Post by SotU on Mar 17, 2009 22:36:48 GMT -5
SniperReady posted this on the old Bioware-VoC forums. I'm just copying it. You can find the original post here but those who don't have an account on those forums are out of luck since you can no longer register new ones on it.
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This is a recount repeated word for word from Dwalus, an old player of VoC. I am posting it for him.
I realize most of you don't know who I am, or my connection to VoC (or Nameless Village, as it was called when it first started), and to be frank, it's sort of a long boring story, so I'll try to keep it short. Many years ago myself and a group of five roleplayers met on an LV server and began roleplaying together every day for quite sometime. We always maintained a constant state of action and drama, it was a great time. Our little group of adventurers was at the time lead by character named Toman Senthan, I remember a few months after we all met and began roleplaying regularly he asked me what I thought about the possibility of starting our own localvault to support our own storylines - Which, at that time, had somewhat out grown the server we had met on - I thought it was a fantastic idea, and so, Toman along with another member of our group, Ugbash, began developing a new module that would eventually become the Nameless Village. When we first set up shop we had only five core players who would later go on to become the very first DM's on the server, in that group were: Myself (I played a character named Dwalus Therronforge), Shizimaru, Hiroko Sung, Ugbash and of course, Toman. Things got off to a slow start, but within a month, our little server was packed every night, things were going great, we'd expanded to numbers we never imagined but there was one problem; Our server just couldn't handle it. At he time, Toman and Ugbash had been sharing hosting responsibities, using their own computers to host the server, which left things a bit laggy and unable to allow more than 10-15 players in at a time without severe lag.
Toman began looking for alternatives and found a solution in two brothers, I'm sure you know whom I am talking about; Dan and Silver. They were young guys then and to be honest, I was a little retisent to allow a couple of teenagers access to our module and be soloely responsible for hosting our servers, but Toman trusted them and that was that, I never raised another question. For the first little while our arrangement with Dan and SIlver (I've honestly forgotten their characters' names and I only remember those names at all thanks to SniperReady) went along swimmingly, they were great hosts and while a little young, weren't too hard to get along with. Over time Toman began to go more and more inactive as his personal life dragged him away from the module, we were sad to see his time slipping off, but we understood and so we wrote his sudden and frequently lengthy periods of time gone into the storyline. When he did return, it was quite the event in the module, it was actually quite funny to see people get so excited when he dropped in. Simultaneously, while Toman was losing time, Ugbash had quit developing the module, also for his life outside of Neverwinter Nights, he pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet (although I do believe Toman kept contact with him for sometime afterwards, I was not really privvy to the finer details, so I won't get into them). With the two people primarily responsible for the development of the module gone, Dan and Silver began to take more active roles in the leadership department. I'm not going to lie, the remaining three originals (Shizimaru, myself, and Hiroko) made their lives a little difficult, we didn't like their constant butting in and challenging the way we ran the module. Things deteriorated over time until it culminated in one huge fight where Shizimaru and Hiroko were simultaneously expelled from the DM client, they just up and changed the DM client password without telling any of us, of course, they were absolutely livid that a storyline that they had essentially developed at this point, for about a year, had been essentially stolen from us by a couple of teenagers. This lead to more public ridicule and accusations and the pair of them were banned from the server permanently after a couple of days. I think it was around this time the module's name was changed to the "Village of Creation." Alot of people had drifted to Dan and Silver's side, most of them hoping to earn a DM position out of it, they did, afterall, hold all the REAL power on that server.
I had been out of town that week and I had no idea what had happened. When I returned home I went to log onto the DM client and found the password had been changed, no big deal, that wasn't unusual, so I log onto the server until my regular character and start asking Dan in the DM channel what's up, what the new password is, etc.. Basically, he told me to "hold on a second" I'm assuming at this point he was talking to Silver about what to do, I think they forgot about me. Anyway after waiting a few minutes Dan comes back and tells me I've been "fired" so of course, I go off and begin telling the kid exactly what I think of him and what he's doing, and about three minutes into this, I'm also permanently banned from the server. That was it. I was angry as hell, but what could I do? It was totally out of my hands. I moved on with my life, I totally forgot about NWN.
