Wow.
Hi, guys, been gone for awhile...and not real happy with what I've seen today since coming back.
My absence, by the way, has a lot more to do with my changing lifestyle (i.e., too much work nowadays) than with losing interest in pinball, vp, or talking with any of you.
So, given a few precious spare moments today, I thought I'd check out some of the vp sites I'd bookmarked all those months ago.
Wow.
At least a third of them are dead. Some of them just come up with error pages, so there's always the possibility that they're temporarily down (highly unlikely). But a lot of them are coming up with your usual scammy "this domain is for sale" pages, which makes it just about hopeless that they'll ever be back.
In doing so, I remembered Neptune's site, where at least someone could still download old tables (probably otherwise never to be seen again) and perhaps gain an appreciation for the game, and the program...but I couldn't remember the site, which brought me back here (and even getting back here took me a couple of tries!), and to this thread.
Wow.
I'd forgotten how vehement this thing had gotten (which is why, pretty early on, I just stepped aside and let everyone else duke it out; not being an actual table-maker, I always sort of felt like an intrusive outsider anyway, albeit an opinionated one...but as an intrusive outsider, why should I presume that my opinions counted?). Reading this thing through once again wasn't very pretty...though, in all fairness, I think it escalated totally out of hand due to bad manners and intolerance on BOTH sides.
After all, John (tilt) was really the first one to start resorting to insults (don't get me wrong, I was, I hope, friends with John at the time...online, I mean; I'm certainly not trying to disparage him). Nep was more or less just reacting to them...and to everyone else who sided against him. He went completely overboard and wound up looking as bad as (and probably worse than) the people hounding him, and it turned into a fracas, with each "side" baiting the other, topped off by Nep's off-color pics (only one of which still remains that I saw).
All this because Nep was offering (yeah, I guess you could say "insisting," but what difference does it make now?) to host EVERY game on his site, along with links to the original creators.
One place that anyone even remotely interested in pinball could find, and perhaps thereby become interested in vp. One place where those people would have found such a multiplicity of ideas, concepts, and solutions to problems, that they may have been inspired to get into things themselves.
I checked out IR earlier...not many new names submitting things over there (virtually NOTHING on vp for the last year, and even fp isn't looking very healthy). The forums, here and elsewhere, don't seem nearly as lively as they did back then. (Of course, I haven't had time enough to check out EVERYTHING, so forgive me if I'm being presumptuous...still, first impressions mean something, y'know?)
At any rate, Nep's site doesn't seem to be hosting the tables anymore, so everyone that was so concerned about ownership and copyrights can breathe easy, I guess.
And if I'm correct, and the hobby is dying, they can take those tables to the grave with them, and not worry about someone infringing upon their rights...or becoming inspired by those games to take up the hobby and keep it going.
Wow.