City of Protis: A Massalian AAR

[Reverend Joe]

I actually believe number of views is a highly misguided way to look at an aar "success". Everytime the author enters his thread or changes the page, edits something etc = view count goes up. There's also quite a lot of people I believe who enter the thread give it a cursory glance and then exit... Other people only look at screenshots, other people just don't have the mental desire to read more than the initial few posts etc... I think the very best way to see if there's enough interest in an aar is through the number of posts adressing your last update... but the community here simply isn't into aars all that much, and they just don't realize that a lot of aar writers need replies to their last updates to get the desire to continue. (I don't deny there's a few authors who don't give a damn about replies and they can drone on on their own forever - but they're very very few) There's nothing worse for a lot of aar writers to put a lot of effort in an aar and then be met by silence. The silence of aar readers kills aars.

I think the problem around here (it's true with me, at least) is that all we (the fans) can think of to say is "great job!" and we feel like stupid fanboys by not being able to say anything else. So, we remain silent mostly out of embarrassment. It's not that we don't like AARs that much; we're just not used to working with the writers on a literary level.

Edit: also, I think AAR fans around here tend to stick to a few AARS that they like, rather than commenting on them all. So yeah, the fanbase can be small, but it also is usually dedicated.