Forum :: Lounge :: With EOSERV for 4+ years

If I recall correctly, it's been 7+ years since Sausage started this community. I came in shortly after, about 7 years ago at Sausage's request to help oversee EOHax when it was still relatively new and at the peak of its popularity.

Incredibly, in that time I never actually properly played Endless Online. I had a Power Macintosh G4, and Endless wasn't ever compiled for the PowerPC architecture. I worked on the community front only.

In the entire history of this community, I don't think it's ever been in as much disarray as it is currently. It was a mess early on as well, equally as much so, but it had at least 10 times as many users as well. The moderation team back then were brilliant - Sausage, Addy, Skazombie, Wolfdog, Plasmastar and myself among others, but my memory doesn't remember the specific details too well. We didn't have much to work with, a free domain name and a cheap server hosted out of Italy being managed over slow pipelines to Australia, but they did a pretty good job, and EOHax ended up becoming a several thousand user community covering a massive number of topics during its peak.

Most notably though, it was a hotbed of ideas and creativity. If you had an idea for a project, it would get built, and the crowds would come. It was brilliant for coming up with new concepts. That's probably the one true thing I do miss about that place.

If you wanted to give this place a new lease on life, give the people a reason to be here. Endless Online is pretty much done, the oldies have moved on and it's development has stalled, but it doesn't mean the more ambitious creative types can't come up with something new and impressive to offer. Put your minds together and your differences aside, work hard, make something great - be it a game, a software tool, an online service, a design, a technology board, anything - and the community will flourish.

If this place needs to be moderated and managed again, there are clearly people willing to do it - I would step back in as an advisor if Sausage were to commit to this place or something entirely new - but it needs direction to give those moderators a compelling reason to come back and take care of the place day after day.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

sblord posted: (26th Apr 2013, 10:38 pm)

If I recall correctly, it's been 7+ years since Sausage started this community. I came in shortly after, about 7 years ago at Sausage's request to help oversee EOHax when it was still relatively new and at the peak of its popularity.

Incredibly, in that time I never actually properly played Endless Online. I had a Power Macintosh G4, and Endless wasn't ever compiled for the PowerPC architecture. I worked on the community front only.

In the entire history of this community, I don't think it's ever been in as much disarray as it is currently. It was a mess early on as well, equally as much so, but it had at least 10 times as many users as well. The moderation team back then were brilliant - Sausage, Addy, Skazombie, Wolfdog, Plasmastar and myself among others, but my memory doesn't remember the specific details too well. We didn't have much to work with, a free domain name and a cheap server hosted out of Italy being managed over slow pipelines to Australia, but they did a pretty good job, and EOHax ended up becoming a several thousand user community covering a massive number of topics during its peak.

Most notably though, it was a hotbed of ideas and creativity. If you had an idea for a project, it would get built, and the crowds would come. It was brilliant for coming up with new concepts. That's probably the one true thing I do miss about that place.

If you wanted to give this place a new lease on life, give the people a reason to be here. Endless Online is pretty much done, the oldies have moved on and it's development has stalled, but it doesn't mean the more ambitious creative types can't come up with something new and impressive to offer. Put your minds together and your differences aside, work hard, make something great - be it a game, a software tool, an online service, a design, a technology board, anything - and the community will flourish.

If this place needs to be moderated and managed again, there are clearly people willing to do it - I would step back in as an advisor if Sausage were to commit to this place or something entirely new - but it needs direction to give those moderators a compelling reason to come back and take care of the place day after day.

The majority of active users these days seem more interested in just hiking their post count up and posting stupid shit. I don't think this place will ever be what it once was ever again. Not to mention the people who are still here who are capable of building something successful have very different design ideas and could probably never work together well. My own interests have moved mainly out of game development over the years, and more into a gaming social website, which is still under construction. Me and some friends have been making gameplay videos and commentaries for quite some time but only ever released one of them. Maintaining game servers proved to be too much to capture my interest. Especially with updates, I dreaded updates, still do to this day, which is why I never put my Minecraft servers back up.

