Is Wolfgaming finally done?

[Kenadian]

Usually when the domain expires, any hits on it take it to the last registrars website.

It looks as if the server itself went down and took the site with it or they just gave up and took everything down.

 

[Wapwap]

In some way it's kinda sad it had come to this, but Wolf was basically doomed 5 years ago when the shit hit the fan. I'm a little surprised it stayed 'alive' for that long.

I still carry my memories of all the great times and moments we've had there. Just an amazing time that was. I guess that's how we should remember Wolf. Luckily i've had the pleasure to meet up again with a lot of you people, hopefully more will follow!

 

[Kenadian]

Very well said Wappy and I couldn't agree more. I had some really great times at Wolf and I'm lucky that those eclipse the bad memories I took away as well.

Anyway, my issues focus more around Rob than they do the community in toto.

 

[Happyclam]

I never really had a problem with Joe or Rob, myself. I'm pretty simple and I just wanted my own gaming experience to be good. I enjoyed the community enough to pay for it and stick around. I was there when the shit went down, but didn't really know any details. I was far enough away from the issue that it didn't bother me to keep in touch with the people involved and not have to deal with the baggage of what happened. Heh. I tried to play BF3 on Wolf, but with the server population always being 0, it wasn't worth it to me. I want to play games, not wait around to play games. I realize you have to build up community and population, but that community got gutted a long time ago.

What bothered me most was when they got Heartsmasher to run the site and he basically just used it as his experimental playground, which made it annoying to have to redo all your settings every other time you visited the site.

Oh, and blame Jezebel for this. She said tm would totally sex me up.

 

[Jezebel]

Oh, and blame Jezebel for this. She said tm would totally sex me up.

Of course. tm does what I say ... and I'm pretty sure he will enjoy it

 

[Kitlope]

He got a BF3 server and tried to reignite WGN, sent out emails and what not to try and rekindle it all. Last I heard he cancelled the server as it just sat empty.

Yup. I lurked a lot around this time wondering if it actually was going to work but between the lack of members and most of them being realism FH fanatics I knew it was not to be. I also liked Rob's answer to everything... "get in the server and play!" Of course, when there's no one else in the server, playing with yourself gets old fast (except for d00k). The best was the "Admins needed" thread - the server wasn't even online yet but a half dozen people volunteered, some even registered having just 1 post to run this server that didn't even exist yet. Then, after about 6 weeks and Rob figuring out the server was going nowhere, he just disappeared into the abyss that is the internet. Old face's did drop by in the dmz but never stuck around long.

It looks as if the server itself went down and took the site with it or they just gave up and took everything down.

Not sure if you remember but Wolfservers and I'm assuming Wolfgaming was bought up by Art of War 2 or 3 years ago. Teamspeak is still up though - have it bookmarked as a backup in case TLB ts goes down. Works quite well since nobody is ever on it to kick us off.

What bothered me most was when they got Heartsmasher to run the site and he basically just used it as his experimental playground, which made it annoying to have to redo all your settings every other time you visited the site.

Couldn't have described it better myself, although I never knew about the settings thing since I hadn't logged with my Kitlope account since the ruckus that went down in April 2007. I watched THS over the next few years pretty much lock down the entire site, probably because of spam. However, when your a site in need of attracting members it's never a good idea to put that kind of wall up. Anybody else ever notice that, other than Joe's early "we gonna be the best community the internets has ever seen" fist pumping raves that it was like nobody really cared if they got more members. I think the FH guys were in their comfort zone much too long playing their dying game and other than Rob trying to spark some interest with Bf3 the site just slowly whittled away to nothing.

I guess we can all say it was a learning experience.

 

[Kitlope]

I did a little digging around over at the Forgotten Hope Forums thinking that Dago Red or someone would post about the downtime. This was posted on June 7 2012 by Dago:

I think Carrion is on vacation yes, but there are still some 4 or 5 wolf admins active to light up the WaW server each thursday (and help out on Friday too).

