Of course, this place wasn’t always this place. A few of you remember the beginning. The off topic posts. The wild west days of no moderation, no Admins but the big guy himself in the early days of Everquest 1. We were a younger set back then, still in college or newer for the most part. Wet behind the ears, in the days when LoLcats were new and novel and no one knew what a plat seller or a forum spammer or a hackbot were. Politics? I doubt there was even a single politics thread anywhere in the forum until the Clinton election. Funny news post threads? Sometimes, but not often. No, other than everquest itself, those were the days of forum games and lamer flames. Of people ranting for no apparent reason about nothing at all. Intrigue and bravado ruled the land, yet an innocence persisted. No one had yet coined the term “sockpuppet†for example.
We saw history created, both in game, in forum, and IRL. The day when a trio of passenger aircraft changed everything. Births, Deaths, Disgrace and exultation. Here there were plenty of people from all walks of life experiencing things together through our thin veneer of electronic data. Some people were as real online as they were in real life as we would later come to find out. Some were a persona only. A script. An actor playing an elaborate master level part over the years for their own amusement. There were the Jesters, the fools, the pricks, the power hungry, and the people really bad at drawing elves.
Sure, we had our problems too. Some of us had a bit of a mean streak and were scaring off new forum readers. So we were eventually exiled to our own OOT forum, and the first Moderator, Darqflame arrived on the scene. It worked pretty well until the first in game guilds made of forum people. You all remember how that turned out in the end. It was a paradox of growth and destruction. I doubt the forum would have grown as large as it did at the time as quickly as it did without them, but would leaving out the inevitable guild implosion have spared us some of the people we lost? Or did we gain more over the drama.
That split, and the sundering of OOT into Asylum really started the legend of the Asylumite. The only forumites exiled for being too good at the forum game. In truth, the reputation was mostly deserved, but only if you got all of us riled up. Asylum never backed down. If you picked a fight in forum, you died or became one of us. In game, guilds and fleets were forged that shook the foundations of the games they were in. Rules and regulations were changed in more than one game simply because we existed.
But gradually we turned inward. Attrition took its toll. People blocked at work, people moving on to bigger and flashier social networking sites. The reputation of the Asylum working against those who never learned the simple truth that all it takes to be an Asylumite is to start posting and stick around regardless of what happens. Our numbers dwindled as the OOT forum, originally set aside as a preserve for people too scared to deal with the Asylum and all it represented instead slowly became the very thing they feared, but with a slightly larger population base.
Then came the Server DDOS, the corporate merger, that incident with the ocelot and the rogue copy machine, the OOT vs. Asylum running feud largely spurred on behind the scenes by Magi, etc. The site forum as a whole took a massive drop in numbers, one we have been slowly recovering from over the years.
Through it all, there remained a constant core of posters, friends, acquaintances that were always here, and likely will be here in some form for some time to come. Heck, give it another few years and we might see our first second generation asylumite posts.
Anyways, I guess I just wanted to say thanks for being here and listening to lame puns, bad jokes, stupid posts and whatnot from me for 11 years. I appreciate it. No, you can’t sue, you were here of your own accord! (they weren’t THAT bad were they?)
Cheers, Here’s to another 25k!