Fast forward four years. I'm hanging out at my brother's apartment with our mutual friend - we'll call him Bojangles - Bojangles and a guy he had met a work, a guy I would later come to know as SniperReady. Within the first five minutes of meeting Sniper he mentioned neverwinter nights, and I was excited, I hadn't heard anyone talk about the game in YEARS and ontop of that, the guy is a roleplayer, what are the chances of that? So I mention I used to DM on a fairly popular Local Vault server, and as it would turn out, it was the same damn module Sniper himself was now a dungeonmaster on. I'm not going to lie (again) when I related my story about what had happened between the five of us and Dan and Silver, Sniper was practically giddy, he thought it was hilarious and now he had ammunition to use against Dan and Silver (I guess at this point he wasn't very happy with the way they were doing things). I told him a lot about the village and it's history, how it came to be, what certain land marks are, and my knowledge was intimate enough to prove my point: I was one of the originals, I guess, over the years, I had been totally forgotten. We ptalked about NWN (and we still talk about it all the time) for the rest of the day and when he went to left he told me to try and get back into the module. Cool, I thought, I wasn't mad anymore, I'd gotten over it years ago, I really just wanted to see how things were. So I get home later that night and install NWN, I still remembered my old login name and password, so no worries there, I search through the list, and sure enough, VoC is still there. Awesome. I can't believe something I helped create was still going so strong I was actually happy to see that it was still around. I recreate my old character and log in, I'm not exaggerating when I say this, but within about 30 seconds I am immediately rebanned from the server without so much as a word as to why. I'm assuming Dan and Silver just remembered my login and were quick to ban me incase I had come to cause trouble.
A day later I told Sniper what had happened and he was like "*** that ***" right off the bat, and went to tell Dan and Silver to unban me, surprisingly, they obliged, without asking any questions. I was allowed back onto the server without any problems or harrasment. That was actually pretty nice of them, I really didn't expect it. I wasn't there to cause trouble so I never brought it up... Besides which, there was no longer anyone still playing there that would remember me, so why bother? I stuck around a couple weeks, met some interesting people, but in the end, it wasn't the same, and the lingering memories of what it had once been to me just left a sort of sour taste in my mouth. I kind of faded away from the scene shortly after that. Not angry, just disappointed that things had changed so much. Between the powergamers and the random people speaking spanish, I just felt as though it had been allowed to go down hill in roleplay content in favor of keeping the server populated. Well, I knew there were great roleplayers there still, but I wasn't really involved and I never really attempted to involve myself. It just wasn't the same.
That was probably about 2-3 years ago that I met Paul (Sniper), I'm 25 now and can look back at the entire experience and laugh it off. Had I really taken the game so seriously? Well, live and learn, right? Paul and I became good friends over the years, we go out for coffee every other night, shoot the *** and our conversation usually leads back to one thing; Neverwinter Nights. This damn game just doesn't seem to want to die. A couple months back we got to talking about the possibility to doing up a new module, I was all for it, my life is settled, I have enough spare time to devote, so why the hell not? Eventually this lead us to one hell of an idea; Why not bring back VoC? Dan and SIlver are out of the picture, I'm sure they've had enough of it, but I'm ready for round two with this ***... This is alot longer than I intended, so long story short, Paul and I are working together to redesign VoC from the ground up (we're undecided whether we'll stick with VoC or its original name, Nameless Village) and luckily, we have a copy of the module so there won't be much of a design difference, except that ours will be a little easier on the eyes and less sparse. I also intend to put in a shrine to my three friends and fellow creators whom I have long since lost contact with. It only seems fitting.
That's the long and short of my history with VoC, it might be a bit much to swallow and I'd understand perfectly if some of you don't believe me... But either way, I'm here to help bring back something we ALL love and enjoy and I hope you guys are as excited for this as I am.
For the immediate future, this is what I would like to happen:
1) Set a new and more accessible forum, that everyone can see and don't need permission to join
2) Begin development updates
3) Get your opinions and ideas on what should and should not be included
Here's the thing, Paul and I are busy guys, development of the module will be slow but it WILL get finished (I'll buy a whip and yell MUSH MUSH at Paul if I have to while he slaves over lines upon lines of code), What I want is to get a community together before we launch, so when we do, it'll be a nice reuinion for us all. Anyway, these are just my ideas, Paul is the brains behind the operaiton and he'll be doing most of the work. But I'm a people person. I'm, uh, good... With people. Or something.
