Welcome to the year 3009, the Armor States of the Web Wide World was not always the way we see it today. A lush land full of technology that never messes up and everything is guarded by what we like to call Mod-bots so there is no longer fear of flame wars, or stealing of wealth via small talk(AKA spamming). No today we are going to travel back to a much simpler time when this great nation was nothing but a small group of entrepreneurs, and even though we know little about this time because of how it suddenly vanished in history and had what seems to be little if no archives we believe from our evidence that they were from the Newgrounds,now known as the Oldground Kingdom, who from what we believe wanted to create a place where they could market their manufactured goods, and make products that they could sell to the Newgrounds, and possibly to other countries that were competing as flash economic societies. We no little of what flash products look like at the time, but that they were not 5 dimensional like the ones we have today. One thing we do know was that the leader of this groups name was Dan McNeely, soon to be known as King McNeely the I, and while we have yet to find any evidence to when he died or whether he ever did as some would like to believe, we do know that he was the one to lead the small group to something much greater, but that is for later. For now though we shall tell you about the first records of our great nation. When Google Spiders still roamed the Web there was the Lands of Gondor(Man no wonder they got sued huh?)After much study we at the Armor Games Historians Guild believe to this day that it was a savage place filled with things such as orcs, trolls, and all sorts of nasty creatures, but our founding fathers managed to survive. Though the largest mystery to this day is what happened to the original camps they created there. It was not long before they somehow created the Armor Castle. No one truly knows how they accomplished it, or what motivated them to build a Castle with so very few people, but many believe that a force from another world may have intervened such as a Monolith to allow them to accomplish this feat. This place would be known as the Armorlands...
Not only that, but everyone within the City looked the same labeled by nothing but a name they chose upon registration to have labeled onto their clothes they were practically faceless in this city with nothing that could make them visually stand out from each other.
Sorry I just don't exactly pay attention to punctuation that much honestly. I will tend to follow a few simply rules here and there out of routine, but I am really more concerned about the content a lot of the time over how its presented, though I suppose I do need to work on that.
The starting years? Just so I have it right, January 2008 was when it was released right?
Maybe if I share what I remember with you guys, it might help tie a few things together.
I joined at the end of March...the first Sonny and The Last Stand were released around then though I can't remember the exact timing. Devoidless and Dragonmistress became moderator sometime in May, I believe, and Ubertuna shortly...before? that.
Moegreche and Devoidless (and to a lesser extent myself) also teamed up to establish "the Great Debate", a series of accounts on which people could engage in a rigorous intellectual discussion on certain topics. Moe, ever the visionary, wanted to encourage structured and critical thinking. If ever mentioned, Devoidless will undoubtedly boast that he beat me, and was the only person to have done so. In my defence, all it demonstrated was that he knew how to search the Star Wars Wiki, and that I'm not as much of a Star Wars geek as he is :P
The whole "switchfoot" stuff happened around the start of June. John's Compulse Tournament was held not long after that, around the time I became a moderator (end of June). Shortly after that, SHOPS was disbanded due to corruption of certain internal elements.
In July, I think, was the scene of the Great Reshuffle. The subforums were all moved around, a lot of spam threads were deleted and the first "no AP" section, the Forum Games was established. It was a few months until the Newcomers Forum was established.
What else was there? kingofgames made the big push for both number 1 and the first gold king rank, heralding the advent of ranking madness. starscreamer, the next points king, went mad shortly after and publicly broadcast threats of suicide all over the forums. It wasn't until early this year that firetail got very active again and took back that rank, and has recently been usurped by Adam. Coupled with this is the growing movement bemoaning the emphasis on points and ranking, along with the well-known fact that a lot of the top 100 do tend to engage in "criminal and other undesirable activities" including covert mass spam, heavy use of inane messenger chat and mini-modding.
No history would be complete without talking about the art contests and the user-based armatar contests too, but that's a lot of detail. There was a time where the Art forum really wasn't particularly active. As far as I can remember, it was actually shottytotheface who started the epic "draw mudkip" thread, which spawned the infamous "butt-rash" joke (courtesy of Kingryan's perverted interpretation of my...perverted pictures...), which remains probably the only thread that you can see Carlie, John AND DAN posting on the same page. Dan (and John) have maybe made one forum appearance since, and I wouldn't know where to find it.
Why am I harping on about this for so long? Because it was really from this that the idea for an art contest was spawned. Carlie was the original judge, throughout the first and initially the second incarnation. Arguably the ASC has one of the most distinctive histories of any established structure in ArmorGames. It's the scene of many takeovers, passovers, drama and, well...art theft and banning :\\ Even I left a bit of a stern message when I resigned from judging after three months of it (not least because I went overseas).
From the ASC people wondered why there was nothing for poetry and much later on, writing, and so those contests were also established.
Estel became a moderator...nuts, I can't remember when, but he was the next, followed by Zophia in December, shortly before I left for a month.
The other bit of history (still in the making) would be the OCT/STG (whatever you want to call it) created by Cenere, the Mixed World Tournament. This would where the manifestation of AG personalities came to the fore, with much discussion of recognised figures on AG. Incidentally the mechanics of this tournament were what the current Way of Moderation is based upon.
Alright, that's much more than enough from me. It's definitely patchy but hey, Crimsonblade's the one writing the account :P
I forgot: Nemo became a moderator after Estel and before Zophia, I think.
And Asherlee left in July, and DM retired in September. Rumour has it that they have been spotted in the area, but no sources can confirm or deny this...
