I am finally making a topic to discuss the future of the site. I will leave this topic up for a few months to be sure that everyone who still has an interest in the site will see it and can weigh in. After that, likely some time this summer, I will make a decision and move forward.
Where Merqury City wasWhen SSX 2012 came out, I invested significant amounts of money to create many custom mods that make the site so original. I found a great modder who worked with me at a reasonable price to create all these mods. In late 2013, the modder vanished with no warning. I tried many times to contact them and couldn't do so. It is difficult to find a good modder and therefore at that point I was stuck. I had to stop updating the board because our custom mods would stop working if I did. The normal upgrading process for phpBB can be very significant and in particular moving from major version to the next almost guarantees that your mods will break.
For those of you that wonder which mods I'm referring to, the following mods would likely break if I had updated the board:
- Scoreboard
- Rankings mod
- Master Runs
- Index Page
- Forum perks, stuff like the medals and custom titles based on scoreboard rankings mod
Now our board has gotten so old that even basic features like making a post will now pop-up errors. It got particularly bad the last year that I had a difficult time even updating the scoreboard. Any time I tried to update it it would log me out of the admin panel. The last time I tried to update the scoreboard, what should have taken 20 minutes took me more than 8 hours.
Where Merqury City is nowMany basic functions of the board are working but badly and there may be multiple functions that are critical to the site that aren't that I don't know about. I don't know what may break in the future, so it has come time to update the site. The next major upgrade to phpbb is 3.2. It contains many upgrades to the board software to put it in line with other major board packages. Again however, the major catch here is if I update it, the big features of the site will break. I have spent the last few weeks communicating with a modder who would upgrade our board mods to something that would work with the 3.2 package. After some preliminary work he has gotten back to me with a quote - and that leads me to my next concern:
Is it worth it?So, it's time to lay my cards out on the table. If I'm being particularly honest here, Merqury City is dead. Like, super dead. We've gotten one post in the last week. I'm hesitant to spend a significant amount of money on a dead site. I have to put a good portion of the blame for the dead site on myself. I don't have the passion for web design I once did. I find it increasingly like a job where once it was my passion.
So why do I not have the passion for updating the site I once did?
1) The biggest one is a change in priorities. I'm not in my twenties anymore. The lifestyle that made it easy to log in every day and check in with the site isn't there anymore.
2) I didn't connect with SSX 2012 like I was hoping I would, so the huge amounts of work that sprung from that game seemed like more work than play. The activity level then died a few years after SSX 2012 and there isn't any additional hope that I can see about a potential SSX game. In fact, the current climate in video games these days with microtransactions and such makes it so that I DON'T want an SSX game to come out if it will be like Star Wars Battlefront 2.
3) The current situation with the scoreboard and the proliferation of emulators makes it extremely easy - EXTREMELY easy - to cheat at the old games and scam the scoreboard. I don't have the patience anymore to suss out whether a video score is legit. Video, at one point, was the 100% way of verifying a score. It is no longer - emulators can be used to cheat even a live run. The longer this goes on the easier it gets as emulators become closer to the stock Playstation 2.
The drama that has occurred the last few years over different players using emulators to get high scores and acting like they are using consoles has weighed on me. Tool-assisted runs are submitted as player runs. I'm not sure how many of the current top scores are actually legit. I'm sure most are - but if I have to play Sherlock Holmes every time we get a top 3 score it lessens my desire to update the site.
Because of this, most of the great players at the game now have separated from Merqury City and started their own community based around Twitch and emulators. They create custom categories with custom rules like many other speed runner communities and that is fantastic. I love watching them - but I don't have the patience to make sure every little change they make to their competition complies with our rules. I don't blame them for making their own community - I would too. But when all the onus falls on me to legitimize scores and most of the impression I get from emulator submissions is that they are fuzzy at best as far as compliance with our rules goes because of several different reasons, it makes it difficult to be a passionate about it as I once was.
So now onto to the bit where I need your feedback.
The future of Merqury CityI plan on keeping Merqury City open, so don't worry about us shutting down. We will remain open. But like I mentioned, we have come to a crossroads. Here are my two options:
1) I can update the bulletin board and lose the mods I mentioned above.
Give me some feedback on if you would be okay with the site just having a bulletin board and nothing else. The posts would all be here, and we will be able to make posts and enjoy the
updated features of phpbb 3.2 but the scoreboard, the Master Runs and other items would be archived. They would be available as static web pages for record-keeping purposes and would not be updated any longer. The fan-art gallery runs on a separate piece of software and wouldn't be affected.
If I don't get any feedback or don't get good enough feedback, this is the option I will take. I will update the forum to the newest version and lose the features I mentioned:
- Scoreboard
- Rankings mod
- Master Runs
- Index Page
- Forum perks, stuff like the medals and custom titles based on scoreboard rankings mod
2) or I can pay several hundred dollars to update the scoreboard, Master Runs, Index page and other mods that give our community their flavor - but for a dead site. We would have all the features of 3.2 and the scoreboard and everything else, but it would be several months before this is done - the late summer at best.
I have a modder who is willing to do this - but I need feedback from the community as to whether it will be appreciated. If we continue our one-post-or-less a week rate, I wouldn't see this as worth it.
So please, give me your feedback. I will keep this topic up for several months and you can weigh in with your opinion. Let me know what you think!