1

Announcements & Such / Unfortunately, we've had to switch to admin approval for new accounts

« on: October 30, 2018, 04:13:23 am »

120 seperate spam accounts were registered, and all of them get by both the CAPTCHA and the random questions, which means someone in a sweatshop is being paid to completely bury forums in spam. We have switched to requiring admin approval for new accounts, as this is the only way to stop this.

Everyone is still welcome to join, everyone is still welcome to recruit anyone they'd like, no questions asked. The admin approval is purely to stop us from getting crapped on my mountains of spam.

If you see any spam accounts we missed, please either post them here or click report so we can nuke them from orbit.

2

Thread Games / Re: The 3 word story game - Round 1

« on: July 05, 2018, 01:02:55 am »

In spite of

3

Thread Games / Re: Line association

« on: July 05, 2018, 01:02:21 am »

Ice Ice Baby

4

CC General Discussion / Finding old members

« on: July 04, 2018, 09:09:29 pm »

If you're reading this shortly after I post it, odds are decent you got the mass mail that went out. Unfortunately, many of those forum accounts were created 8-10 years ago, and not many people update their contact info in their profile, so some emails bounced, some went into the void, and some are likely sitting in someone's spam folder, never to see the light of day.

However, many of us have each other friended in various other systems (Discord, Steam, Skype, etc), and various other games, know members IRL, or otherwise can reach many old CCers that our email server can't. If you know any such members that may be interested in coming back, please let them know we're up and running again... we'll probably get far more people through direct contact than the high AoE, low impact email burst.

5

Introductions / Re: The_black_assalant returns as Faith

« on: July 04, 2018, 09:03:11 pm »

Welcome back!

I'm not sure if we still have other Runescapers, but there's probably a few, and I'll add a forum for it if there is.

6

Introductions / Re: I Received an E-mail

« on: July 04, 2018, 09:01:15 pm »

Welcome back!

I wouldn't worry about a preference for fora over chats, as CC's been a mix of both for most of its history. Even in our KoC glory days, where we got something insane like 150k posts in 2 years, we had a decently active IRC room, and after our IRC server croaked, we were running an XFire room for years after that. Discord's simply new, better tech, for something we've pretty much always done. MMOs also usually have in-game chat rooms, so there's that as well - even most of our browser games have/had a chat interface. So... our 2019 collective post count probably isn't going to look like our 2005 one, but this site should still be active and running, and with several of us planning on doing things like thread games and play-by-post RPs, there should be a good number of people checking in regularly (which in turn means anyone starting a thread should find people posting in it). It's true that the internet collectively has shifted less in a forum and more in a chat direction (primarily because using forum software on a cell phone is a royal pain), but it's not as large a shift as you might think - they're two different communication media, and they both excel at different kinds of conversations. New tech doesn't really change that fact.

Lack of time affects all of us to at least some extent - I doubt any of us have the free time we did in high school or college (though we'll find new people who do). The thing is, we don't need to.. CC's always been run democratically, with people dropping in and out as time permits, and our list of games has always included a couple of quick browser things that require minimal time (Forge of Empires currently, we could probably get KoL going again as well if people are interested, and certain cell phone games wouldn't be bad choices as well), as well as several people not actually playing any of our stuff and simply hanging out. This won't be any less true in the new generation of the group.

The community is one big, happy chaotic mess by design, and the idea is that there's always something for everyone to do, with whatever time they're willing and able to commit, and everyone is always welcome.

7

General Development / Welcome to Game Dev

« on: June 25, 2018, 07:47:36 pm »

This is for discussion of all aspects of game development - sharing your project, asking for help, discussing techniques, discussing the medium in general, etc.

If you'd like a subforum for a major project (especially if it's mainly/entirely CCers building it, but it doesn't have to be), please ask and I'll make it.

8

Play-by-Post / The 1 minute explanation of what this forum is for

« on: June 25, 2018, 07:26:07 pm »

Play-by-post is exactly what it sounds like - an RP that runs a post at a time. This can range from simply a cooperative story, to a standard tabletop ruleset, just being run a post at a time.

Since each thread -is- the RP in question, anyone creating one should of course state the setting, rules, etc, in the initial post. If you're doing something more complex - say, a world where each thread is a play-by-post RP, but there's an overarching setting and characters, feel free to request a subforum to run that out of.

Anyone is free to run either type of RP here, as well as to discuss the medium, ask for help making characters, etc.

9

Freeform RP / Info and Discord RP server

« on: June 25, 2018, 07:20:52 pm »

The CC Discord RP server is at: https://discord.gg/JzMVQ6Z.

This is for freeform RP - generally more story-based, system-less stuff, where everyone simply says what they do. These can be GMed or not, depending on the setup. Feel free to discuss anything related to that type of RP here, whether or not it's being done through CC.

I've made this a separate forum from the tabletop system-based campaigns, as they tend to have a very different feel to them, and to play quite differently. If splitting the two seems pointless, please let me know, and I'll open a poll as to whether this should indeed be its own forum, or if we should simply have "play-by-post" and "everything else".

10

Tabletop Campaigns / Info and Discord RP server

« on: June 25, 2018, 07:12:57 pm »

The CC Discord RP server link is: https://discord.gg/JzMVQ6Z.

Welcome to the tabletop campaigns forum! Feel free to discuss any RP campaign you're involved in, whether as GM or player. Discussion of things that you're thinking of running is also fine, as are recruitment threads, and threads that simply discuss the hobby in general. Games discussed do NOT have to be CC-run.

If you are GMing a campaign of any kind, and would like your own subforum for it, simply ask, and one will be created.

