What Coulda Been

I'm afraid times, they are a-changing. In case it's not totally apparent to all of you, not only is PC dying, but more importantly my little clique of cliquey clique people in S&M (CBC whatevs, we're S&Mers at heart) has deteriorated into nothingness and a dead...inactive server that rarely has anyone on it, let alone enough people to have an interesting / fun conversation with. So this is going to be my peace out / good luck thread I guess. Karp called me a drama queen for wanting to post something like this, but it's more of how I feel our community could have been had we taken proper action at the prime time and stuck with it. However, things didn't happen that way, seeing as how B&W has been out for nearly a year and half (if it hasn't already, I don't remember anymore), and our member base has stayed relatively the same. We lost people, we gained people. Nothing changed by the names we saw on screen while we battled or were online.

So I guess I'll start out with my little opinion of how we ended up this way. It all started back in whenever when "we" decided it was a good idea to kick elf out of our group because he got angry at us. It's the internet guys, I'm sure elf is a very calm person in real life, but the internet causes use to be more aggressive / think less about consequences when we do stuff. He just happened to be an unlucky victim of such actions. Say what you will, but the instant he was gone, S&M died. He was my mentor, my friend, and the only one who cared enough to get me to be a regular here. If it weren't for him, I would have left this site years ago, but I didn't because he helped me get approval from the majority of old S&M that's now gone, making me a regular and finding the fun in competitive.

He was S&M. If you deny that, face the facts. Things were fine until he left.

Next I would like to talk about our "projects" that never happened because we weren't interested enough to pull them off. One of these ideas was a set of 4 clans. One was gonna be run by me, one by Vrai, one by wolf, and one by Karp. Karp and I both finished ours, I never heard much about wolf's, and Vrai couldn't find time to make his (which I totally get, because being captain of the football team senior year is a huge deal, and I'm proud of Vrai for such accomplishments, he's a true dude). As you can see, I put a good deal of effort into the completion of my "thread" that would function as the clan. We would pretend to be pirates and I expected it to perform nicely, however we never got to put these actions into motion, and so I'd like to not keep this hidden from the rest of PC and just post it here because as of now, it's never gonna happen. I'm no longer into Pokemon at all. It's dead to me, more so than it ever has been. I beat it to death by playing it for a year straight without a single break. I don't get how some of you do it, perhaps because you played it less extensively than I had. Anyway, here's the thread. Cute, eh?


Another topic I'd like to discuss is tutoring. What a mess. :[ I was very disappointed with how the first class was run, and my opinions were crushed by "well I think it went alright." It didn't go well. Face it, the people who were learning are the ones we should be listening to. They said it was hard to follow, felt disorganized, and too many people were speaking out of turn adding to the confusion. WE shouldn't have been making assumptions as to how they felt. Maybe it's just me, but I feel tutoring shouldn't be attempted again. People learn better in a more informal setting. They come on PO, ask questions, battle. It doesn't have to be a classroom or "individual tutoring". I learned exactly how I just said, and I'm sure ALL OF YOU OTHER TUTORS AND REGULARS LEARNED THE SAME EXACT WAY. You didn't enroll in a class, you didn't get 1on1 (well maybe you did, but it was probably after you had been battling for a while and just wanted hone a particular skill), but this makes me think: Why are we running classrooms and such if we, as regulars, didn't learn that way? What are we making out of these people? I feel if someone is gonna stick around like we all did, they're going to have to have that drive to learn on their own, not arrive at a "class" at a specific time.

Other events never worked, the end. Tours sucked because half the people never even showed up. Etc. PC clearly isn't a battle community, and I know I joined here instead of some other sites purely because of that. I saw it more as a social place, make friends, trade and battle if you want (casually) and discuss other things that you're interested in. I changed over the course of my 4 years at PC. I think it definitely was for the better though. By taking up competitive battling, I was exposed to S&M. S&M was the more mature and grown-up part of PC at the time (and may still be, although I see less of that as mature people are everywhere in PC now because only veterans are around now-a-days). It made me a mature person in turn. I look at some of my old posts, and wonder "was I really like that at 13? Seriously?" It's amazing how much I've changed throughout the years, and it definitely was for the better.

