Post #152789
September 30, 2020, 02:52:02 PM
Wintreath, like any community, is defined by its constituent members. That's constantly in flux; I have no doubt that a large number of the people who've left over the past year did so not because of any 'cultural shifts' or as a direct result of 'the drama' so much as that their friendgroups moved on and they moved with them.
Wintreath's continued pull is because this is where people you like and want to hang out with are. You can retain people as a result of activities - CAH night or community games of Werewolf spring to mind - but people hang around (or find themselves returning) either because their friends are here, or because they think they'll find a group of people you might like and want to hang out with.
It's not because there is some je ne sais quoi that Wintreath has, some lightning that has been caught in a bottle here that must desperately be clung to because to lose it would be the end of the community, but because the internet is an anarchic place where you do what you want, for the most part, and much of the time, because we're social animals, what people want is to hang out with people they like, and very often that's people who like what they like.
That's probably not the answer you wanted, but it's the answer I think is true; equally, I don't know whether you'll find it disappointing or encouraging, but I personally look at it as encouraging; it says people are here because they want to be here - not because this is the only place for them to fulfill some dark and terrible craving*.
Consequently, they'll either sound off if they're not happy, or they'll vote with their feet. And that's fine. People outgrow communities all the time, especially ones which skew younger - as most NS regions, and by proxy their communities, do.
Also, low-key, I'd much rather the Wintreath vibe than the still-somehow-clinging-to-a-nightmare-shadow-facsimile-of-life that Ainur seems to have metastasized into in the server I sometimes remember still exists, glance at, and then recoil from.
Tl;dr: Wintreath isn't special special; it's ordinary special; special in the same way every community is special, in the way "I mostly like the people here, you all mostly tolerate me, we've developed in-jokes, and frankly it'd be a lot of work making a new set of in-jokes somewhere else so we're all just stuck with each other until some of us decide it's worth the effort after all, but it's okay because some new people will have come in before then".
*(Except for me, because Wintreath is where I, a Vampire, slake my hellish thirst for the blood of man! I name myself such so that the circling Hunters who walk the informational web may know and mark me. Come! I bear my chest to your stake! End my foul and unnatural existence! I have lived countless aeons already, hidden from the cleansing light of the sun; my shrivelled soul longs for the sweet embrace of Death, whom when she comes, I shall greet as an old friend, with the same relief of an exile at the knowledge that he may finally return home.)