Personally, with the users this website has, I don't think it will ever truly achieve a unified direction. The best thing we could hope for at this point would be for people to at least stop spamming everywhere you look. However, I doubt that will ever happen.

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May he now rest under aegis of mirage -
As the sands slowly turn to Elysian fields

The best direction forward for this site is to repurpose its board software and the server it runs on, building something entirely new or a continuation of where EOSERV.net ends. It can't be a progression or a return to the past of this community, it has to be an entirely new mindset and entirely new way of thinking.

The issue this site has to contend with is that it's a community for software development with no active software developers. Of course it's in decline. The only way to rectify the problem now is to change direction. It's already as apparent as it will ever get that there's no further development in Endless Online and most of the devoted few that played it and worked on it during its prime have outgrown it, so it's time to age the community with it and bring it up to something a little more relevant to our modern day tastes.

There's a select few here I would be very grateful to work with again because I know they're capable of producing quality content and products. Perhaps it's coming to the point where a few key members need to consider having a sit down to discuss what to do and where to go next.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

Until Sausage is motivated to update the website software and hire an active moderation team though, this website will go nowhere. Even if a team did form to start creating things again, the people who just post here to get their post count up for lulz would still trash the place.

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May he now rest under aegis of mirage -
As the sands slowly turn to Elysian fields

Indeed. I need to arrange a time to contact Sausage again. I'm sure this place (or at least its assets) has the potential to operate much smoother and generate a lot more revenue than it does currently.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

I read this thread and I can only gather that the community is disappointed with the community. Yes times are different as nearly every useful packet has been discovered and taking those releases added to the functionality of the offical source = free mmorpg software. You can't really bitch and moan about a guy that has put this together for free and few people have even bothered to put in a few dollars in the donation link as a simple thank you to him. Is the community in disarray? Yes, and that is because there are trolls that create chaos, goof-offs that post useless and idiotic topics to stimulate the minds of other goof-offs that visit here, and the remaining few that seek intellectual support that are turned off by such garbage. We have a lounge and it tends to look like my facebook wall with all of the rambling about nonsense. The only fault I can find here is the community. Don't look for handouts from Sausage, try making your own work for a change. Those of you that have been with eoserv.net 4+ years should be able to put together a decent platform game ground up. Make your own site, throw up some ads and profit. Vult-r told me even hidden object games make a decent amount of revenue, and those should be pretty easy to make from scratch. If you are waiting for free handouts of code, it might be time to make some friends that have the ability to help you. Sausage stays busy with school these days so it is time the community started support itself a bit rather than relying on someone to wave a magic wand and produce more code, release new projects, or finish current projects for them.

Communities don't manage themselves Apollo, and I think you may have misconstrued what I said somewhat.

Sausage is quite the bright spark, I worked with the guy on a daily basis for 3 years. I work in the computer industry and still have yet to find anyone in the business that comes close to his level of ability. He's incredibly capable and I'd be more than willing to work with him again on any project he should choose, provided that option were ever on the table.

I also know the hardware that this site runs on isn't free either, and its visitors and activity are critical to generating the revenue needed to keep it afloat. What I am suggesting is that there is a lot more potential in the hardware, software and services that he has built up gradually over the last 7 years. I don't want to see his efforts go to waste, but that's precisely what I can see happening.

I suspect the reason little has gone into EOSERV in the last 12-18 months is that Sausage realises that there's little direction forward for Endless Online Private Servers and the tools necessary to operate them, thus negating the need to update or maintain them any further. I'm sure if he could, he would opt to take what he does have and move in a completely new direction, but the kind of time investment needed to do so isn't feasible when contending with university studies as well.