11

Forge of Empires / Shameless recruiting link thread :p

« on: June 22, 2018, 12:22:24 am »

If you'd like to post your recruitment link, please do so here. If you're joining the game, please do it through someone's link... they get free stuff.

Mine is: https://en.forgeofempires.com/?invitation=9408739-en10-l&ref=player_invite_link

12

Announcements & Such / And we're up!

« on: June 22, 2018, 12:02:08 am »

Welcome back to all!

Our forum software was so old that there was no way to do a straight upgrade, so we had to do a whole lot of copypasta to get everything restored. All of the really glaring errors have been fixed at the time of posting this, but there's probably still a few more minor issues that haven't been addressed yet. If you find any, please let us know and we'll track down the bug.

Yes, I'm aware some colors need to be changed, we'll be toying with those over the next couple of days to get everything or at least almost everything in CC colors, ideally without making anything else invisible.

Please note that our logs were -not- preserved. For the most part, this isn't an issue, but it does have the side effect that nothing is marked read for anyone. This unfortunately means everyone will need to do a quick check through the forums for what they haven't read and want to, then click "mark all as read". This is a one-time issue; once you hit the button, posts will show read or not as expected going forward.

13

Announcements & Such / Major downtime and upgrade

« on: May 06, 2018, 05:29:56 pm »

The bad news: Our OS is ancient, and so is our forum software... to the point we can't even get security patches anymore. To fix this, we'll need to nuke the server from orbit and rebuild it. This will take quite some time.
The worse news: With Tinywarz, RO, and KoC all pretty much dead, activity here has dropped to near zero.

The good news: Sonya and I aren't stuck in the job from hell anymore, and actually have time to fix the server and get the community going again.

2 days after posting this, this website will go down for a very long period of time, including not even loading a homepage initially. Barring anything really unexpected happening, it will be back up by the end of this month.

Once we're back online, we're going to be putting in a large effort to contact as many old CCers as we can, as well as getting groups going in multiple games.

Our Discord is of course up and running, and will not be affected by the site going boom. If you don't yet have access to the Discord and would like to join, please ask pretty much any CCer by pretty much any means. (We don't post the link because we don't want to deal with spambots, but everyone is both welcome to join and invite others to it.)

14

CC General Discussion / Looks like there's finally a viable XFire replacement

« on: May 15, 2016, 06:34:39 pm »

There's a program called Discord. It lightweight, free, doesn't appear to have any ads, and seems to basically be what XFire should've been.

-You can create a server for a group, under which users can be assigned any permission settings, including allowing multiple admins.
-You can run multiple rooms, both text and voice, and they'll be under the same general side icon. These can also be sub-controlled, so if we need say... a more private room for strategizing as opposed to a public one that gets posted everywhere and is fully publicly accessible we can do that. It also allows to us split off general chat and RP, for those who are looking for one and not the other, or simply want them on separate logs. Rooms can be freely made and deleted, so if we need say... a temp room for one battle in one game, create, use, poof.
-It appears to support both the "Here's who's playing what" and the ability to run via overlay inside a game - the two main things that made XFire famous in the first place.
-It has a downloadable desktop client, downloadable phone client, and an in-browser version for when you're somewhere you don't want to or can't downloading.
-It puts everything into one icon, so you click the CC icon and there's all of our current rooms. No need to play the "where did that Skype room I haven't touched in a few days go" game?
-So far, I haven't seen any ridiculous start-up times, random crashes, rooms disappearing/renaming/changing owner for no good reason, random errors, or any of the many, many issues XFire had.

If you'd like to try it out, here's the site:
https://discordapp.com/

Here's the quick overview of what it does (including what it does that Skype won't):
https://discordapp.com/features

15

Announcements & Such / CC Updates

« on: September 19, 2015, 06:51:30 pm »

We have done (and are doing) several things to get us moving again.

1. We've launched a new site, toolsofchaos.com. This will eventually have several tools, scripts, etc for various games, as well as a wiki with info and guides on everything we play. The wiki is up at wiki.toolsofchaos.com. As it was *just* launched, there isn't much beyond a main page, but for anyone who'd like to start adding stuff, the software is ready to go. We may also try to become *the* Wiki for TW, which could help get us running. This can lead to all sorts of cool stuff, including a much more active site, a much easier time forming guilds and such, and us having an actual budget.

2. You may have noticed that our forum software version is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay outdated. This is largely because I was waiting for an API script to update to version 2, and our skin to likewise update. At the point, the second has happened, and it doesn't look like the first is ever going to. I'm going to start experiementing with v2 this weekend, and assuming it can convert our DB easily, we should soon be upgrading. If not, we're still upgrading, it's just going to take longer as I'll need to write a huge pile of SQL to do it manually.

3. With Tools of Chaos being a thing, we'll be simplifying chaoscluster.com's main page to focus on community elements - forums, chat, guilds, etc, with a link out of the toolsofchaos.com for the rest. ToC will in turn do the opposite. We're eventually looking to have accounts work on both, but this way, people can use either or both as desired.

Some minor things:
-The Iron Grip: Marauders forum has been nuked. The game was shut down several months ago, and the forum had a whole 2 posts in it, so there's no reason to keep it around.

-Everyone that was playing on the Minecraft server is currently stuck in jobs from hell and other weird schedules, so we've taken it back down. Restoring it (or starting up a new one) would take a matter of hours, and can (and will) be done as soon as there's any demand for it - we're simply avoiding paying a second server bill for something that isn't used.

-It may look like we're dead from the extremely low activity for these forums, but a good number of our members are in regular contact with each other, and we have most definitely NOT given up on CC.