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This is a recount repeated word for word from Dwalus, an old player of VoC. I am posting it for him.
I realize most of you don't know who I am, or my connection to VoC (or Nameless Village, as it was called when it first started), and to be frank, it's sort of a long boring story, so I'll try to keep it short. Many years ago myself and a group of five roleplayers met on an LV server and began roleplaying together every day for quite sometime. We always maintained a constant state of action and drama, it was a great time. Our little group of adventurers was at the time lead by character named Toman Senthan, I remember a few months after we all met and began roleplaying regularly he asked me what I thought about the possibility of starting our own localvault to support our own storylines - Which, at that time, had somewhat out grown the server we had met on - I thought it was a fantastic idea, and so, Toman along with another member of our group, Ugbash, began developing a new module that would eventually become the Nameless Village. When we first set up shop we had only five core players who would later go on to become the very first DM's on the server, in that group were: Myself (I played a character named Dwalus Therronforge), Shizimaru, Hiroko Sung, Ugbash and of course, Toman. Things got off to a slow start, but within a month, our little server was packed every night, things were going great, we'd expanded to numbers we never imagined but there was one problem; Our server just couldn't handle it. At he time, Toman and Ugbash had been sharing hosting responsibities, using their own computers to host the server, which left things a bit laggy and unable to allow more than 10-15 players in at a time without severe lag.
Toman began looking for alternatives and found a solution in two brothers, I'm sure you know whom I am talking about; Dan and Silver. They were young guys then and to be honest, I was a little retisent to allow a couple of teenagers access to our module and be soloely responsible for hosting our servers, but Toman trusted them and that was that, I never raised another question. For the first little while our arrangement with Dan and SIlver (I've honestly forgotten their characters' names and I only remember those names at all thanks to SniperReady) went along swimmingly, they were great hosts and while a little young, weren't too hard to get along with. Over time Toman began to go more and more inactive as his personal life dragged him away from the module, we were sad to see his time slipping off, but we understood and so we wrote his sudden and frequently lengthy periods of time gone into the storyline. When he did return, it was quite the event in the module, it was actually quite funny to see people get so excited when he dropped in. Simultaneously, while Toman was losing time, Ugbash had quit developing the module, also for his life outside of Neverwinter Nights, he pretty much disappeared off the face of the planet (although I do believe Toman kept contact with him for sometime afterwards, I was not really privvy to the finer details, so I won't get into them). With the two people primarily responsible for the development of the module gone, Dan and Silver began to take more active roles in the leadership department. I'm not going to lie, the remaining three originals (Shizimaru, myself, and Hiroko) made their lives a little difficult, we didn't like their constant butting in and challenging the way we ran the module. Things deteriorated over time until it culminated in one huge fight where Shizimaru and Hiroko were simultaneously expelled from the DM client, they just up and changed the DM client password without telling any of us, of course, they were absolutely livid that a storyline that they had essentially developed at this point, for about a year, had been essentially stolen from us by a couple of teenagers. This lead to more public ridicule and accusations and the pair of them were banned from the server permanently after a couple of days. I think it was around this time the module's name was changed to the "Village of Creation." Alot of people had drifted to Dan and Silver's side, most of them hoping to earn a DM position out of it, they did, afterall, hold all the REAL power on that server.
I had been out of town that week and I had no idea what had happened. When I returned home I went to log onto the DM client and found the password had been changed, no big deal, that wasn't unusual, so I log onto the server until my regular character and start asking Dan in the DM channel what's up, what the new password is, etc.. Basically, he told me to "hold on a second" I'm assuming at this point he was talking to Silver about what to do, I think they forgot about me. Anyway after waiting a few minutes Dan comes back and tells me I've been "fired" so of course, I go off and begin telling the kid exactly what I think of him and what he's doing, and about three minutes into this, I'm also permanently banned from the server. That was it. I was angry as hell, but what could I do? It was totally out of my hands. I moved on with my life, I totally forgot about NWN.
