BF2S Forums Liminals ...

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.

The beginning of the end was the creation of ee chats. It increased general forum activity but decreased involvement in specific threads/communities.

- 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.

Mods need to make right all of the things that took place before and unban Macbeth and Uzique.

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.

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.

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?

What annoyed me was when the whole US team went sniper on Road to Jalalabad and made no effort to advance whatsoever.

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.

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.

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?

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.