Why did you close your RPG?

I closed by board due to lack of interest on my part and others. That and the freakin theme creator disappeared off the face of frickin planet and messed up my theme. I ended up going back to my original board, re-skinned it from the ground up and started fresh. I did kinda close the board when I just got a member too...but they're spelling irked me...is that bad? o.o....don't judge me.

 

Wow, so I chose almost every option. I've run a lot of forums in my time, some longer than others, though most of them have averaged about 2 years before they were/closed or died. The last three sites (the other three listed here), though...

Here & Queer: Roleplayers that I didn't like were joining but it was kinda my fault for running a slash board in the first place.
Pokemon: Prepare For Trouble!: I lost interest. I lost interest almost a YEAR before I finally called it quits and closed it.
Tellius: The drama that ensued completely killed my mood for the site. It literally gave me panic attacks to even look at the site. It made me sick to my stomach, it would churn and my throat would get tight. I don't need that crap.

 

I've only ever closed 1 roleplay site... I closed it for a mixture of several reasons.

There had been some drama that had gone on behind the scenes and it just left a very sour note for me. I wanted nothing to do with the site for the longest time and to make things better/worse (depending on your perspective) I had also gotten pretty busy too. So I left to deal with the issues and put all the drama behind me. When I returned later I just couldn't do it. I'd lost the passion for the game. I didn't care whether it lived or not.

Furthermore most people had left. And I just didn't have the time, energy or level of concern to even attempt a revival. So I ended the site.

As for what I did... I composed a "we're closed message" and posted it on the forum a week prior to the closing date. After that I turned the site into maintenance mode (disabled all posting, PM and email functions) and left it so that anyone with an account could log in to read their stories or get their profiles. I removed the chatbox so people wouldn't be spamming it.

 

I still wish I hadn't closed my old site (it ran from 2008-2013), which closed late last year. I was even working on a new version until last month. I had to close it for a few different reasons...

• THE BIG ONE: The site had been struggling to obtain new members for 14 months by the time I closed it. Mass advertising wasn't working, being active on one of the large/main RPG directories didn't work anymore. Then the week before I made the decision to close, I was informed that somebody had been attacking another site apparently on my behalf, claiming they were stealing content/original lore etc. I never approved (and never would) such actions, especially as it turns out it was a friend's site that was being attacked who had stopped communicating with me for fear I was behind the situation. I thought hard about the situation (the friend was the person who told me finally) but the damage had been done, and I made an estimation that it would take at least a year for my site (and my?) reputation to recover and for new members to come by. I'm writing books now for it instead.
  
• Age: I advertised really heavily between 2010-2013. A lot of roleplayers already knew of the site, so that wasn't helping bring in new members, and advertising only worked by guest dropping ads for that site despite trying out various methods, so I couldn't find another way that I could advertise that actually brought members in.
• Drama: my last "chunk" of members at the end wanted me to do things differently, they argued that the game mechanics didn't work (when they did if you put the time in), one got on her high-horse and started an attack-the-admin campaign alongside the attacking of mechanics, and she caused others to act like this. Once I'd booted her off (by asking her to leave and listing why) the site never recovered and others left.
• Wrong Roleplayer Type: The site was always meant to be fast-paced and exciting in-character. It wasn't just a fantasy site, but an action one as well. Things were meant to happen, and characters were supposed to be the cause of things happening. A large amount of the roleplayers during the last year liked conversations-that-go-nowhere, coffee-shop etc kind of threads (basically the ones where nothing really happens IC, and you're left wondering why you're even posting at all). The game came to a crashing halt, I ran out of creative steam trying to keep the storyline moving and it just wasn't fun for me to thread in those sort of threads. I like my threads to have consequences :) The same roleplayers posted maybe once every two-three weeks. (The last four of us that stuck to the very end were posting once every two three days though, but we slowed down too.)
  
• Admin Drain: I don't know what else to call it, but with the above issues (especially the wrong roleplayer and the first one), I just ran out of steam. Creatively, I realised I would be better off writing solo-pieces set in the world - it would be the same as before, but this time I wouldn't be dragging other roleplayers/writers along. I would just be relying on me - I would still be coming up with all of the plot ideas, still creating the game's world by myself (but I always hogged that responsibility anyway), but there would be no pressure! I was the only staff member, and the only reason I might have considered hiring a new staff was to inject some hope and life into the site whilst I recovered. But that wasn't going to happen because the members would just shrug and maybe think about posting.

 

WELL. My boyfriend and I ran a HP RPG together. And when we broke up.... well, you can imagine what happened from there. Three years later and we've started RPing together again. But it's still a bit weird haha

 

As a website developer with (very) limited funds, I didn't close my RPG - the host did... twice!
Both times, the hosts were unable to keep up-to-date with server costs and my code (RPG) was lost.
Due to it being in a "beta/not-beta/trying to build around active players" state, the version I had was outdated.

