very nice.In post 0, Shanba wrote:It's been about half a billion years since I joined this website. I came here after playing mafia on, of all places, Penny Arcade's forum. Initially, as I do in all places I join, I simply lurked, unsure of whether I wanted to make the plunge or not - reading games, GD threads, so on, before finally jumping in and joining a newbie game - and shortly afterwards, replacing into the disaster that was kingmaker mafia II. But while my initial enthusiasm for the game has waned, the friends I made playing the game have stuck with me, and many of you I now know in real life as well as internet buddies. The community is sometimes a bit screwy, but by and large you guys are awesome.
Which brings me to the point of my post, as hinted (not so subtly) in the title. You see, back in the day there was a little link underneath the general discussion forum that brought you to an exchange 5 AIM chatroom where the dedicated mafia players used to gather and chat. I came there and was immediately greeted with the lurid multicoloured fonts that people loved to use - and rapidly taught games like Contact, Ghost and so on. And of course, we played mafia there. Lots of mafia. Upick, mostly.
Time went by and the crowd there changed. It became populated by people who had started to lose interest in mafia, and while it was people from mafiascum, talk was as likely to be about Tengaged or League of legends as it was about mafia. It started to develop a negative reputation, and the games of mafia and contact or whatever dried up, but I still loved it and I still enjoyed the company of the regulars. Eventually the negative reputation led to the removal of the link from the website, and it became the duty of the regulars to advertise and try to keep the little scumchat community alive by pimping the link every once in a while, trying to get a few more people to stop the slow bleed of people moving on from spending hours in an old AOL Instant Messenger chatroom.
What's more, soon afterwards, the chatroom was added to the website proper, and the need to have somewhere to just talk with people, that had continued to sustain the chatroom in the dark days went away. Scumchat lacked purpose, and it showed in reduced numbers.
For the last year or so it's been clear that scumchat is dying. The regulars dried up to roughly me, Patrick, Mykonian and Izzy. For the last month or so I hadn't opened Pidgin to check if it was still running. Today I opened scumchat, and for practically the first time since I had joined the site, I found scumchat empty. Not even an account idling there, simply empty. Scumchat is dead.
This thread is simply something to mark the passing of a chatroom in which I spent many hours and which remained an important part of my life for the best part of a decade.
RIP.
Rip.
