Quote Originally Posted by gollum View Post
I appreciate that you are a long standing member of the community, but you are not the only one.

I doubt very much that the twc became popular only due to being interesting. Modding played certainly a very large part, but so did the fact that twc was far more open as a community, is using the reputation system and has internal politics based on it, it allows custom avatars, by all accounts was open to less mature and younger members and also embraced the newer tw games. To be perfectly honest a large part of the popularity of twc is unwnted from an orgahs point of view and i certainly agree with that. Amidst the accessible and loose environment there is a lot of pettiness, and this certainly also contributes. However, the org may be on the edge of having reached the other end - ie being isolationist due to its conservatism in regards to the tw community.

Volume is not everything - but a certain amount of inflow of new members is needed for the forum to remain dynamic both in terms of environment and participation. The problem is that past a critical point, a "downward spiral" effect may make the effects of lack of inflow sharply dramatic. Such an effect has already taken place; during the RTW years the org and the twc were almost equal. However by the time of M2TW the org lost ground because the trend of M2 was in line to RTW while the org core was expecting a return to pre_RTW gameplay, and because it was known to younger players by that time that twc was more oriented to CA's line. Also the org, being traditionally a bastion of the STW/MTW community that was its core, by the time of M2 was short of knowledgeable leadership in regards to new TW games. The only person that did so, was econ21, and his absence as a moderator hurt the ETW section. Dont get me wrong; i understand that people come and go - but having only one person for that job (leadership in a new tw game sub forum) isn't exactly a healthy sign.
I never said im the only one and i know one or two things about what happened at TWC during my active days there. But i wont go into commenting anything of it as i dont think it would be fair to either of these forums. I do agree that having likes of DukeJohn, Myrddraal and EpistolaRichrad as moderators in modding section was great thing for Org in the days of RTW when the community was expanding rapidly. Now if the Org doesnt posses such characters for ETW and NTW, that is a bad thing, but you cant force people to do the job if there is no interest.
So to me first thing would be to make Org look fancy enough for new people and work so the subforums would be vibrant. If that would be successful then no doubt we would gain many new interesting people also. Copy catting TWC is not an option as there is one TWC already. Org should adapt to new times, but not by loosing its essence.