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Link to original post: [drupal=2187]A Bittersweet Ending[/drupal]
As of tonight, I am closing The Custom Pokémon Shop.
I don’t believe many User Blogs regulars know it very well (although I’ve written about it in a few blogs before), but here’s the shop if you wish to see it – The Custom Pokémon Shop. I feel the need to let out my closing feelings on the shop, and I feel the need to explain its closing thoroughly to those who frequented it, members or requesters.
We really did have a great run. For about 3 months it was an amazing thread. We had members join and all, we changed, we kept making sprites. We had our issues, with arguments, things that required rule changes, and whatnot. It’s truly hard to express how much fun the shop was for that time, you pretty much had to be there to understand, so I won’t go on forever trying to express it.
But as the months went on, I think all of us were either busy or lacked motivation to sprite…probably a mixture of both, really. The thread was still VERY active, though, as we got off-topic quite a bit.
Overall, I think the thing that brought us to this point quickly was that we seriously stopped being so lax after one rather nasty argument leading to a temporary lock. For MANY months, the Poké Center was basically lacking moderation, and we did want moderators, though I did sort of like the lack of moderation a little better, save for when the occasional spammers attacked and no one was there to do anything. When actual moderation arrived we really had to straighten out. Of course, we were inactive sprite-wise regardless, so I don’t think that changed anything, it just brought the thread to this point faster because off-topic discussion didn’t hide the fact that we were practically dead.
Numerous other factors contributed to it, too. For one, the fact that many spriters were very inconsistent about spriting. Life interferes, obviously, and I tried to be as consistent as I could once life interfered more than it had before, but you can’t sprite when you’ve had it hanging over your head forever and lost motivation as a result. At least, I can’t.
There was also the factor that we practically made the thread a fascism because we had to implement so many rules due to people not being sensible about it. You’d think a lack of frequent activity for weeks and a request list with 15+ sprites on it would key people into the fact that they probably shouldn’t request, especially not 5 sprites at a time, but they didn’t pick it up so we had to put a maximum for the request list (which never really stuck, actually) and rules preventing people from requesting more than one sprite within a certain time span. Things like that. You can see the entire rule list for reference of the things we implemented. I felt bad about it, but it was hard enough maintaining the shop with other things to do, without people requesting REALLY difficult things just to request difficult things incessantly.
I think one of the largest factors was that, in the end, both Spire and I wanted to make a shop simply to make sprites for everyone to see, to both supply sprites and just have fun making them…and too many people took it too seriously. Many people never even came back to thank us for the sprites we made, on a few occasions someone made disparaging remarks about our sprites, and when our sprites were posted on another forum (which was in retrospect a horrible idea, apparently any sort of social aspect of Serebii [a Pokémon fansite] is nazi-ridden) they were basically torn apart with criticism.
Tonight, Zook PM’d me asking if I would be okay with him starting his own sprite shop…and at first I was devastated, thinking of how our shop wouldn’t be able to stand up anymore if another shop were created.
But after a minute or two of thought, I realized that our time was over. The shop was dead, and there was no reason another shop shouldn’t be able to come in and thrive, rather than us struggling to keep our thread alive because of the nostalgia of what it used to be. In weeks to come it will become even more difficult for me, at least, to maintain the shop, because I’m not sure if I’ll have any free time as it is, much less will I have time to just relax AND sprite for the shop. I decided that we should let the shop die with dignity. Rather than one day having it fall out of existence and we just don’t bother to do anything about it, close it now.
I do apologize to those who still frequently visited the thread and Mewter, who against all odds, still tried to keep the thread active and fulfill requests…but I think it’s time for us to close.
The shop was great while it lasted, we had a great run. In the words of Zook, who will always be remembered as The Custom Pokémon Shop’s requester extraordinaire,
As of tonight, I am closing The Custom Pokémon Shop.
I don’t believe many User Blogs regulars know it very well (although I’ve written about it in a few blogs before), but here’s the shop if you wish to see it – The Custom Pokémon Shop. I feel the need to let out my closing feelings on the shop, and I feel the need to explain its closing thoroughly to those who frequented it, members or requesters.
We really did have a great run. For about 3 months it was an amazing thread. We had members join and all, we changed, we kept making sprites. We had our issues, with arguments, things that required rule changes, and whatnot. It’s truly hard to express how much fun the shop was for that time, you pretty much had to be there to understand, so I won’t go on forever trying to express it.
But as the months went on, I think all of us were either busy or lacked motivation to sprite…probably a mixture of both, really. The thread was still VERY active, though, as we got off-topic quite a bit.
Overall, I think the thing that brought us to this point quickly was that we seriously stopped being so lax after one rather nasty argument leading to a temporary lock. For MANY months, the Poké Center was basically lacking moderation, and we did want moderators, though I did sort of like the lack of moderation a little better, save for when the occasional spammers attacked and no one was there to do anything. When actual moderation arrived we really had to straighten out. Of course, we were inactive sprite-wise regardless, so I don’t think that changed anything, it just brought the thread to this point faster because off-topic discussion didn’t hide the fact that we were practically dead.
Numerous other factors contributed to it, too. For one, the fact that many spriters were very inconsistent about spriting. Life interferes, obviously, and I tried to be as consistent as I could once life interfered more than it had before, but you can’t sprite when you’ve had it hanging over your head forever and lost motivation as a result. At least, I can’t.
There was also the factor that we practically made the thread a fascism because we had to implement so many rules due to people not being sensible about it. You’d think a lack of frequent activity for weeks and a request list with 15+ sprites on it would key people into the fact that they probably shouldn’t request, especially not 5 sprites at a time, but they didn’t pick it up so we had to put a maximum for the request list (which never really stuck, actually) and rules preventing people from requesting more than one sprite within a certain time span. Things like that. You can see the entire rule list for reference of the things we implemented. I felt bad about it, but it was hard enough maintaining the shop with other things to do, without people requesting REALLY difficult things just to request difficult things incessantly.
I think one of the largest factors was that, in the end, both Spire and I wanted to make a shop simply to make sprites for everyone to see, to both supply sprites and just have fun making them…and too many people took it too seriously. Many people never even came back to thank us for the sprites we made, on a few occasions someone made disparaging remarks about our sprites, and when our sprites were posted on another forum (which was in retrospect a horrible idea, apparently any sort of social aspect of Serebii [a Pokémon fansite] is nazi-ridden) they were basically torn apart with criticism.
Tonight, Zook PM’d me asking if I would be okay with him starting his own sprite shop…and at first I was devastated, thinking of how our shop wouldn’t be able to stand up anymore if another shop were created.
But after a minute or two of thought, I realized that our time was over. The shop was dead, and there was no reason another shop shouldn’t be able to come in and thrive, rather than us struggling to keep our thread alive because of the nostalgia of what it used to be. In weeks to come it will become even more difficult for me, at least, to maintain the shop, because I’m not sure if I’ll have any free time as it is, much less will I have time to just relax AND sprite for the shop. I decided that we should let the shop die with dignity. Rather than one day having it fall out of existence and we just don’t bother to do anything about it, close it now.
I do apologize to those who still frequently visited the thread and Mewter, who against all odds, still tried to keep the thread active and fulfill requests…but I think it’s time for us to close.
The shop was great while it lasted, we had a great run. In the words of Zook, who will always be remembered as The Custom Pokémon Shop’s requester extraordinaire,