Before more of you pm me here, yes wolf forums are down and I don't know why. I went to wolf servers forums right away to talk to someone, but they are down too -- so we're broke. If anyone has a non-forum contact for THS or someone at wolfservers use it and let me know what you hear!

Or maybe this is just the last death spazm and the end of 12 years of Wolf.

http://fhpubforum.warumdarum.de/index.php?topic=16791.105


The last death spazm? LOL you noticed! 12 years of Wolf? Tsk Tsk Dago, you should know better than that... closer to 10 years. Looks like once again the plug was pulled out from under management. Where have I seen that before?

 

[PepsiChic]

This thread has been an interesting read...more so with the names attached to it.

Still....

I might open a bottle of Sierra Mist to celebrate this news...

 

[tmtm]

Ok, now that I'm up and running I can dive into this mess.

However, it's been bittersweet though watching the "dream" fall totally apart by two complete morons that let greed destroy something that was pretty neat at one time. Good riddance.

I do owe Rob some thanks though because he showed me how not to run a website. The guy was thankless, greedy and could care less about the people helping make his site successful and even though he doesn't own it anymore, I'm glad none of it ultimately worked out for him....... BTW, sorry for my demeanour but I've never met anyone online I've had less respect for than xxxGiJoe.

This is about it. That community was a hobby. A little corner of the internet filled with like-minded people that enjoyed playing games together. Attempting to use the (considerable) goodwill Wolf had built up to make money was incredibly greedy.

And as a note: I wasn't around during the big fallout and don't really know what happened...

You were lucky you missed it.

They should have been thanking both of them, offering them a stake in WGN at a financial level. Especially Paul who poured himself into getting that place on an even keel and making it self sufficient. Ultimate respect for that guy.

This. Not for me, but for him. I was excited to help get Wolfservers going in the beginning, but it didn't take long for me to realize that wasn't a thing to help our community, but instead was a naked money grab (kind of like the last time I stayed at Duke's place). When the split occurred and we became two separate little islands I knew that a collision was coming eventually. I had hoped we could make a clean break. I kind of always expected things to blow up, but I was shocked and a little taken aback by the bitterness shown by Joe and Rob.

I shouldn't be surprised at all. Anybody that's ever partnered with Rob has eventually fallen out with him. Anybody remember Hobbes? And what ultimately happened to that worthless meatbag Joe?

I wish we could have been more aggressive about making a clean break back then.

I conversed with Joe tirelessly prior to their return and although I didn't agree with what they were doing, I did try and help settle both sides during their return.

I know you were sensitive as to how some of us would perceive that, and I want to tell you again that I don't have any problem with it. Zero.

I still carry my memories of all the great times and moments we've had there. Just an amazing time that was. I guess that's how we should remember Wolf. Luckily i've had the pleasure to meet up again with a lot of you people, hopefully more will follow!

I can't believe I'm about to type this... As usual, the Waptard is spot on. I couldn't agree more.

Oh, and blame Jezebel for this. She said tm would totally sex me up.

The line to get sexed up by me starts over there----->. Shower first. Don't forget like someone else did. (Duke)


Wolf's death was long overdue, and my only regret is that I didn't get to pour gasoline on that shambling corpse and burn it myself. The fact that it can disappear from existence and only a couple of FH grognards notice it's missing tells you all you need to know. Maybe I'll buy the domain in 2014 and we can do it all again, with Paul and I playing the villains this time.

 

[Engnr]

I don't make a good villain. Maybe that's where I fall short. Oh well it takes all types I guess. :dance2:

 

[PepsiChic]

You were lucky you missed it.

It depends on where you stood at the time. At first I was very upset, (ask Duke i flooded his pm box! sorry Duke <3 )

Now when I look back, I find the whole leaving thing very entertaining... my little "posse" went out with a hell of a bang and Im proud of each of them for standing up against certain individuals who were corrupting the very heart of what WGN had become while under Duke and Engnr's care.