Fast forward four years. I'm hanging out at my brother's apartment with our mutual friend - we'll call him Bojangles - Bojangles and a guy he had met a work, a guy I would later come to know as SniperReady. Within the first five minutes of meeting Sniper he mentioned neverwinter nights, and I was excited, I hadn't heard anyone talk about the game in YEARS and ontop of that, the guy is a roleplayer, what are the chances of that? So I mention I used to DM on a fairly popular Local Vault server, and as it would turn out, it was the same damn module Sniper himself was now a dungeonmaster on. I'm not going to lie (again) when I related my story about what had happened between the five of us and Dan and Silver, Sniper was practically giddy, he thought it was hilarious and now he had ammunition to use against Dan and Silver (I guess at this point he wasn't very happy with the way they were doing things). I told him a lot about the village and it's history, how it came to be, what certain land marks are, and my knowledge was intimate enough to prove my point: I was one of the originals, I guess, over the years, I had been totally forgotten. We ptalked about NWN (and we still talk about it all the time) for the rest of the day and when he went to left he told me to try and get back into the module. Cool, I thought, I wasn't mad anymore, I'd gotten over it years ago, I really just wanted to see how things were. So I get home later that night and install NWN, I still remembered my old login name and password, so no worries there, I search through the list, and sure enough, VoC is still there. Awesome. I can't believe something I helped create was still going so strong I was actually happy to see that it was still around. I recreate my old character and log in, I'm not exaggerating when I say this, but within about 30 seconds I am immediately rebanned from the server without so much as a word as to why. I'm assuming Dan and Silver just remembered my login and were quick to ban me incase I had come to cause trouble.
A day later I told Sniper what had happened and he was like "*** that ***" right off the bat, and went to tell Dan and Silver to unban me, surprisingly, they obliged, without asking any questions. I was allowed back onto the server without any problems or harrasment. That was actually pretty nice of them, I really didn't expect it. I wasn't there to cause trouble so I never brought it up... Besides which, there was no longer anyone still playing there that would remember me, so why bother? I stuck around a couple weeks, met some interesting people, but in the end, it wasn't the same, and the lingering memories of what it had once been to me just left a sort of sour taste in my mouth. I kind of faded away from the scene shortly after that. Not angry, just disappointed that things had changed so much. Between the powergamers and the random people speaking spanish, I just felt as though it had been allowed to go down hill in roleplay content in favor of keeping the server populated. Well, I knew there were great roleplayers there still, but I wasn't really involved and I never really attempted to involve myself. It just wasn't the same.
That was probably about 2-3 years ago that I met Paul (Sniper), I'm 25 now and can look back at the entire experience and laugh it off. Had I really taken the game so seriously? Well, live and learn, right? Paul and I became good friends over the years, we go out for coffee every other night, shoot the *** and our conversation usually leads back to one thing; Neverwinter Nights. This damn game just doesn't seem to want to die. A couple months back we got to talking about the possibility to doing up a new module, I was all for it, my life is settled, I have enough spare time to devote, so why the hell not? Eventually this lead us to one hell of an idea; Why not bring back VoC? Dan and SIlver are out of the picture, I'm sure they've had enough of it, but I'm ready for round two with this ***... This is alot longer than I intended, so long story short, Paul and I are working together to redesign VoC from the ground up (we're undecided whether we'll stick with VoC or its original name, Nameless Village) and luckily, we have a copy of the module so there won't be much of a design difference, except that ours will be a little easier on the eyes and less sparse. I also intend to put in a shrine to my three friends and fellow creators whom I have long since lost contact with. It only seems fitting.
That's the long and short of my history with VoC, it might be a bit much to swallow and I'd understand perfectly if some of you don't believe me... But either way, I'm here to help bring back something we ALL love and enjoy and I hope you guys are as excited for this as I am.
For the immediate future, this is what I would like to happen:
1) Set a new and more accessible forum, that everyone can see and don't need permission to join
2) Begin development updates
3) Get your opinions and ideas on what should and should not be included
Here's the thing, Paul and I are busy guys, development of the module will be slow but it WILL get finished (I'll buy a whip and yell MUSH MUSH at Paul if I have to while he slaves over lines upon lines of code), What I want is to get a community together before we launch, so when we do, it'll be a nice reuinion for us all. Anyway, these are just my ideas, Paul is the brains behind the operaiton and he'll be doing most of the work. But I'm a people person. I'm, uh, good... With people. Or something.