 

I closed mine because I didn't have the time, uni drained my soul. :P

 

My first site I closed due to the site it was hosted on. Webs is absolutely awful, I wouldn't recommend it. I ended up paying for a year and then we overran the bandwidth limit, so they froze the account. After about three attempts of cutting down on bandwidth I gave up and started fresh on Proboards.

 

The first time I ever launched a board I was twelve years old. I'd been RPing for two years, and I'd already helped admin a site by that point, so I figured I was ready... But I wasn't prepared for the time commitment that comes with launching a site. Getting those first couple of members on board is really hard, and the longer it took the more personal I took it... Like, I didn't realize that it just takes time, and I didn't know much about advertising yet, so I was disheartened and closed it not long after I opened it.

 

It is a very good topic.

It was an old group long ago that closed because all the players left to make their own group... it turned out that none of the group created worked and they finally gave up on rp-ing and started writing on their own side.

I stopped when an oc of mine died... I was frustrated because all the person rp-ing his death with me dropped it in the middle.. and my beloved oc was still to be considered dead. It broke my heart more than once. I joined groups that had already small friend pack... exclusivity. I found it hard to even get in a rp, that even if I remained logged on all day. I finally decided to try and shake the internet a bit to find much more serious rp-ers.

 

My last site closed (over 2 years ago now) after being active for over 6 years; It was still active at time of closing, though not at it's peak. As the staff and a few key members started discussing the plot, we realized there was a flaw in the plot that wouldn't allow us to continue the storyline much further once the 'main objective' of the plot was reached. It would require a time-skip back in time to 'repeat' the plot, or to skip ahead (that requiring an additional plot/explanations about the plot conclusion). Neither was ideal.

Since activity was waning (we were in no way inactive though, but we didn't have any new incoming members, just oldies that stuck around to post each day), I decided it was best to end things on a good note. I closed the board with an announcement and locked the forums. Members could log in to view their accounts and archives but not to post. We also had a facebook group and I let everyone know that I would be working on a new game...

... a year later, started up a new game with a completely new plotline that wasn't related to the old one at all.

 

I've closed a couple in the past, but the main reason was lack of time. I'm a mother and RL will always come first. That said, I still have my first site that began in 2003!

 

My Star Wars role play that I basically had open from April 2011 to December 2015 (more or less) was closed because my staff members and I just kind of lost steam in trying to push for activity. Like, we tried having a major event happen and barely anyone blinked an eye at it. I hated doing it, because it made me sad, but I think what helped was that I knew it wasn't THE END, and that I'd get at least some of our most loyal members to join the new site that we decided we'd open after my spring semester. School was the other reason I felt that I needed to close it...I just wasn't around as often as I wanted to be because school was sucking up a lot of my time, and when I'd come home I just had 0 interest in doing much of anything because I was so tired. I think that little break was something that we needed.

 

I pretty much always left it up as a graveyard (if it was on a hosted platform). Can't see myself doing this for self-hosted, since that requires $$$.

 

Most of mine are in a graveyard state. Usually happens after members leave or there's way too much drama especially among staff I hired once. This was some years ago.

 

It was mostly muse towards the activity and time that cut me away from a RPG.

 

I've lost a few RPs, some because the host site died, some because they never got off the ground in the first place

 

Most of the time it was because of inactivity.

However, I'll admit one was due to IcyBoards upgrading to 1.8, which meant old skins simply did not work at all anymore. I'm not that great with coding, so it usually takes me quite a while to get everything perfect, and once it is I generally never really change anything except the colours and graphics. Since the software upgrade required me to completely rework the code (and admittedly I couldn't figure it out), I gave up. Although by this point there were only two other members active, so again lack of activity was a part of it. Asked them if they minded, and they didn't, so we shut up shop.

If I had my time over, I might seek out help with adjusting the template to fit the new version. But man, a version change which breaks a skin you love is ALWAYS a bummer regardless.

 

I've mostly been a part of other RP forums rather than GMing but I did have a short foray into creating and running a forum on my own. I worked out a pretty good system with people I liked and it seemed like it might have a future but the membership and join rate stagnated. Eventually I had to close it after people had a falling out.

 

I think I accidentally killed my first one.

It was a long-running non-canon Bleach RP. About 10 years old, actually. Interest was waning, partly because Bleach itself had been going downhill for years, but also because Real Life was claiming a lot of the playerbase while very few new people were coming in. The other GM and I decided to start working on a new RP in an original setting, figuring we could fire up the interest for something new and revitalize the writers.

Well, that much of it was successful -- too successful. I intended to run both RPs at the same time, different flavors for different moods, but as soon as we opened up, the idea of having an open, original world without the stagnation and restrictions of Bleach seemed to kill any chance of the Bleach RP continuing on. The new RP picked up fast and the old one just went silent within a few weeks.

I'm still a little sad that it ended, but 10 years is a good run for one overarching story, and our community itself is still together.