If anything upsets me, its the fact that so many good people, ment so little to the ones who took over. I ADORE my online friends, when we left WGN most of them travelled from all over America and Canada to meet me and Fireblade, we went camping on numerous trips, did a huge road trip and they came to our wedding. They arent just "internet friends" they are family.....and the fact that the WOLF family was torn apart by greed (and IMO some nasty people under Rob and Joe) breaks my heart.

I take things personally, Im big hearted and people mean a lot to me, out of everything that was lost in WGN...."family" was the biggest loss of all.

 

[mondo]

Now when I look back, I find the whole leaving thing very entertaining... my little "posse" went out with a hell of a bang and Im proud of each of them for standing up against certain individuals who were corrupting the very heart of what WGN had become while under Duke and Engnr's care.

Actually that was extremely de-constructive. Myself, TM, Engy, Duke, Kit, Vision, Oracle, JK, NT, wappy (no disrespect to Duke but for a long time the three site admins were myself, Thad and Paul; then wappy, NT and Duke came back to join us) and a few others had poured thousands of hours in WGN between 2002 and when Rob and Joe came back. Some of the antics between the FH crew had us pulling our hair out with frustration.

It might seem a little brutal but it often came off as a bunch of kids had come into our house and started having temper tantrums over a computer game, which none of us much wanted anyway.

For a long while the only thing that stopped us pulling the plug on the FH server and removing admin rights for 90% of people was Paul. The only reason we didn't ban the entire 'evil' guys was Paul. Thats not a slight on him at all, he was the voice of reason most of the time and we looked up to him because of that.

But look at it from our perspective, you didn't see most of the behind the scenes problems that we had when Rob and Joe came back, but the antics of some of the forum members at that time really didn't help matters at all and it all came together with our internet home which we'd carefully built up over years coming down around us, which was extremely upsetting at times.

It left me for years feeling quite bitter towards a number of people. I think in some respects it even changed me as a person, some for the better but also some for the worse.

 

[PepsiChic]

Mondo, at the point we left WGN was already too far gone to be saved, there was a valient effort, but not even long after we left, the rest of you did too. I dont think us leaving had any bigger inpact on what was happening then with the sh1t storm that Joe and Rob had brought with them coming back from the dead.

Also...we didnt have a whole lot to do with FH, we ran the BF2 servers and the CSS sevrers and had them populated 95% of the time. The only time we "admined" the FH server was when it was dead, (ie everyone from wolf was in bed) and even then we managed to get that server populated to at least half capacity at those times.

that though seemed to be our "undoing" certain people didnt like that we would go into the empty FH server, change the map to a popular map, have people join, and bascially change the maps as to the publics requests to KEEP it populated in the normally dead hours. Not that anyone cared to ask what we were doing and instead used it as an excuse to oust Fireblade. I know he wasnt much loved in WGN by the older members, but overall he knew how to maintain, and fill 4 different types of servers, when we left ALL those servers died.

Im still bitter about how we were treated, Engnr did the best he could to take care of us and I'll always have the utmost respect for him and Duke. Everyone who treated us like crap though I dont have the time of day to waste on them anymore. Its just not worth getting stressed about.

Also you'd be wrong to think that my group leaving didnt cause a lot of hurt, upset and distress for us too, a lot of the guys who left had been with WGN a LONG LONG time. It was their online gaming home and it was falling down around them. At the end of the day though, they didnt like the way people were being treated, and that their hard work for WGN, unrecongised and unappreciated was having a noose tightened around it.

I dont think there willl be another place like WGN...but maybe, thats a good thing. because when it all goes wrong, it causes a lot of damage. :icon_sad:

 

[Kenadian]

I left for quite a while to deal with personal issues.

At the time of my original hiatus from Wolfgaming, I was starting to feel put off by what I was seeing in the Staff Forums.

