Post by The Uteen on Mar 6, 2016 23:47:46 GMT
Following on from the conversation here.
I didn't realise Sven had returned. It's disappointing he's angry, but not unexpected. I'm surprised he's talking about the stealing of his intellectual property, though, and find his talk about restoring his database as proof interesting.
Since you don't have much in the way of Thrive's history, I'll give a brief account as it relates to this, as best I remember.
Evolutions! originally began as a hoax by Sven on the Sporums (a fairly good one, too, in terms of effort put in, I think there were pictures). It followed a worm creature's evolution. It was revealed fairly quickly, but a group of people came together who wanted to make it a reality.
The Evolutions! forums were made, with the worm as its mascot, in a nice banner at the top. The main goal was to build the game Spore should have been. There were the basic ideas for editors, stages, and everything, but being so new, they were mostly just outlines. I'm not sure if the idea of auto-evo was around back then, but there was a desire for actual realism, I think, in terms of survival, and scientific accuracy where possible. There were a couple of detailed concepts, though, even back then, the main one being ~sciocont's detailed, comprehensive document describing the Organism Editor, a unified creature and plant editor.
I join some time after the Evolutions! forums were created (several months, probably). There was already a small team, with most, if not all, having played Spore and been disappointed. I would infer from this, and Spore's target audience and the average age of gamers, that most of us would have been young teens at most, and certainly only a few older than 20. Sven contributed too, but was generally much less active than the ‘core team’.
The forums were nice. There was plenty of ‘work’ to do thinking up how the game should be. Some people questioned if we needed to keep the ‘!’ in the name, but otherwise things were good.
Then we started getting a few spambots. Maybe we had always been getting them, but the admins were doing less to filter them out.
Some people wanted to reorganise the forums. So much was changing, the old layout was getting a bit dated.
Nothing really changed, and this was probably the main problem. Spambots continued, starting becoming more of a regular sight; the requests for changing the layout went unanswered, and people got irritated. We turned to someone to blame. We turned on the person in charge. We turned on Sven.
I'm not sure whether this was the case, but I believe the consensus was he was the only one who could change the forum layout. The spambots were more of an issue, and required active filtering from people with the permissions to delete posts, of which there were few online regularly, and probably few to begin with. Sven may have been the only one able to give permissions to users, but clearly the people with power weren't acting to remove the spam, or share the ability to do so.
What is the right thing to do in this situation? We decided to move to a new forum.
We didn't just decide, though. There was, as was repeated at the time, a ‘revolution’ to ‘overthrow’ the ‘dictator’ Sven. As I said earlier, we were probably, on average, young teens. We felt abandoned by the person in charge, and wanted more than was being provided. There was a legitimate problem, but it was regrettably responded to, in part, by hate posts.
It didn't help that Sven was virtually absent throughout this. He wasn't online regularly. He didn't fix the forum. He didn't solve the spam problem. We rarely ever saw a post from him. He became an abstract figure to blame for the problems we were facing.
Amidst this, discussion continued. We had a poll for a new name, and decided on Thrive. Concise, grammatical, and the awkward ‘!’ was gone. Eventually, a link was posted to a new forum, free of spammers, a forum whose layout could be changed as we pleased, and a forum without Sven. Those of us that saw the link, moved. The forums went offline shortly after. Gradually, most of those left behind discovered the new forums, and we regrouped.
We kept these forums for a while. Extended periods of downtime forced us to retreat to a backup forum on occasion. Eventually, it became a problem, and we decided to move once more. Again, people were left behind as the old forums went offline for good, particularly those who didn't know about the obscure backup forums on which we had to post the link. We regrouped over time, as before. This forum, I think, is what is now referred to as the old forum.
Sven has a right to be upset. A ton of hate was directed at him, and the community held a grudge for a while, for no reason other than that he had probably more important things to do, than manage a forum all day.
I'm not sure how valid he is in that we stole his work. He posted the hoax that was the inspiration, but Evolutions! as it existed in the forums was always a collaborative effort (after the intial hoax, many other members were far more active, more invested even, than he), and the team moved as a whole to the new forums. There was no ‘small group branching off’. There was no-one left on the old forums when it went offline. His refusal to acknowledge Thrive as what he created is upsetting, and his desire to create a new Evolutions!, rather than come back to a new Thrive community which would now welcome him, doesn't help his image.
He is correct in saying we stripped his name from the idea, and continued the work he began without him. We paid respect to our origins, in a way, by inventing a ‘company name’, Revolutionary Games, as a reference to Evolutions!, and the events which led us to become Thrive.
As for Sven, after Evolutions! he seemed to just disappear, and in the time that followed we rarely mentioned him. It was a matter of the past, and a low point in our history.
I'm a bit disappointed that we have defended ourselves by saying that Thrive is different to the original idea of Evolutions!. The original outline was created then. Tweaks were made, but I'd say most of our efforts went into filling in the details, which were admittedly scarce at the time. The truth, from my perspective, is Evolutions! abandoned him, and he abandoned us.
