Quest (maybe) shutting down

[David Whyld]

https://blog.textadventures.co.uk/2016/ ... and-quest/

Not really ADRIFT related but did anyone see this recent announcement on the Quest blog? It looks like Quest might well be shutting down in a couple of months.

[ElliotM]

I saw that, he is looking for a buyer of the different resources, assets, and services he had created.

[Lazzah]

I saw that, he is looking for a buyer of the different resources, assets, and services he had created.

As I read it, Alex isn't looking for any money, he just wants someone - or some people - to take them on to keep Quest going.

[ElliotM]

I got that sense, too, but thought I had seen the word buyer in his article. Either way, finding a successor of sorts to carry on those projects might be tough despite community enthusiasm.

[David Whyld]

It's more than tough. It'll be a miracle if he gets anyone in less than three months with the necessary skills, willingness and time to do this. If he'd posted this maybe a year before the deadline, he might have a chance but three months is just nowhere near long enough.

[Lazzah]

I can't say I wouldn't be sorry to see Quest go under, but I would feel for Alex Warren if it did.

Surely this would be an ideal opportunity for Campbell to promote ADRIFT but given the current state of play I doubt if that would happen.

[Kennedy]

Hopefully Alex can find someone to pass Quest on to. It would be a shame for the program to go under.

[Lumin]

I dropped by the Quest site a couple months ago after all this went down and had already been resolved. It meant more to me because there's a non-zero chance I might write a Quest game some day.

The most mind-boggling thing the creator did wasn't this sudden announcement though, it was months before when he removed PMs and profiles altogether. Step one in destroying one of the most active IF communities: remove the ability for authors to communicate with each other.

I still don't know what he was thinking but it killed my interest in learning the program pretty much overnight.

[David Whyld]

I always wondered about that myself. The timing certainly seemed odd if nothing else. You have a vibrant, active community and what do you do? You remove PMs, member lists, post counts, profiles, old posts (a vast history of posts spanning a decade or more), all the nice eye candy which makes people want to be part of a forum... and you replace it with... well, the sorry bland mess you have now. A veritable ghost town. It's hard to really tell if anything's happening now because of the forum setup but whenever I stop by, it generally seems to be people complaining over the recent changes.

Then a few months later, you suddenly announce you're giving up on Quest and saying if someone else doesn't step in and take over running it in the next five minutes, it's bye-bye Quest and thanks for all the fish.

Really makes you wonder if the negative reaction to the changes is what prompted him to give up on Quest. Of course, he could just have reverted the changes and given people the old forum back like they wanted but I guess that wasn't an option for him for some reason.

[Lumin]

People there are so desperate I see they're just flat out posting their email addresses in threads now. Have fun with the spam guys.

But actually, yeah, I did wonder a lot what motivated dropping the program. Could always be RL stuff but handing it off completely seemed odd, when it's not like people are expecting or clamoring for regular updates. Just maintaining the site shouldn't have been that time consuming and would have left him free to pick up development on Quest at any point in the future. So I hope it wasn't really a case of picking up his ball and going home, but, I guess there's no way to ever know.

What I always used to think would be great would have been removing the forum and site as separate entities and making it so that site members are automatically able to post, and private messages could be sent to the author of any game you're playing. The public Comments sections were an awkward and unreliable way to communicate, and made avoiding spoilers difficult.

Now though I'd just be happy with a standard free forum stapled to the site. And as usual I'm regretting once again every life decision that has led to me not knowing how to program or do web design.

e: Actually I'm not sure what's going on with that site at all these days, on a number of levels. Most of the games listed on the front page weren't even made with Quest.

[David Whyld]

People there are so desperate I see they're just flat out posting their email addresses in threads now. Have fun with the spam guys.

But actually, yeah, I did wonder a lot what motivated dropping the program. Could always be RL stuff but handing it off completely seemed odd, when it's not like people are expecting or clamoring for regular updates. Just maintaining the site shouldn't have been that time consuming and would have left him free to pick up development on Quest at any point in the future. So I hope it wasn't really a case of picking up his ball and going home, but, I guess there's no way to ever know.

You really have to wonder why, if he was planning to hand over Quest like he did, he went through all the hassle of changing the forum beforehand. Seems a strange way to leave things: effectively ruining the community he created. With a bit of luck, whoever's running things these days will bring the old forum back soon and this new one can be quickly forgotten about.

Actually I'm not sure what's going on with that site at all these days, on a number of levels. Most of the games listed on the front page weren't even made with Quest.

I think it's become a kind of repository for all things IF, a bit like the IF Archive or the IFDB. I'm not sure it's really needed, though - I mean, we already have the IF Archive and the IFDB - and it kind of makes the actual Quest games seem pretty poor by comparison. It also isn't obvious from a quick glance at the site that most of the games weren't written with Quest. (Or maybe that's the point.)

[Lumin]

Yeah it seems a little odd having the Quest games themselves be some of the least visible on the site. None of the editor's picks themselves are Quest games.

Even with Quest stuff tending toward the very, very amateurish, there's no shame in bringing in a steady stream of new blood. Why hide it?

Anyway, so I'm a little disgruntled with Quest right now. I kind of have to level with you guys, once I was able to sit down and get serious about a project I was intending to write them out in Adrift and Quest simultaneously and release them on both sites for uh, science.

