I completely, 100% agree.
I'll match your rant with one of my own, and a little story.
So when I joined VC:MP the only playable server was LWs. Back then, the fervor with which people supported the use of one single weapon (the stubby, not even the shotgun too) was extreme. I quickly became part of that server's culture, and I adopted the view held by 99% of the regular 'high-profile' players that stubby fighting was the hallmark of a good VC:MP player, and that disturbing it was the hallmark of douchebaggery. It was partly out of this that the 'Anti-roofing anti-spazzing clan' idea grew. But it also grew, in a significant way, because I thought that it would be a successful way of recruiting skilled people (I tried and failed to launch clans three times prior to ArS, under the names 'The Armed Bastards', 'Vice Family', and one other that I can't remember). And successful, it was.
The VC:MP community was actually tiny at this time as the masterlist had gone down for about 4 months solid in mid-2008, and then was on-and-off for another 6 months or so. We would make forum threads celebrating the few occasions that VC:MP had a global playercount of 30. Despite this, the ArS concept proved successful in recruiting some of the very few new players, so the concept worked out, but it wasn't long before it was doomed. To an extent we were trying to emulate the good clans of the time - KFJ, DnA - whose modus operandi was to form, by invitation only, an elite. They didn't have training ranks, they didn't allow clan applications. In a community whose membercount you could measure on a child's abacus, it is now obvious in hindsight that this strategy couldn't work, and sure enough, it didn't.
After just a few months I decided that actually the elitist attitude of the LW regulars and the dominant clans of the time was counter-intuitive. It was arrogant, and it in fact stifled the growth of the community. It was then that, after chatting with Knucis and aXXo a little, I decided to open VU, a clan that instead of trying to entice good players, would create good players. At that stage we allowed virtually anyone to join as a trainee, and if, after an effort to train them, they remained unsuitable, we'd kick them. We gained a bad reputation, as a clan that had dropped all its standards, but soon some of the trainees shone through, and it wasn't long before we had the likes of TheKing, J.Ripper, GangstaRas, AEG, and Kontrium kicking ass all over the mod. Having said this, we still remained a fairly stubby-centric clan, and our training would be mostly angled in that direction.
It was around then that I met ULK.HeAD, and we started talking about XE. During the latter half of 2007 and early 2008, XE had been a hell-zone, whose only administrators were either inactive or completely tyrannical (there was one fundamentalist Christian admin, whose name I forget, who would often make decisions based on what he thought was right by his religion). HeAD, however, had convinced Tommis to hand over the administration keys to ULK, a gang that consisted then of a very small number of old MTA guys (HeAD, Bishop, Prontera and then later hazz - maybe Gulk too, but I don't remember seeing him that often), and of a bunch of players who had been banned from LW (including akiharu, who got banned when he was using the name 'Sophie', back in the days when he pretended he was a girl). Their philosophy was completely different to the LW crowd. Perhaps driven by the patchy sync in MTA, their attitude towards fighting was 'bring as much as you can, and kill your opponent no matter what'.
HeAD was very smart, so to build a server culture that had this ideal at its heart, he opened power over its administration to almost anyone, provided he or someone he trusted had vetted them a little, and we had our first true community server. ULK still very much had ultimate control, but (except for Bishop) they made a lot of effort to make everyone think that this wasn't the case, and that everyone had power in the server. And they did, to an extent, but the final word lay with ULK. XE grew, and then it declined a little. It was at this point that HeAD and I had a series of long emails and irc conversations about how to try and shape the VC:MP community.
The email exchanges probably totalled about 20,000 words, and in them we discussed how VU and ULK operate, how XE should run, what community events should look like, and what Sharks vs Marios (an idea I had only just come up with) should look like, and how it might be able to grow the community. We were not doing this for altruistic reasons. We were, to paraphrase HeAD, making the game we loved to play better, so that we could enjoy it more, and making sure there were other people around to play it with us.
TL;DR
To cut a long story short, we came to the following conclusion:
VC:MP has to have player freedom at its heart.
XE, VU, SvM and ULK were modeled or remodeled around this ethos (the latter unsuccessfully, because of a few dinosaurs among its ranks). Players ought to be able to play this mod exactly how they want it, and they should have the opportunity to access every single part of it. This means not forming an elite culture. We must make servers and clans - the backbones of the community - welcoming to all newcomers. Applications to join clans, and server and events administration teams, should always be open. All weapons in large TDM servers, except for those that are completely overpowering (the minigun is the only one HeAD and I could think of) should be free and accessible to all players, as all of them can be countered. The XE that we made with this in mind was a crazy warzone, the epicentre of which would change all the time, and that had newbies teaming up against vets and completely wiping the floor with them. It turned things on their head; though I must admit, things got a little unfair when c-glitching became commonplace.
Sadly XE and ULK failed because of internal politics that were a direct result of people not following this ethos. VU still remains strongly attached to it, however, which is why there are people like Stormeus and Thijn, who can and do barely hold stubbys, senior in our ranks.
It seems like the dominant server of today, LW, has gone back, to an extent, to its old ways. Maybe it's taking the VC:MP community with it. It doesn't feel like a welcoming place, it feels like one that is accessible to only those 'in the know'. Not just in gameplay, but in its whole culture. You only have to look at their forum to see how much of a 'community' server it is. It's almost entirely functional, with very few posts made outside what is absolutely necessary to post. It's a place for the exchange of information between those who have power over the server, and those who don't, and that's all it is. If you went and looked at the old XE forum (I don't even know if it still exists), you'd find hundreds of posts a day; fights, ideas, suggestions, admin applications. XE grew with the community, and the community grew with it, and it was all underpinned by a simple faith in letting each other play exactly how we'd like to play.
I'm not badmouthing the administration of LW as people, as most of them I would consider to be friends, but I think the way that the server is run is not conducive to the forming of an inclusive, competitive, fun VC:MP community.
I guess my message to you, Stormeus, is this: it wasn't always like this, and what happened with our XE experiment proves that it doesn't have to be.
Topic: Playing VC:MP the wrong way (Read 4440 times)