I like the off-the-cuff Saloon dynamic too, and don't want to see it stagnate in self-worship and "inner circle" circle-jerking the way some humour forums do.
The pecking order shocked me when I saw it because it was one of the first blatant "popularity contest" types of posts I'd seen. Usually when that sort of sentiment starts cropping up in a forum, it means certain people in a community are butt-hurt about something and want to pick a fight/tear up the place. In retrospect, looking at the thread starter, I'm not surprised and not as concerned. Coming from a relative outsider and newcomer, it seemed out of place and some of us were pr. surprised to see Cheese run with the "data".
Normally this kind of pissing contest makes for a tiresome forum and I usually avoid the Saloon when these things come up, but I was bored and saw an opportunity to see if I still remembered enough statistics to make a graph and interpret it.
With better judgment, I realize this whole matter is best forgotten and allowed to sink into the soft anoxic ooze at the bottom of the forum. Perhaps a daring deep-sea expedition will recover it intact after millions of years, preserved by low-oxygen conditions. Perhaps a great seismic event will thrust up the strata of the Abyss into the mountaintops, and an upstate New York highway construction team will discover the fossilized remains of the pecking order in a slab of slate. IMO it should not be canonized. Effort != worth.
The TMO time-to-completion graph is very different story for the Saloon. It is a dreary, depressing reminder that AOE3 is a dying game and this Heaven is reaching a plateau, and a crucial decision. We've had some new GDers pop in to the Saloon, but with the predictable result that not all of them are a good fit here. Some see the Saloon as a place to argue politics and religion. Others see the Saloon as their personal therapist or a place where they feel they can leave behind their social skills, and just drop horrible threads like leaden farts in church.
Abort, retry, fail? With TMO reaching a plateau, an asymptote beyond which no TMO can ever expect to be "finished" in the foreseeable future, what does the Saloon want to do?
Crunkatog on ESO
Bart331 balance suggestion: aztec: remove civ
Voltiguer: Ender, Sioux in 1.04 will be a top civ, no matter how many layers of Sioux goggles you put on
schildpad on Elephants: ...their mansabdar unit sucks so hard it looks like a black hole
Crunkatog on Steam.