Look everybody is shocked to shit about the costs of maintaining character guides and shenanigans, but I have yet to see any evidence of The Cannons doing things maliciously. As a matter of fact even when it comes to Wiz you can’t say he wasn’t trying to give SRK his best ( his way of doing it at time ranged from awesome like when he helped out DaRabidDuckie to absolute dumbfuckery with his years of threats of closing GD down). Maybe vanilla isn’t the best, but that is Two-fucking-thousand-dollars-montly to keep a group of people together. Fucking hell, I don’t make 24k yearly. A person’s yearly salary was being spent on keeping up this site reportedly for multiple years. Mind you, the 2K situation is current costs, that doesn’t take into account all the other years for which SRK burned a hole (and a sizeable one) in their pockets.
This community is tight for a reason, one of those reasons is the damn money and work upper management have done regardless of how you feel about them. That damn well deserves all the fucking respect and appreciation you can muster because I wouldn’t be getting heated over if what they didn’t wasn’t anything short of great.
But this the situation where we find ourselves:
Running the forums at the moments costs a lot of money. That in itself is surprising for a couple of things: 1) we know traffic has significantly slowed down since AE2012 release and 2) it is expensive as all shit to do it with a forum software that absolutely nobody likes. We also have the situation where much of the upper management doesn’t want to deal with the forums and their community anymore (This means Cannons and Wiz, Preppy is a very active admin on a lot of front and back end issues). Lastly the front page has become its own separate brand apart from the forums; as such the name SRK now means that FG pseudo blog that has its own different set of users (and its been this way since…12-13).
Wanting to fuck off from SRK is natural. The great thing about SRK has always been its existence over these 18 years. This has meant that if you fucked off for years, it was still here years later. If you did it for a couple of months (like I did not too long ago) it was still here months later. Imagine the sole existence of it being attached to your wallet. That’s a different type of relationship altogether. The Cannons have other life things to care about. They have Stonehearth and whatever fighter they are making for Riot and family and just general lives outside of this nonsense. They don’t want to deal that’s just fine and everybody HAS to hold that part of it. You don’t get a say on what people do with their personal lives.
The big issue is that this side of kind of got left hanging. Thankfully we have Preppy who does an insane amount for the forums. But if the level of interest wasn’t there from the top, we needed a more open transition and communication. Feel as they may, just let us know “hey, we have the world going, we can’t at the moment, who do you trust so things can be handled?” or other some such. This weird backroom decision making has always been bad and lead to bad situations. Years ago the cost of running a major became a huge talking point precisely because nobody was willing to sit down and level with people. Preppy was in the middle of cleaning up a lot of the modding stuff so SRK chose to close down in the middle of the current admin trying to prevent the situation happening. This is absolutely awful for everybody. Maybe we don’t need to know every little detail, but we need to know more than what is being shared for the sake of being able to communicate.
As a community the separation of the front page and the forums puts the forum, which had been the sole reason for this place, in a precarious situation. Because the URL shoryuken no longer means community, it means blogging. I have homies who write for the front page and none of this is meant to disparage them. SRK turned into a 2 headed beast and the younger head takes more precedence. That means that in the case of the URL owner (inkblot) its easy to say that one side is working and the other isn’t. For us it means that name SRK basically dies to us for all practical reasons; the name dying means that this particular community dies with it too. I feel that part of it was a miscalculation on management side from not necessarily understanding the value users gave to being SRK members. If you spend a crazy amount of money and you’re looking at that type of analytic, the decision becomes a somewhat obvious one. It does put SRK the forum in greater uncertainty for a future.
The money…two thousand dollars. I am going to whole heatedly disagree with Flicky. Dude has a 7 month account so I don’t think he sees the greater picture. Its absolutely silly that people were getting burned for that much over the years. Had communication been better between users and management, we probably would’ve arrived at a cheaper solution, one that would let us fundraise to keep the forums alive and have the silly Quality of Life things people enjoy (animated avatars and galaga ships). The eSporty stuff has taken over what actually matters: the community. This place isn’t about a trophy, its about a group of people who care about these games and getting good at them. These people that interact on a daily basis solely on talking shit and wanting to be better than others. Maybe SRK isn’t the whole of the FGC (fucking shitty as term I’ve always hated) but it is very much the heart of it whether outsiders like it or not. If we want to stick together, there’s no better way to show it than to unload that financial burden that the Cannons placed on themselves. A community together requires a community effort to keep it that way.
But we desperately need leadership people who are going to care about the state of the forums and are going to do things to promote it. We need to engage ourselves and give this place some new life (which there are a lot of ways to do). We just need to stop saying SRK sucks and remember why this place kicks ass. There’s too many people who haven’t been here for years saying this place sucks; what’s even worse is people who don’t contribute complaining about people who don’t contribute. This place can be fixed but it needs the community in it to be mentally back.
