uziq
Member
+492|3422
so.

this forum was once a booming community full of amped-up iraqi soy-boys itching for an engagement with the MEC brown devils.

now it's dead, less than an echo chamber, more of a schizoid single persona muttering to himself in the voice of the polices and etc-ra.

at what point did the forum die? what was the decisive moment? was there a coup de grace? or was it a slow pillow snuffing out?

nominate your best-hits and epochal moments.

when did bf2s die? let's recall the time before when discussions had more than 3 participants.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Mods would ban the most popular users. A mod who was off the forum for 8 months could come back and perm ban a popular active user and there was nobody who could/would reverse the ban.

Also, the mods from the Nordic were the worst. Varegg, Ultrafunkula, Bern etc. Finland is an unhappy place. They shouldn't be allowed into NATO.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
uziq
Member
+492|3422
agree 100% with your analysis. i wonder if there were some 'canon' threads that portended the end ...

any particularly flame-heavy threads in which many of the great glorious dead were RIP'd ...

this whole thing is like a petri dish with a whole forgotten ecology.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
The Michael Jackson death thread. ATG got so angry he created the Deadpool Thread.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

The beginning of the end was the creation of ee chats. It increased general forum activity but decreased involvement in specific threads/communities.
pirana6
Go Cougs!
+682|6260|Washington St.
I miss cdogmn
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

- The clampdown on Your thoughts, insights, and musings on this matter intrigue me.
- The clampdown on healthy toxicities and rivalries (not helped by reports being used as a bludgeon).
- Termination of and maybe unfair mockery of pace threads.
- In maybe a few cases, not letting banned users back for the sake of a community-inactive admin or mod.
- AWMs. Not enjoyable to send, very annoying to receive. Demeaning stuff.
- The end of Battlefield as a franchise many of us, here on a Battlefield 2 forum, felt invested in.

The occasional meltdown seemed to stir things up a bit, but fleetingly.

tl;dr, entropy. No contact with pretty much all of the people I used to chat with on ICQ in the 90s, as of the early/mid(??) 00s. In all fairness, BF2S has been comparatively long lived.
tazz.
oz.
+1,338|6144|Sydney | ♥

We became adults and some of us

Spoiler (highlight to read):
had responsibilities

everything i write is a ramble and should not be taken seriously.... seriously.
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Mods need to make right all of the things that took place before and unban Macbeth and Uzique.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

Mods don't have that power.
pirana6
Go Cougs!
+682|6260|Washington St.
But for real, when is this place going to finally bow out gracefully to the annals of the internet?

I get the feeling that trying to get the band back together anywhere else on the web will end it about 1/4 to 1/2 of the active members here even making it, but maybe it's for the best.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

The beginning of the end was the creation of ee chats. It increased general forum activity but decreased involvement in specific threads/communities.
good take. i think you're onto something.

but if i recall correctly it was because so many ongoing flame wars and inter-user banter was spilling over into every thread. woops!

an interesting thing i see now is a nostalgia for forums elsewhere on the internet. people in respectable quarterlies and papers are mourning the death of internet 'subcultures'. i suppose bf2s was a subculture, of a sort.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

What I really feel nostalgic for from here are things like the absurd scoreboard, killstreak, and glitch screenshots, making fun of silly server kicks, and people arguing over various merits of game tactics or guns. When was the last time a thread was made whining about dolphin diving or flashbangs? I miss some of the flame wars as well, but not to the point that some literally drowned multiple threads.

As a bonus, the place isn't an "official forum." Those sometimes seem to have a different, more sterile vibe to me. Maybe a parallel to games having a pretense of being "grown up" now. Always online, always policed, serious business.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Battlefield 2 went offline.

I suppose the end of the Iraq war was relevant.

Otherwise BF2s has basically faded away. No idea why I'm still here TBH.

Highpoint for me was an epic meme war with usmarine, it went for pages before the mods wiped it. Such a loss.

Some mods were assholes, having their final say in a thread then closing it.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
Can't remember why ATG ragequit for the final time, I think usmarine got a better job so had no need to vent.

Otherwise why would any sane person stay?
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

What I really feel nostalgic for from here are things like the absurd scoreboard, killstreak, and glitch screenshots, making fun of silly server kicks, and people arguing over various merits of game tactics or guns. When was the last time a thread was made whining about dolphin diving or flashbangs? I miss some of the flame wars as well, but not to the point that some literally drowned multiple threads.

As a bonus, the place isn't an "official forum." Those sometimes seem to have a different, more sterile vibe to me. Maybe a parallel to games having a pretense of being "grown up" now. Always online, always policed, serious business.
i find it hard to be nostalgic about specific game-related whines. taking computer games deadly seriously is probably one thing we should have all aged out of gracefully. can you imagine being 32 and getting upset about 'camping'?

As a bonus, the place isn't an "official forum." Those sometimes seem to have a different, more sterile vibe to me. Maybe a parallel to games having a pretense of being "grown up" now. Always online, always policed, serious business.
not to sound like a broken record, but insofar as bf2s ever did have a 'sterile' official vibe, it was because of overweening moderators pretending as if they were defending a proud and venerable institution or something.