What I'm suggesting is that if it were to become an option to take the assets and expertise of this place in a new direction, with Sausage's blessing, to make something much more financially viable, something with a future and perhaps a broader audience than what we currently have today, I would gladly offer to rejoin the community I was a part of for so many years and help him with that monumental task. On my own, I'm not interested - I work best with a team effort and that's what I aim to do. I'm studying as well, with work commitments on the side, but I occasionally find time to burn and I would prefer to spend that time contributing rather than let it go to waste.

There's also other factors in play here but I'm not at liberty to discuss what they are.

All in all though, communities are centered around products and services. I learned that quite early on. When the product or service at the center of a community ceases to be relevant, the community suffers. It's very easy to take your suggestion on board that the users should be developing their own content by now, but at the same time you're suggesting they move on and let this site fade away. After all, once they have their own products and services to offer, what compelling reason do they have to stay?

The very existence of this community in the present day suggests to me that it still serves a purpose and therefore an exodus of users wouldn't be beneficial. The best solution then comes back once again to revitalising this community by once again taking it in a new direction. However you need community input and the blessing of the owners before that can be considered.

Get the select few together, get the blessing of the site owners and community operators and come up with a solid plan on how to carry this site and any users it wishes to retain forward. Make it a team effort, Sausage shouldn't be expected to build something for the sake of keeping the users demands met, but he should have a controlling say in it.

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EOSERV.net Academy Of Trolls, Satirists & Sarcastics
5.5 Years Former Site Administrator / Moderation Team / Member (Retired)

Very true, but the point I am making is that EOSERV is fairly complete for the purpose of emulating Endless Online. The direction the community needs is a project that isn't dependent on Vult-r's hacky work. Using EO as a template is bad. What the community needs is a flexible game engine, probably a server/client combo that can handle basic scripting and produce a very decent mmorpg, or possibly even rpg based on the end user's desire. It is pretty ugly to even make a client that works like EO due to the amount of hard-coding that has to become flexible variables between official and custom built clients. Anyway, the statement I was making previously regarding using what you have learned from Sausage to sustain yourself as a coder. He made EOSERV in a way that spoon fed everyone C++. If anything, it would be a great sense of pride to know that a single project both taught and inspired people to create their own projects and be successful. It is a lot like mentoring. Managing the fodder that mainly occupies the Lounge section is useless. Sausage wanted a place for people to post garbage seperate from the main forum sections, and unfortunately that is the primary activity section for eoserv.net. 

Anyway, you can have an anti-litter campaign in your community and you and a few others can help by doing your part, but if the majority of the community are the ones doing the littering it will ruin the overall appearance. 

Started playing EO with my cousin when I was 8 years old. I've been with EOSERV for over 4 years as well releasing my own creations. Learned C++ when I was 11 and now a star student in my Computer Programming class in high school. I was the first person to create a Capture the Flag server. Ananas, I remember you as a friend because you joined my server and helped me debug my code. I've been joining and leaving looking at people's artwork for a year and finally remember the e-mail I used to sign-up on this account with, so I decided to write this to you. There are some very talented people here that help out the community. Right now I gave up on coding EOSERV, and actually coded my very own game; which might be released very soon. Got any questions? Please ask. 

- Dallas      

Plasmastar posted: (26th Apr 2013, 06:30 pm)

Been "here" before there was a here.

Amen. Although I joined when eoserv was still a development blog :p

sblord posted: (27th Apr 2013, 12:12 am)

Communities don't manage themselves Apollo, and I think you may have misconstrued what I said somewhat.

Sausage is quite the bright spark, I worked with the guy on a daily basis for 3 years. I work in the computer industry and still have yet to find anyone in the business that comes close to his level of ability. He's incredibly capable and I'd be more than willing to work with him again on any project he should choose, provided that option were ever on the table.

I also know the hardware that this site runs on isn't free either, and its visitors and activity are critical to generating the revenue needed to keep it afloat. What I am suggesting is that there is a lot more potential in the hardware, software and services that he has built up gradually over the last 7 years. I don't want to see his efforts go to waste, but that's precisely what I can see happening.

