The Future of Wargamer

[AP514]

Some salty guys around here.

[EICJoe]

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that 6 owners later there's absolutely no knowledge of the history of site, given that there wasn't any appreciation of it for at least the past decade...

Considering I didn't start until 2016, I think it's slightly disingenuous to hold us accountable for events that had happened back in 2009. I'm aware that there was a serious controversy over article attribution around that time. I've had plenty of people contact me over the years about this and, provided they could give me a list of articles they wanted to have the credit reinstated, I've always changed them back, no questions asked.

For everyone else, BayonetBrant is referring primarily to GrogHeads I suspect. They're a forum-based wargaming community founded by Wargamer readers. So if you want to widen your net of sources for digital wargaming content, they're a pretty decent crowd and they've got some good writers and community members over there as well. Just don't mention Battlefront customer support or DRM practices.

BB if you would like to share some of the other communities here, you're more than welcome to. Also, if you'd like to share some *actual* stories of the Wargamer of yore instead of bundling all your nostalgia into a stick and using it to beat us for being inferior, I'd welcome some tales of the old days.

I'm here until they cart me off to pastures anew, so if anyone has any further questions/concerns, please let me know.

[bayonetbrant]

No one should be holding you to account for things that happened back in 2009--11 or so; but the archives certainly go back well before 2003.


GrogHeads is one of the places that a bunch of that community ended up, but not the only one. A bunch of people were at ACG for a while (tho their forums are now toast). Rock Paper Shotgun absorbed some of the community, too. Others drifted off to Gamesquad or BGG or just largely left forum communities on the web as a whole.

While I was a founder of GH, I have since moved on myself, and have now taken up residence with The Armchair Dragoons, so that's yet another place that a bunch of old WGer hands have landed.

As to some of those old highlights?

There were a LOT of great discussions on the writers' email list about whether or not to give the old Wargamers Award for Excellence to a specific game. You didn't just say "hey give 'em this award" but instead you had to justify it against a lot of penetrating questions from your fellow writers about why your game was better than game X or Y at certain features. Writers *really* dug into the games to make their cases

Game conventions with the WGer crew turned into family reunions, with group dinners, frantic coverage around the convention halls, and sharing new discoveries with each other as we played a lot of demos and wrote coverage of them.
(GenCon 2006 was a particularly great one)

One of the coolest things that *really* brought the community together was completely non-wargame-related.
One of the forum members had a young son who was diagnosed with leukemia. In addition to many forum members contributing to his charity to help research a cure, another forum member had a pretty cool idea up his sleeve, and solicited donations from the forum community as a whole. Those donations turned into a MASSIVE model railroad set that was purchased and shipped to the young man. The shipping updates, and day-of-delivery-updates where everyone knew what was coming but was waiting for the forum updates from the recipient family were almost like watching live TV in slow-motion.

The Wargamer family (it was a family back then) had literally dozens of people meeting up face to face off the forums. Those friendships have spanned multiple deployments, moves, marriages, divorces, kids, conventions, promotions, job changes, duty stations/city changes, retirements, and (now) multiple websites.
It really speaks to the strength of that community back then that so many of them are *still* in touch (I've had 3 texts/PMs from some of them already just this morning)

It was demolished by ownership before you, which is totally *not* on current management. But while you've been able to breathe some new life into the corpse they handed you, it's a different life.

You can't go home again, and handing off Wargamer to yet *another* owner that probably knows even *less* about those glory days just gets further and further from ever getting close to recapturing them.

and with that.... I'm done for this thread.
props to El Cid for indulging in the nostalgia without just shutting it down (as at least one previous editor would've done)


My venting was heavily-colored toward the complete demolishing of the article archives and the lack of knowledge of the origins of the site, and rapidly spread beyond that to a broader rant.

At least one of you has said it's just all saltiness. OK, fine - your opinion.
But let's see your WGer pub credits. Put 'em on the table. I was closing in on 100 articles in around 4-1/2 years, averaging around 2/month.
Let's see your forum post count as a member of the community. Before the 'old' forums got nuked, I was in the top 25 or so total post count for the history of those forums. Most of the top 50 were run off 10 years ago.
Call us salty all you want, but we earned that saltiness with a mountain of contributions that've since been nuked

[All American]

Lol, bunch of seething chuds in the comments.

Wehraboos and borderline Nazi sympathizers are a problem in the wargaming community. Wargamer should call these instances out and the videogames enabling it, as should every other gaming outlet regardless of the genre.

Just because your right wing perception of the issue makes you oblivious does not mean it doesn't exist. "Wokegamer", really? Haha.

Imagine being salty over a statement saying wargaming needs to be more diverse and Nazi atrocities shouldn't be whitewashed. Says a lot about you.