Last edited by uziq (2022-06-02 05:07:08)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
What annoyed me was when the whole US team went sniper on Road to Jalalabad and made no effort to advance whatsoever.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
never really saw the hype with that map. there were so many other fun maps with fast-moving captures and better squad dynamics.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
it's funny how people say so often that 'online records are immortal' or 'data is out there forever', etc, but practically an entire generation of online culture has vanished without a trace in very living memory. paper records and physical media seeming more relevant than ever ...

i used xfire forums/messenger/stats a lot back in the day. whole thing folded now. just the legal property of some generic venture capital fund afaik. website gone. thousands of hours of stats gone. app no longer in operation. entire friends list (like ICQ/MSN/AIM, in their way) and groups gone. just like the bf2 game stats are no longer relevant, but applied to a whole social stratum of online life and gaming subculture. it's akin to the fact that one day everyone's steam profiles and all the steam communities will go dark, too.

the rise/fall of the BF franchise, like the CoD franchise i suppose, is relevant, yes. moving away from forums and big stats databases to their own integrated in-game friend lists/services. much less room for communities to organize and grow outside of the big publishers' own game/game launcher ecosystems.

discord's meteoric rise in recent years, not just for games but seemingly for all hobbies and pursuits, including fandoms and artist-fan communities, is probably relevant. i let that all pass me by, though. like twitch.tv or streaming communities, i'm too old for that shit.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

I think you can be somewhat fondly nostalgic for a thing without wanting to go back to it. I've had plenty of opportunities to return to Battlefield 2, but felt done with it. Battlefield had its stupidity and quirks that made for some memorable online experiences, before it just became run-on grenade spam in the alleyways of Karkand. Being kicked from a ChRiStIaN server for saying the word "butt," lol. The stupid stuff on this forum that reminds me of a time I considered the franchise playable.

can you imagine being 32 and getting upset about 'camping'?
Jump into World of Tanks (please don't) and you'll find people from 16 to 61 complaining about camping. I got into that game for fun, but people were screaming until they lost their voice on voip, lol.
uziq
Member
+492|3422
world of warcraft: classic was a pretty interesting, once-in-a-generation experiment. literally resurrected an entire gaming culture and game-design approach from ca. 15 years ago. none of the modern conveniences or streamlining. almost a 'retro' experiment.

and it had the same social dynamics, for a while. server-based communities, forum discussions (moved to aforementioned server-based discord communities). it even seemed to carry some of the same bonhomie and ~vibe~ ... for a while.

but it also showed that online culture in general has moved on. a lot of these halcyon days we're nostalgic about are in a way looking back at a lost world. online and public discourse is much harsher, more astringent, indeed polarized now. politics are back in the fray, in a way, that they weren't in 2005. the wow:classic experiment was fun for about 3-4 months, until you realized that the new/current generation of gamer have optimized and number-crunched the shit out of everything, and seemed intent on spending their time making the game as unenjoyable as possible.

a lot of bf2 players were basically hapless amateurs, and that went for casual MMO players and gamers of all other stripes too. you could be a bumbling amateur back then. i think current-gen gamers are way more toxic and less forgiving of the clueless. league of legends and fortnite etc. have put paid to that.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|6741|PNW

To your last, I'll concede that a lot of games feel or seem toxic these days, but I feel like they always were to various degrees, as far back as 20+ years. MUD drama as far back as the 90s, giving preferential treatment to roleplay over build optimizers in a game ostensibly built for PVP (made for some sour players). For all I've enjoyed the games of yore, I also don't feel any overwhelming urge to get back into multiplayer text dungeons or crusty old shooters that require sacrificial chickens to run on a modern PC and additional arcane knowledge to connect online.

I feel like toxicity still varies from genre to genre, game to game, server to server, or just subjective experience/preference. Would definitely expect a better reception in a new coop game than jumping into a MOBA with no clue what I'm doing. Dodged a massive bullet with Fortnite as well. People were enthusiastically trying to get me into it, I just didn't want to. Let me derp around on Terraria for a couple weekends.

Wandering a bit from the decline of BF2S maybe.
Finray
Hup! Dos, Tres, Cuatro
+2,629|5758|Catherine Black
Went out with a whimper, not a bang..

Some smiles from reading through the memories though

uziq wrote:

until you realized that the new/current generation of gamer have optimized and number-crunched the shit out of everything, and seemed intent on spending their time making the game as unenjoyable as possible.
I kinda hate this aspect of gaming now. If you're not doing the absolutely most efficient method or best gear or whatever, that entitled shut in with way too many hours on his hands will pipe up about it.

What happened to having fun and hanging out?
https://i.imgur.com/qwWEP9F.png
Finray
Hup! Dos, Tres, Cuatro
+2,629|5758|Catherine Black
ps add me

https://i.imgur.com/SutIXL6.png
https://i.imgur.com/qwWEP9F.png
pirana6
Go Cougs!
+682|6260|Washington St.
I think there's some rose-tinted glasses here. While fun-BF2 was indeed fun, I remember tons of toxicity. Nade-spamming, spawn camping, etc all had hours of discussion and fights. The 4* generals of the game all nade-spammed for hours because it was the most efficient way to get points.
I think at this point, everyone is remember the good about the game and mostly ignoring the bad that was also there.

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