The fact of the matter is, Ares isn't dead. As someone said earlier, Maelstrom is an incredibly old game and it is still played. However, whatever boards or community there was for Maelstrom is probably long gone. This happens. I was here in the beginning (relativly) of these boards and their furor of activity. It was great. I remember some of the old RPG's... Starlance, that madcap era before we all decided to scrap and start over. The COMPLETE ownz'ing of the humans by the Salrillians. That was no good. We gotz our behinds whupped.
Anyways, there are plenty of things like that that still exist, but they're just now slowing down. Ares is probably going to be moving into the retirement home of games. Activity about that game will slow down, getting less and less fervent until finally (and this takes a while) people forget about it almost entirely and the community all but ceases to exist. This cannot be avoided, for any game. It's like trying to reverse entropy.
What can we do? Not a whole lot of anything really. There's no real reversal of the game's entropy, only retarding the effect.
What may come next? I think anything at all would be a possible Ares II, already mentioned. Perhaps also an Ares plugin for EV Nova. If done with quality, it would make a fine remembrance of Ares though I doubt it'd revive the forums.
Oh yeah, and speaking of the forums, if they want to remain robust, they must become varied. Dedication to one game is admirable, but ultimatly doomed. Discussion about other games, other topics and the such is the last hope for the boards.
That's all i have to say
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Madness takes it's toll; Please have exact change.
), but all I'm thinking about, so far, is a nice little program that lets you enter in simpler stuff and show you whatever you need for Hera - Ask Slug in a Can, one might say.
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too difficult or too easy C) buggy or D) boring. He then forgets Ares and moves along.