I was very much dragged into Pentarix being banned and that in itself was hard on me. Not only was I trying to smooth it over, Pent himself just wasn't listening to reason as he thought going out loud was the best way to go, bad decision Pent my friend.

I also started noticing Rob and his little temper tantrums and I just didn't have it in me to put up with his BS. In fact what bothered me the most is the way he'd just go off on people; people whom I had the utmost of respect for and people I truly thought of as friends.

There's a laundry list of things he did that I just can't believe (maybe I just don't want to) but that combined with personal issues is why I left originally.

I created Lifesupporters and worked it for a while and after a few years, tm, Engnr and I were loosely conversing over my possible return. After all, I loved Wolfgaming and felt at that time it was still important enough to me to try and return.

I was very much involved in two nasty situations; one being removing Pepsi from Staff and two the return of Joe and Rob.

Pepsi and I have conversed numerous times over what transpired and in all honesty, it was a crappy situation that the Staff faced and tried to deal with in the best possible matter. There was a lot of conflicting input and emotions at that time and while I understand it, I still will never get over how childish some handled it.

I can't believe how important it was for some to know the details of things that were simply none of their business. When something happens to a member onsite, it is between that member only and the Staff, that's it. If the member wants to share the details then that's their prerogative but asking Staff to divulge potentially sensitive details is not only ridiculous, it's ignorant.

I have never nor will I ever share details of what others are going through. Many people confide in me because they know what their telling me will never go beyond the two of us. I will never risk this level of trust for anyone, ever.

Shortly thereafter I was in communication with Anubis/Joe. I knew they were coming back and I knew Anubis was the kind of guy that really didn't sugar coat things nor was he interested in discussing; action is what THEY believe was needed.

I say THEY because Joe at least had a backbone but at no time did he ever act autonomously. Wolf at some point had gone from Gaming Community to Business and that was how they were going to deal with it and heads were going to roll because of it.

I still to this day get along very much with Anubis even though I know that he isn't very popular with many. He's always been straight with me and I respect that.

Rob on the other hand is a spineless twit and I wouldn't cross the street to piss on him if he were on fire.

The only positive I can say when I finally put Wolf behind me once and for all is that I did EVERYTHING in my power to get the Wolf of old back. I'm still not entirely sure where and when we lost the "us" but we lost it and Management Returning encapsulated it.

 

[Kenadian]

I also want to say for the record that we have a chance here to do it right and we're taking it very seriously.

Fragtard is hopefully a place that will be know of for being fun, inviting, supportive and most of all, friendly. I've always had a "member first" mentality so I hope we can make this a place that many can consider home.

We're not interested in leasing gaming servers, we're not interested in oral with EA; we're interested in people and the entertainment value of gaming together!

 

[Engnr]

Time to let the past lay. I had long talks with many people during those times, Pepsi, Fireblade, Mondo, even GIJoe. I counted everyone my friend, everyone. TM and I wanted WOLFGaming to be a place where friends got together to play games, nothing more. GIJoe had other ideas for WOLFGaming. So TM and I needed to be removed. Sure I felt hurt and hard done by at the time but when I saw the mass exodus that followed me, you all lifted my spirits. Back then we weren't ready to resurrect and I certainly didn't want to do the admin thing anymore. At pretty much the same time I had a bunch of stuff going on in my RL, cheating spouse, divorce and losing my kids, well it was a low point let's just say. At the end of the day, it was years ago. I count everyone here as my friend and I think Duke has the right idea. I have both kids living with me full-time, remarried and it seems the right time all round to put the "gang" back together.

Were mistakes made? Sure. I made mistakes and I will continue to make mistakes. Pepsi had a following and a good head on her shoulders, sure it may have gone against some other's opinions, but I saw her ability to bring people together. Fireblade is a crass son of a bitch via his online persona, something that he rarely lets go of. I personally think he should drop it, but that's him. The persona only bothers me when some of my friends are bothered by it. Heck he and Jez talked just the other night and you should have heard it, but she didn't mind. Still I have talked to Keith on some of the rare occasions that he has dropped the persona, not a bad guy honestly. All talk, no bite. Sorry Keith.