[markojager]

Hoping that the changes are for the bettter, I'll continue to be here. Let's the name be the guide for the site and the wargames to continue as the center of everything.

There are some salty people here. If we see a debate about something, we could improve. I'm not very keen on some of the topics that were discussed outside of the wargaming themes, that made some feathers to fly, but that was interesting.

Long life to the Wargamer.

PS: Salvage or refurbish some of the old articles. I just read the 4 articles about implementa from 2016 and those were great (just one needed some upgrating), there are others that could be of use.

[hmgs1@hotmail.com]

Just for the record and FWIW, NONE of the Wargamer articles are gone or lost. On this very site* I was able to track my own writing back to 2014 when Scott Parello was EIC. As for the other pieces I wrote before that (when I was enlisted into the organization by James Zabek), I found those as well on a nifty little resource called WayBackMachine which is now hosted by the Internet Archive non-profit (www.archive.org). It regularly archives the entire content of all the Websites that ever was several times each year, with the first Wargamer archive coming in on 14 April 1997. See below.

This is a great resource for all wargamers, most recently used by me to recover some absolutely glorious battleflags from the now defunct drapeaux.org site.

*Also, BTW, there still is an About Us article on the Wargamer site as well as a Wikipedia page for those interested in a little history.

Ciao, Colonel Bill

Screenshot 2021-01-20 091555.jpg (53.41 KiB) Viewed 1221 times

[bayonetbrant]

The Wayback machine is *not* the same as Wargamer.com maintaining their article archives. Finding the articles somewhere else is, in fact, the single best evidence in support of my assertion that the article archives *here* are toast.

Go type "guillory" into the search box and see what comes back for my articles - 2 I wrote, and 2 about my games

Go use Google's search and try to find my original "why I love diplomacy" article anywhere on the site
Only 3 of the original 5 Battle Lab articles are there; the PDF attachments for the fog of war article are gone.

Go pull up the Crusader Rex article from 2006 (which, interestingly enough, doesn't come up with a search by my name) and note that (1) all the images are missing, and (2) it's only about 20% of the article, because the CMS only migrated the first page of each article, and dumped the subsequent pages
https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/crusader-rex/
This is true of any of the articles I wrote - page 1 is there. Pages 2-x are not, nor are any of the images. Any internal links are broken. And most you can't find by searching for an author; you have to know the name/title of the article to find it, assuming it's there at all.
First World War review https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/the-first-world-war/
GenCon 2007 convention coverage https://www.wargamer.com/articles/gencon-2007/
LNLT: Band of Heroes review https://www.wargamer.com/reviews/lock-n ... of-heroes/

So yes, the article archives are, in fact, demolished, in that whatever fragments you might be able to resurrect are utterly unusable beyond a few opening paragraphs. Again, not necessarily the fault of current management, but an accurate statement representing the current status of the site.

I wasn't going to keep replying here, but you've essentially called me a liar, and I don't stand for that.

[EICJoe]

The Wayback machine is *not* the same as Wargamer.com maintaining their article archives. Finding the articles somewhere else is, in fact, the single best evidence in support of my assertion that the article archives *here* are toast.

Apologies BB - Bill told me about the Wayback thing and I said he could post about it here. I haven't interrogated it in depth myself to see how much is stored there. He posted it in good faith and was merely attempting to highlight that there may be some bits saved, for those who are interested in such things. It wasn't supposed to be an exercise in calling you a liar.

Thank you for also pointing out the drawbacks of WBM.

[hmgs1@hotmail.com]

For EIC Joe:

I think Brant's comments are directed more at the Wargamer archive's limitations and not WBM, specifically the fact that one has to go to a third party location (WBM) for information he believes should have been retained on site here (Wargamer).

Admittedly I did NOT check one of his articles or anyone else's at WBM, but I did find my Historicon 2006 article from 8/18/06, all five pages, not just the first, so it seems WBM is working as advertised. However, most images are missing and obviously if the original site has dropped pages when WBM crawls it, then it will not be archived. See https://web.archive.org/web/20061128191 ... /page3.asp

For Brant:

No one, least of all me, is calling you dishonest. I just knew of a reasonable solution to the problem (saying nothing about the policy behind it) and asked Joe if I could post it. Nothing more.

I will now proceed to my bomb shelter and return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Ciao, Colonel Bill

[bayonetbrant]

Apologies BB - Bill told me about the Wayback thing and I said he could post about it here. I haven't interrogated it in depth myself to see how much is stored there. He posted it in good faith and was merely attempting to highlight that there may be some bits saved, for those who are interested in such things. It wasn't supposed to be an exercise in calling you a liar.

apologies accepted