MMOG. I just really liked reading LtM (and eventually SND) and everything I know about MMOGs comes from there. It wasn't an everyday read, but I'd check in once a week or so and see what new horror was begin perpetrated.

This time we lost a website not to banner ads and the crash of the dot-coms, but to infighting. Too bad.

Yeah, Mythic's reaction was way out of proportion to the original rant that was posted.

The site had gone downhill, but I wish it had survived so it had a chance to get better. Oh well.

I just read this:
http://mu.ranter.net/misc/endofsnd.html


Interesting.

SND was out of control though. They lost Smed (who worked with LtM/SND from the birth of the site), they lost the OSI input, they drove all Wolfpack and Funcom people out of the forums. Eventually the only developer that was stil responding to the threads was Mythic. Even then, everything Mark or Sanya said in the forums was twisted, pulled, and stretched until it didn't resemble the original statement at all. The rants, in general, had become assanine.

Snowspinner was, for me, the beginning of the downhill slide of "ranting because, ummm, just cuz". He complained about the smallest problems, things that maybe .05% of the population of these games would even bother reading. He played 30+ hours a week, but he talked about EQ like it was the worst game ever published. He spent $500+ in cash for his items (by his own admission), then complained that he shouldn't have to pay $30 for the huge expansion being released in December. It got to the point where I refused to click any rant that had him as the author.

Luckily, they had The Tick there as an EQ ranter also. He was by far one of the better updaters to the site.

SND had brought on some great new "ranters" recently too. Teir was a perfect example of what a ranter should be: he had good reason, he explained himself well, and he had a sense of humor. His rants sounded like true complaints, not just excuses to call Verant or Funcom the spawn of Satan himself. I thought the site might be making a comeback.

Then this happened.

There was apparently a lot of tension behind the scenes between the updaters. I think that maybe this Mythic thing was just the straw that broke Eldin's back. After all is said in done, everyone involved overreacted and we lost a fixture of the MMOG community.