A while back, I wrote a post about how the community was dying down a bit. People were posting less on the pfhorums and the metaserver’s activity dropped a little. WELL! Now it’s the summer, and once again we get a new wave of activity. Of course, with activity comes a huge increase in retardation. As I had mentioned before, stupidity has always been at the core of the community, and if you’ve joined the metaserver recently, you’d have to agree with me.

If you look at the numbers alone, the metaserver has been more active than it has in the last 7 months at least (as long as I’ve been recording statistics). At the current rate, there will have been more than 3,500 games this month, which is roughly 1000 more than the previous months. I’m guessing this is due to it being summer and people are more free to waste time, and this is a good thing.

But there is a cost. If you’ve visited the metaserver lately, you’ll rarely find a time when at least one person isn’t spamming the chat with random bullshit. At best, you’ll find people talking about the game they’re playing, but they’ll be typing as 12 year-olds typically do on the internet. “How r u?” is a typical sentence you’ll find. When it’s in full fail mode, you’ll get people typing whatever they can as quicly as possible and hitting return so that there is a constant stream of crap being thrown to the screen, and no one can talk properly. And since there is rarely anyone around that can do anything to stop it, there is no reason for these people to stop doing it.

The worst part about this is, good players and smarter players have been driven away by all the new idiots. People have either left completely or have resorted to muting everyone in the metaserver just to play.

I have to wonder how Marathon attracts new people that are so young, and why these people would be interested in such an old game. Some of these people weren’t even born when the game came out. While I do think it’s cool that marathon is still attracting new people, I just don’t understand why it always has to be accompainied by a crowd that takes the fun out of the game.

It seems to me like it’s a lose-lose situation. Either the community doesn’t attract new people and it dies out, or it does attract new people that make the game harder to enjoy. What happened to the days when I could actually play games with people I didn’t find annoying. Did this ever actually exist? Am I just blocking out how much it really sucked?

I don’t know which is worse. Having a community that isn’t active and is kind of boring, or a community that is just plain annoying. Well, I’m still here, so I guess I’ll take either :C.