But let's talk about the state of the IF community in general.

ADRIFT: in its death throes. Makes me sad. But I've been here over a decade and feel like I owe the universe at least one solid ADRIFT game before I die.

Quest: Kind of in this limbo state of usable/not usable. A lot depends on where the new admins go but who knows how long that will take. I actually got made a mod over there at one point to help stem the flood of crappy sandpit games, so that and being in semi-regular contact with some other authors was keeping me coming back. But neither of those have been the case for awhile now. If I do make a Quest game it's going to have to be written with only very little/very shallow contact with other Quest authors, which isn't much of a motivator.

intfiction.org: holy hell these people are insufferable. The bouts of normalcy in between fits just doesn't make up for it, plus when they're not being crazy they're being kind of boring. And I understand they drove Piers away from IF entirely which is pretty much unforgivable.

intfic.com: Still a cool place, but doesn't get to stay in its own untainted little pocket universe the way ADRIFT and Quest do.

I'm way into chooseyourstory.com now and that's not going to change, but CYOAs are just not IF and never will be, never mind that all the IF people just flopped over and preemptively offered them their I.D. and house keys along with their lunch money.

Twine doesn't seem to have any kind of Twine specific community hub, as far as I can tell those authors are just doing the cuckoo bird thing and laying their eggs in the IFDB nest. Meanwhile the Choice of Games community is still derailing each and every writing thread with screeching about BIGOTS and gender identity afaik.

I almost wish we could have some kind of joint commune for ADRIFT authors and those among the Quest regulars who are literate and decent and otherwise not human cancer. Heck, let a few CYOA people come along too.

Solution: Build a palace on the moon?

[David Whyld]

I've felt pretty much down in the dumps with the whole IF scene these past few years. Whenever I motivate myself to start writing a game again, I wonder who’s going to play it? Why am I spending time writing games? What's the point of it?

ADRIFT is largely dead – a few games here and there but nothing more than that and if there's anything being done with the program itself, it’s being done very quietly. Campbell is a stranger on his own forum and I can’t remember the last time he was here much. I'm sure PO Prune will step in here to tell me that Campbell is definitely 100% still fully committed to ADRIFT and we just need to give him time, but to be honest that’s the same story I've been hearing for the past decade and still nothing is happening.

Quest was abandoned by its developer who did an amazing job of ruining the forum before he left. It now looks like something that escaped from the 80’s. Not that I ever liked Quest much anyway, and I haven’t tried to write or play a Quest game in years, but it’s still depressing seeing how badly things have been messed up over there.

Int.fiction I've given up on. I actually got a one month ban from there last year for telling one of the mods that I thought their Codes of Conduct was drivel and I had no intention of abiding by it, and then when the ban was over I found I didn’t have much motivation to post there anyway. Most of the people I like seemed to have left or been banned themselves and the place is full of the people who made them leave or got them banned. Yes, they drove Piers out. A few years before they pretty much forced the admin Mike Snyder / Sidney Merk out as well, which was a really shitty thing to do considering he set the damn forum up in the first place and paid for the costs of it. If I’d been him, I’d have tanked the place before I left.

So all in all, I think the IF scene is in the worst state it’s been for years. I’d love it if things improved and became more active, but it doesn’t seem very likely that it's going to happen.

[Lumin]

I hadn't even realized about Merk, damn, I really have been out of the loop. For every bit of drama I witness it seems like there's even I only hear about after the fact. Of course it doesn't help that they're deleting entire threads. How did that even happen, though? It was his forum. Seems like he needed to be a little more judicious with the banhammer, or hell, if nothing else shut the whole place down and toss up some donkey porn. Or a copy of 1984.

The IF community being the main thing hurting the IF community is hardly news, though. In their case it's been years and the ridiculously specific, over the top demands for bland 'niceness' and walking on eggshells over there haven't done a thing to leach out the toxicity. Just bottles it up to make the next drama explosion even worse.

Meh. Even with the Quest being...Quest, and the site broken in ways that annoy me as much as this one now, it's still well up on the list of places I'd rather hang out and have game design chat on over intfiction. Meanwhile we've still got one of the better communities here, it's just that we're missing a few people and the main page gives seizures to new ones.

Oh...but to keep the thread on topic...speaking of Quest, this amused me:



questreviews.jpg

[David Whyld]

I hadn't even realized about Merk, damn, I really have been out of the loop. For every bit of drama I witness it seems like there's even I only hear about after the fact. Of course it doesn't help that they're deleting entire threads. How did that even happen, though? It was his forum. Seems like he needed to be a little more judicious with the banhammer, or hell, if nothing else shut the whole place down and toss up some donkey porn. Or a copy of 1984.

There was some big argument on the forum - I know, shocking for that place, right? - and I think he was being called on to outright ban certain people who he felt had done nothing wrong. When he refused, the people doing the calling kicked up a massive fuss about it and said he was doing a lousy job of running things. He said he'd had enough and stepped down as admin. I know he still posts there from time to time but the place certainly went downhill after he stopped being admin. That was around the time they came up with the ridiculous Codes of Conduct. There's more about it here:

http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtop ... =4&t=16839

Oh...but to keep the thread on topic...speaking of Quest, this amused me:



questreviews.jpg

Ah, Quest users are always good for a laugh