Phases will be phases,
and friends will be friends,
but I will never know people
that were as great as S&M​

tl;dr
<3 You all, gonna miss you. I'll be posting an appreciation blog when I get to it.

P.S. I know my grammar sucks ass, I don't care, and I'm sure it's possible to get the ideas I'm laying down.

Guys, stop acting like Aero is wrong about D-A being the heart of S&M.

D-A was a part of all of the "good times" that took place back in the day and everyone here, new and old knows that it wouldn't have the same and won't be the same without his antics, the morality of which are questionable. If Elf wasn't a big deal then there wouldn't have been so much "drama" with him being banned. You could argue that he created it, but he definitely didn't, and Wolf, Anti etc had even warned him multiple times before the ban iirc, I'm sure if it was some new user who misbehaved, then they wouldn't have taken such precautions. He's also probably the best battler to have come from PC, honestly I could go on and on about Elf and get you guys to hate me more, but Elf was a major player in the whole "Battling Community" aspect of CBC, helping us become more than a battling section as a Pokemon forum. If we didn't have that community feel, Aero would have posted this in NU/W's leaving thread.

Anyhow, it sucks to see you go Aero, but I'm glad someone said it. You're one of my best friends and you'll be greatly missed.

Face the facts? Both Anti and I, including other members have been ridiculously busy ever since the beginning of CBC's "inactive" state. Did you consider that to play a part in this? Or the failure of the Tutoring Corner, which I take full responsibility for, end most hopes of CBC recovery (or for new users, becoming active in CBC)? Or maybe all this drama and pessimism circulating DA's ban and CBC's current lack of activity (caused by thoughts like these)? Also consider that because of those reasons, we lost members such as you, and that further damages an already bad situation. However, I am not saying you can't leave, it is your choice, but don't complain about the problem when you are contributing to it. No active forum moderators alone should lead a community into inactivity, with the lack of anyone to lead it (see: G&P). Certainly, DA was an important member no doubt, but reputation shouldn't be a justification to not ban a user. Bans shouldn't be biased. We had perfectly good reasons to ban him, and we were nice enough to make it temporary and not ban him on PC itself. Taking into account all that he did after the month ban, he should have been permanently banned. However, he apologized and since he was a close friend, we reconsidered. Regardless, CBC isn't run by one person, it is run by the community. I don't see how you can shove aside everyone else's effort in favor of one.

Additionally, the clan progress didn't stop (nothing has, only tutoring), it was only put on a pause because of the aforementioned issue (in real life issues). If it was put to an end, I wouldn't have listed it in the improvement thread. As for tournaments, they were successful (at least all of mine were). They are always successful if you advertise enough and keep the theme simple. PC isn't Smogon, but what it can become is an active battling community if we make the effort to recover CBC consistently (and not giving up right when something fails). '08 was proof that PC can be a very active battling community. Though, it is not going to be thriving community immediately after the changes are implemented, it takes time to recover. I wish everyone would stay optimistic, and if that ever happens, I am sure CBC would be very active.

Anyway, it is unfortunate that you are leaving, and I wish you good luck with future ambitions.

Even though I don't come on here often, I lurk the forum and felt like saying something.

In my eyes, while he wasn't necessarily a great part of S+M, DA was a big part of it. I specifically remember a great period of time where he was the only one who bothered to give out rates, even if they weren't exactly put in the nicest way, he was still trying to help.

I agree with Aero about the Tutoring Class I walked in on one day. It was basically one topic to the next, with about one person doing the main part and then about 5 other people just adding in random things, which wasn't a very efficient way to do it. If you were going to have one person be the main person doing the class, then it should have been only them talking.

Back back to what Aero was saying about Elf. To me him getting banned didn't signify the end of S+M/CBC/whatever you want to call it - it was in decline before that. But it did in a way. I don't really know how to explain it, but I'll try.