I suspect the reason little has gone into EOSERV in the last 12-18 months is that Sausage realises that there's little direction forward for Endless Online Private Servers and the tools necessary to operate them, thus negating the need to update or maintain them any further. I'm sure if he could, he would opt to take what he does have and move in a completely new direction, but the kind of time investment needed to do so isn't feasible when contending with university studies as well.

What I'm suggesting is that if it were to become an option to take the assets and expertise of this place in a new direction, with Sausage's blessing, to make something much more financially viable, something with a future and perhaps a broader audience than what we currently have today, I would gladly offer to rejoin the community I was a part of for so many years and help him with that monumental task. On my own, I'm not interested - I work best with a team effort and that's what I aim to do. I'm studying as well, with work commitments on the side, but I occasionally find time to burn and I would prefer to spend that time contributing rather than let it go to waste.

There's also other factors in play here but I'm not at liberty to discuss what they are.

All in all though, communities are centered around products and services. I learned that quite early on. When the product or service at the center of a community ceases to be relevant, the community suffers. It's very easy to take your suggestion on board that the users should be developing their own content by now, but at the same time you're suggesting they move on and let this site fade away. After all, once they have their own products and services to offer, what compelling reason do they have to stay?

The very existence of this community in the present day suggests to me that it still serves a purpose and therefore an exodus of users wouldn't be beneficial. The best solution then comes back once again to revitalising this community by once again taking it in a new direction. However you need community input and the blessing of the owners before that can be considered.

Get the select few together, get the blessing of the site owners and community operators and come up with a solid plan on how to carry this site and any users it wishes to retain forward. Make it a team effort, Sausage shouldn't be expected to build something for the sake of keeping the users demands met, but he should have a controlling say in it.

I'm all for the movement of a new direction - where do I sign up? haha I'd love to see eoserv.net become a game development forum rather than a server emulator forum. Sure there are other forums like that but to specialize in isometric 2D rpgs would be fantastic. It might even give Sausage some revenue... 

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Hmm.

Haha, I remember those days, there was arguments over who had the new released arena script and when you hit someone it would say it above your head like an announcement. Fun days

I've been here for 3 years and 31 weeks. kinda close to 4 years. I usually just browse these forums when i get home from school to check up on the community. I can also remember Ananas helping me on msn with my server. I do remember having a shit load of fun, but nowadays when i look at the forums i think like.. wtf happened? I just saw some shit about Moonie and Ananas and I also wonder why no one has banned her. I remember a lot of the old servers i use to play. Map layouts and features and everything. I don't think ill probably ever have that much fun playing an eo server again. 

@hotdog The client your working on looks amazing and I would love to play it.

When I first joined eoserv, it was acool place. Admins helped the hell out of users and such. But now we have biased admins like queen who ban the unpopular trolls but let the popular ones stay. We also have a eoserv wall which is the lounge. Ever since sausage added lounge eoserv wentto shit. Eoserv might be getting a tad bit better with ananas threatening the troll controller moonie but I doubt change. I will never forget you desmond.

If I ban every troll there would be noone left. Your all trolls in your own rights.

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Qbot/null

I've actually played since a really early version of eo I always remember sausage from various places even when he got his devil on main, the first time I talked to him when  I joined yfl I thought he was fucking random. Never really fully there always busy with some project or some idea he just came up with, my whole stay in yfl was pretty awesome due to all the shit sausage would come up with the dupes, eo proxy, the account list etc. The reason some of the titles were messed up due to symbols being removed was probably sausage too during guild dupe. Making guilds with symbols was fun, I remember <3 or 69 lol. 

Never thought he'd come up with a way to truly make endless well endless, and a community lol I'm sure private servers will keep going for a very long time and eoserv as well. Who cares if it's not moderated(at times) it sort of gives off the sense endless online has been giving off since v28 where there are really no admins so players have to basically turn a blind eye or find a way to enforce rules. Haven't really been a member of this place long which doesn't bother me, this is probably one of the closest communities to being somewhat normal related to private servers. 

(btw bring back arena server)