Evil Pumpkin and I had a pretty good friendship for a time. He and his gang all had, yet again, another online persona to live up to, but I trusted him to do what was right for the servers so we could get them populated again. Mistake on my part, maybe, but I didn't think so.

Let's face it. The rules at WOLF were somewhat strict, but it more or less worked. I do believe there were a few nights where the "Grenadiers" went forth and caused havoc on other servers, not too much but still. Heck we all were young at one point, some are still damn kids! But in the end, we were a family, with family scuffles, yes? I miss the WOLF days, and I would love to have those days back where the server was full of my friends and I could escape RL for a short time. This time it will be with my wife and even my son when he's not too busy playing games with his friends! My kids and Beth have noticed me laughing and smiling more in the last two days than I have in a very long time.

I'm ready to try again, and I'm ready for WOLF to be buried.

 

[mondo]

Pepsi, I can't remember the specifics about when you guys were removed as admins but what I do remember is we as a site admin group, super mods and BF mods had carefully nurtured a reputation for years, well before you guys appeared. A bunch of new admins had basically pushed our limits and I believe what happened is Fireblade got caught out breaking a rule and someone complained.

You have to remember that we'd always removed admins for any infraction, any. That is how we got our servers to no.1. This was modus operandi from day 1. So when someone complained about an admin and could back it up, we just acted like we always did and I believe only probably twice in 3 or 4 years did we do that (some guy with pizza in his name, but he took it like a man and stayed around and later on he won our trust back). I don't know how tm and engy saw it but me personally (and a few others, no names), the FH community caused allot of problems for us, that server did, cliques within the community did, WGN had a reputation which is or was more important than any individual.

Until the latter days of FH we only asked people to be admins, even contemplating putting a post out there asking for people to volunteer was a new thing.

We'll probably not agree on a lot about what happened, but at that time I was one of 3, then 6 people entrusted to run that site which was bigger than any of us. So my perspective was one which saw a member or members causing trouble so the answer is to boot them.

Its harsh I'd agree but when you're running a site with 100 daily users, 300+ weekly active users and 30,000+ registered members (we purged a great deal!) and a number of different communities within communities, its hard to keep everyone happy. And as far as I remember it wasn't anyone being kicked out, it was admin rights being removed from certain members. Really it shouldn't have been a big deal and certainly could have been handled allot better.

 

[Kenadian]

Very well said Engnr :friends:

That was then, this is now. We all have a chance to start anew on a clean slate so lets run with it

I can say with total honesty that I'm very glad to see you all here and honored you would take the time to join up and share your thoughts.

 

[Shilka]

Mondo, at the point we left WGN was already too far gone to be saved, there was a valient effort, but not even long after we left, the rest of you did too. I dont think us leaving had any bigger inpact on what was happening then with the sh1t storm that Joe and Rob had brought with them coming back from the dead.

I can only agree, the whole rob and joe shitstorm was purposely designed to flush people out who imo deserved a lot better. They offered me to stay but just the way Engnr got treated was enough for me to not want to stay. Ofcourse a lot of this happend behind the scenes so a lot of people including the bulk of the admins never knew what really happend.

I can't recall innocent stuff like mapchanging ever being a problem, there were a bunch of really bad communication and attitude problems with other people. For example at a certain time we got a lot of complaints from people being banned for additional rules that were agreed on by a small group of admins on teamspeak, without us knowing about those 'fh specific rules', them nowhere being posted on the forums nor communicated in game let alone the general public having any chance of knowing them even if they had wanted to know.
People were getting banned left and right for not attacking the right flag, for defending bases that didn't have priority according to admins, for 'wasting assets' iow not attacking as fast/clever as FH die-hards would like to see etc. When we tried to get a discussion going about all this, in order to get some stuff in writing on the forums and server announcements so at least players would have a chance to know about them all we got was a shitstorm about how we had never put any effort in adminning ourselves and how much they felt their ego was being trampled upon because of us wanting to discuss it.