IIRC, a couple of weeks after his ban was when people started to get busy, school started up again, etc. and the people who were driving the reconstruction of CBC went with that. Anti and Wolf weren't able to get on for awhile they had, frankly, more important things going on in their lives than PC. And that's fine, real life should always come before a forum you post on on the internet, easily. But that isn't to say it didn't contribute to this huge drought of inactivity.

While the main people beyond the changes around here were gone, other people should have stepped up and done something about it instead of sit by and watch it fall into the state the forum is in now.

Like this for example:

http://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=255322

This is a GREAT resource for the forum. It was posted 4 months ago and still isn't finished. Yeah, wolf got busy and all that, but all that needs to be done is getting rid of the extra lines on each CSS. And I know there are people who know CSS and could have easily done this at any time in the past 3 months. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but I'll just chalk it up to general laziness.

What Karp said is true. D_A was, for lack of a better word, a "symbol" of what S+M was. When sims, ABYAY, etc still posted here...what we are trying to get CBC back to. And whether you want to admit it or not, SM wouldn't have been the same without D_A, for better or for worse, regardless of your opinion of him.

But really this is what I think the biggest issue is with CBC. This forum still has a negative connotation around here and it will take a lot longer than you all assume to change it. Whether it was through our complete failure of a streak of DCC's that was essentially a giant trollfest, the sarcastic nature of the rates, often bordering on flat out mean and deflating, that caused people to not want to come in here, or whatever - it will take longer than you think to change the forum's opinion of CBC/S+M. And I just want to throw this out here too. It doesn't matter that we changed the name. I'd bet real money that people still view this forum as S+M, and still have a negative view of it given past experiences in here.

Frankly, this next part may get me banned on the server again or make nobody like me, but it's true. The biggest issue, hands down, with S+M/CBC was the mods. Nobody who was a mod seemed to care what happened in the forum, hence the trollfest of DCC's with mods actively taking part, often leading it the most, with everyone acting like DA's image about Sims was the greatest thing ever [when it wasn't even that funny, but that's not the point]. Stuff like that should absolutely NEVER be acceptable behavior from mods. And then on the server, when there was a rule about acting like a - to people, the mods openly did it, which signified to the members that it was fine.

And then it honestly was hard to take it seriously when the "nice initiative" was implemented when after a couple of weeks the mods, mainly DA, were doing the same stuff again. And that has to do with the mods not doing anything about the trolling, despite it being against the rules, ultimately leading to what happened with DA, and to a severely lesser extent, myself.

Black and White came out in the US in March. The first thread about changing S+M/CBC was in January/February. Frankly, it's been 8-9 months and the forum is in the same sad state it was back then.

Tl;dr I'm not summarizing it. Read it. It's important and has a lot of things in there that people won't say because they're scared of repercussions.

yankee0724 said:

Even though I don't come on here often, I lurk the forum and felt like saying something.

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No one disagrees that he was a big part of CBC (he definitely was/is), only that CBC was a solo effort. Everything Aero said about the Tutoring Corner is true (I even covered most of it already in the Improvement Thread), but that is in the past now. As for Speed Tiers, the CSS is probably too complicated for anyone to edit until I explain how it works haha. I also need to update it now with the new changes to OU.

Anyway, intimidation is no longer an issue in my opinion; it is much much better than in the past. We can only do so much to fix our reputation among PC, which should improve over time. Regardless, we will still be working making the forum more helpful to new users. The issue with moderators (and DCC) is again, a problem from long ago that we have already fixed. I agree that the situation with your past ban could have been dealt with better, but actions like that happen too rare to pose much of an issue. Other forums and even PC in general have events like that occur. Furthermore, I don't recall anyone returning to their old ways again, except for you, Syndrome, and DA? You understand now, Syndrome has left to an extent, and that was one of the reasons DA was "banned."

At any rate, this thread is deteriorating and I doubt anything good will become of it except for more unneeded negativity. If anyone wants to continue the discussion about CBC revamping, it should go in the CBC Improvement Thread where it belongs. Farewell Aero, I am sure the blog you mentioned can be used to say goodbye if you still wish to make it.

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