I didn't realise Sven had returned. It's disappointing he's angry, but not unexpected. I'm surprised he's talking about the stealing of his intellectual property, though, and find his talk about restoring his database as proof interesting.
Since you don't have much in the way of Thrive's history, I'll give a brief account as it relates to this, as best I remember.
Evolutions! originally began as a hoax by Sven on the Sporums (a fairly good one, too, in terms of effort put in, I think there were pictures). It followed a worm creature's evolution. It was revealed fairly quickly, but a group of people came together who wanted to make it a reality.
The Evolutions! forums were made, with the worm as its mascot, in a nice banner at the top. The main goal was to build the game Spore should have been. There were the basic ideas for editors, stages, and everything, but being so new, they were mostly just outlines. I'm not sure if the idea of auto-evo was around back then, but there was a desire for actual realism, I think, in terms of survival, and scientific accuracy where possible. There were a couple of detailed concepts, though, even back then, the main one being ~sciocont's detailed, comprehensive document describing the Organism Editor, a unified creature and plant editor.
I join some time after the Evolutions! forums were created (several months, probably). There was already a small team, with most, if not all, having played Spore and been disappointed. I would infer from this, and Spore's target audience and the average age of gamers, that most of us would have been young teens at most, and certainly only a few older than 20. Sven contributed too, but was generally much less active than the ‘core team’.
The forums were nice. There was plenty of ‘work’ to do thinking up how the game should be. Some people questioned if we needed to keep the ‘!’ in the name, but otherwise things were good.
Then we started getting a few spambots. Maybe we had always been getting them, but the admins were doing less to filter them out.
Some people wanted to reorganise the forums. So much was changing, the old layout was getting a bit dated.
Nothing really changed, and this was probably the main problem. Spambots continued, starting becoming more of a regular sight; the requests for changing the layout went unanswered, and people got irritated. We turned to someone to blame. We turned on the person in charge. We turned on Sven.
I'm not sure whether this was the case, but I believe the consensus was he was the only one who could change the forum layout. The spambots were more of an issue, and required active filtering from people with the permissions to delete posts, of which there were few online regularly, and probably few to begin with. Sven may have been the only one able to give permissions to users, but clearly the people with power weren't acting to remove the spam, or share the ability to do so.
What is the right thing to do in this situation? We decided to move to a new forum.
We didn't just decide, though. There was, as was repeated at the time, a ‘revolution’ to ‘overthrow’ the ‘dictator’ Sven. As I said earlier, we were probably, on average, young teens. We felt abandoned by the person in charge, and wanted more than was being provided. There was a legitimate problem, but it was regrettably responded to, in part, by hate posts.
It didn't help that Sven was virtually absent throughout this. He wasn't online regularly. He didn't fix the forum. He didn't solve the spam problem. We rarely ever saw a post from him. He became an abstract figure to blame for the problems we were facing.
Amidst this, discussion continued. We had a poll for a new name, and decided on Thrive. Concise, grammatical, and the awkward ‘!’ was gone. Eventually, a link was posted to a new forum, free of spammers, a forum whose layout could be changed as we pleased, and a forum without Sven. Those of us that saw the link, moved. The forums went offline shortly after. Gradually, most of those left behind discovered the new forums, and we regrouped.
We kept these forums for a while. Extended periods of downtime forced us to retreat to a backup forum on occasion. Eventually, it became a problem, and we decided to move once more. Again, people were left behind as the old forums went offline for good, particularly those who didn't know about the obscure backup forums on which we had to post the link. We regrouped over time, as before. This forum, I think, is what is now referred to as the old forum.
Sven has a right to be upset. A ton of hate was directed at him, and the community held a grudge for a while, for no reason other than that he had probably more important things to do, than manage a forum all day.
I'm not sure how valid he is in that we stole his work. He posted the hoax that was the inspiration, but Evolutions! as it existed in the forums was always a collaborative effort (after the intial hoax, many other members were far more active, more invested even, than he), and the team moved as a whole to the new forums. There was no ‘small group branching off’. There was no-one left on the old forums when it went offline. His refusal to acknowledge Thrive as what he created is upsetting, and his desire to create a new Evolutions!, rather than come back to a new Thrive community which would now welcome him, doesn't help his image.
He is correct in saying we stripped his name from the idea, and continued the work he began without him. We paid respect to our origins, in a way, by inventing a ‘company name’, Revolutionary Games, as a reference to Evolutions!, and the events which led us to become Thrive.
As for Sven, after Evolutions! he seemed to just disappear, and in the time that followed we rarely mentioned him. It was a matter of the past, and a low point in our history.
I'm a bit disappointed that we have defended ourselves by saying that Thrive is different to the original idea of Evolutions!. The original outline was created then. Tweaks were made, but I'd say most of our efforts went into filling in the details, which were admittedly scarce at the time. The truth, from my perspective, is Evolutions! abandoned him, and he abandoned us.