Next to the fact how untrue that is, I know people like wapwap and me already had around 3000 admin hours per person on wolf BF before FH even exsisted, it's hard to discuss and reason with people if their only reaction is; FU, we adminned a server for 6 months so we know better and therefore you shouldn't interfere. Which completely ignored the fact that we spent, as mondo sais, thousands of hours and 5 years to build up wolf and as a result were able to say; here guys, you can have an FH server, you can admin it as long as you admin it the wolf way.

FH adminning went hardcore, which really wouldn't have been a problem as long as it would have been discussed and communicated. However part of the admins decided to completely circumvent the rest of wolf staff and turn the whole thing into a us vs them, eventhough as far as we were concerned they were part of staff. But in the eyes of some FH admins, if you weren't expert in FH, you weren't alowed to discuss FH behind the scenes, not if you had thousands of hours of admin experience, not if you spent 5 years day and night building up wolf, not if you were running the site, not if you were the one who had to receive and act on all the complaints coming in. And that's the hairpulling frustration mondo is talking about. It all ended with engnr basicly saying, let them have it, and the rest is history.

All nothing compared to what rob and joe had planned for the end ofcourse.

Well, it's water under the bridge now, and it was a great though in the end thorougly frustrating and at times downright painfull learning experience. At least that's the way I look at it...

 

[PepsiChic]

Pepsi, I can't remember the specifics about when you guys were removed as admins but what I do remember is we as a site admin group, super mods and BF mods had carefully nurtured a reputation for years, well before you guys appeared. A bunch of new admins had basically pushed our limits and I believe what happened is Fireblade got caught out breaking a rule and someone complained.

You have to remember that we'd always removed admins for any infraction, any. That is how we got our servers to no.1. This was modus operandi from day 1. So when someone complained about an admin and could back it up, we just acted like we always did and I believe only probably twice in 3 or 4 years did we do that (some guy with pizza in his name, but he took it like a man and stayed around and later on he won our trust back).

This frustrates me somewhat, and not you personally but the situation that surrounded both Fireblades banning and my groups exit.

GooGel was the one who complained. Im not niave nor stupid. He complained that Fireblade was changing maps to the same map over and over again...no-one came to him and asked him anything, instead they removed his admin rights for ALL the servers.

What actually happened was *I* was changing the maps, like i said previous, the Fh server was dead, at its usual dead hour, we changed the map to a more public appealing map, and it worked, people joined the server, when the map rotation continued people left the server, we again decided to swop the map, we played the same map twice in an attempt to get people to join and again it worked and people came back, we then decided to fore-go the rotation and let the public pick which maps to play next. during this time only 1 WOLF member joined, and that was Googel, he then complained - I guess he didnt like the map!

Fireblades admin rights were removed from all servers - it was completely unfair, and i'll maintain that as long as i live! We did nothing wrong, our attempt to populate a dead server worked and we got punished for it, and in the process, having lost admin rights for the 2 BF2 servers and the CSS server we worked so hard on they all died pretty much instantly.

Fireblade was with WOLF a lot longer then myself, as Engnr said he has a unique personality hes outgoing and says what hes thinking. However, if you truely spent the time to get to know him, hes on top of his game, he knows how to run a server, he knows how to get people to populate that server and spends hours on it to keep it running smoothly, he takes it very seriously. He also cares a great deal about anyone who becomes a friend.

Im not just saying this crap becuase im married to the guy, theres a *reason* I married him and its not because hes an a$$hat. Ask anyone who really knows him.

At the end of the day he was another person let down by the whole thing and it hurt him a great deal more then perople realize.