Why did you close your RPG?

Yes it certainly is a good long time and as long as the community sticks together, that's what matters, Will! It's always hard to see things we really enjoy go away.

 

Such a tough thing to assess. I think, honestly, I put a lot of pressure on myself as staff to do great, be better, write more, have more members! - that any even slight lull in activity stresses me out. Between that and flaky staff, it's a hard road sometimes.

 

I only put one on "inactive" since I was an admin there and the board was getting inactive. Plus other staff issues.

 

I recently closed a long-running Harry Potter game after 10 years, mainly for behind the scenes drama. Most of the older original players had left the game while others would pop in, write for a couple of weeks then disappear for months on end again. Newer players would write acceptable bios for characters, then write posts that were completely different to what was in their own bio and in ways that stood in stark contrast with the game itself. Major plot points were ignored ad nauseum. And somehow through it all, I was attacked personally for being a 'meanie' to put it nicely, when reminding people that there was actually a story arc that all subplots had to acknowledge. That hurt, closing the game. But at the same time, it felt like putting down a rabid dog.

 

It's sad when the members slowly leave or become inactive, and then if you're in a niche genre like Dragonriders of Pern, Play-by-Email, it's really hard to attract new writers. Forums now dominate most RP genres it seems.

 

My last site, well my Co-admin got super sick, my other Co-admin got super busy with school
And then my grandfather got cancer, so I just left, gave up. I didn't have the heart to do anything at all but spend hours playing video games. It was pretty traumatic. That was 2 years ago and I've only just started running a site again.

 

For me it has always been the lack of interest. Members tend to ebb and flow over time with Harry Potter boards (which is what I mostly did), and the Potter era boards really died out so I had no one to write with consistently.

 

Most recently, I dropped mine because I had a lot of real life stuff going on. I've been considering starting one up again, though.

 

I had to close the first rpg forum I ever made after several years. I was leaving the country for several months, and wouldn't be able to maintain the site. I had several staff though that I thought I could trust, and leave in charge. They ended up completely abandoning the site and letting it die. When I got home the site was too far gone to revive. The staff I'd trusted had gone MIA, and all the members had moved on.

 

I've closed RPs for various reasons, most often for drama or inactivity, though.

 

My RPG ran for about 6 years after I took control and it got to the point where I went from young teenager to a twenty-five year old father and needed to just let go and leave. Now that my daughter is 10 and loves DBZ, I'm entirely jumping back into the website thing though!

 

Drama and Inactivity are usually the only reasons. Drama is really the most painful reason I find it's usually only 1 or two people that somehow destroy a whole group and when you've put so much work into something eugh. It really sucks.

 

God I totally feel with the whole drama thing. I wasn't the creator, but I was an admin on a pretty popular RP site (at least within the forum we were on at the time) and it was super active, with like 20-30 replies per day on one day, and it literally dropped to almost nothing the next because there was some internal drama between an admin and the creator and it felt like we had to take sides, and when all the active members just dropped off because they either didn't want to take sides or took the other admin's side, it just sucked for everyone else because half of the plots they had were gone or they just didn't feel like RPing anymore.

At that time, the platform we were on also had a huge maintenance issue (you couldn't log in at all) that wasn't solved until two weeks later and by then, all of the drama/members leaving/site problems just killed the site, which is really sad to be honest. I had so many characters I loved and I just had to leave them behind :(

 

I closed mine down due to some terrible drama that drove a ton of members away. After I tried a reboot but it never took off and gained members. Sucks cause it was one of my first real rps and it was damn good.

 

First go at my lore definitely attracted the wrong crowd. Not all the lore loopholes were ironed out yet and for fear of having a failing site, I allowed pretty much any fantasy character through the doors with minimal regulation between species or individual lore or aesthetics. Unfortunately this meant the meat of me member base wasn't the crowd I was hoping to attract, instead finding myself saturated with Pyramid Head knock-offs, bland supernaturals, and an abundance of people who didn't seem to acknowledge the lore existed at all. Fear of failure ultimately did cause it to fail anyway. After realizing I couldn't even tolerate my own site, I pulled the plug on it to recuperate and find out what about it wasn't flowing right. Needless to say taking that time was exactly what I needed as the trial run showed me everything I needed to change about it to mold it into what I really wanted for the long haul.