Welcome to the Jokers Forums

Hi guys, and welcome to the most unnecessary and underutilised forums on the internet.  




Our clan is only a small collective of friends at this point, but realistically - that's how we'd like it to stay (more on that in the post to follow).

Jokers Gaming has gone through another "reset" in the past few months..... I think we're up to about Jokers 3.0 at this stage.... ....and from here on in, we'd really like to focus on the quality of our members, rather than the quantity of our members.


So, yes - these forums might be under used, and only looked at by a few. Logging on and reading posts won't be a mandatory task. There won't be any rules and regulations like the ones which were necessary when our clan had 50 members.

But at the same time, for those members who would like a forum - a place to post up game info, or leave more permanent comments  - we need to have a space for them to do so.

And so here we are. Your new Jokers Gaming forums.


Enjoy!

Now that I've welcomed everyone here, I'd hope that you can indulge me in a bit of a ramble.




I promise it will only be 5 or 10 minutes of reading, and I also promise that a big, long winded post like the one below, will be the exception, rather than the norm.

I've put it as a second, separate post though, in case you can't be stuffed reading another huge spiel from lylow. But I want to get some stuff off my chest, and out in the open. (ooooooh, juicy scandal!).

Read on if you want. All good if not though.

Cheers.

As most of our long-term members know, our clan has been through some ups and downs in the last few years. Membership numbers drop, as less new users join, and more veteran members go quiet.

I'll admit that I've focused way too much on maintaining numbers within our clan; constantly concerned that we're shrinking away to nothing, has led me to make some poor choices along the way.

- Promoting new members too quickly, into leadership roles.
- Bending clan rules to keep questionable members as active as possible.
- Twisting myself and the clan until we resemble a pretzel, just to accommodate the wishes (and often the demands) of a small handful of active members

When it would probably have been better to show them the door, as soon as they became a problem.



Mistakes were made on my part, but it hasn't been an easy road for me either. Often I've been left to make choices for the direction of our entire group, while others in leadership positions were inactive, or were unwilling to get involved in the day-to-day running of our clan. And I don't just mean the current admins of our group. It's been a problem as far back as the history of Jokers goes: "admins" doing less for the clan than some regular members, has been a constant issue for me.

Overall though, I felt frustrated each and every time someone quit the clan. From my perspective, I'd done everything I could to indulge every request that our members came to me with, and yet still people would bail on our group.





Some of you might not know this, but it all built up to breaking point 4 months ago, when our active members simply refused to game with our most veteran members.

And me with a foot in both camps, I honestly didn't know what to do.

My long term mates are some of my best friends in gaming. They push past the boundaries of being "online friends", and have become genuine mates in real life - people that I'd gladly have stay at my house, spend time with away from the PC. The kind of people who share my interests and enjoy my bullshit in return.

But at the same time, the active members were the people who had showed up night after night. The guys who had become the "core" of our clan. Without them, there were some nights when Discord would have been a ghost town, and the whole point of our clan - a place where people hang out and game together - would have been lost.

I thought to myself - "What should I do?"
Only hang out with my real mates, who turn up to play games with me once a week? (So I'd have to sit by myself the other 6 nights a week).
Or do I hang out with the active users, so that I can actually get a game with people, play as a squad, and have all those benefits in-game?




As I said - I honestly didn't know what to do, so I followed in the footsteps of plenty of others, and decided to quit Jokers Gaming.

I just couldn't handle having to constantly choose. I hated seeing Discord in the evenings, because whichever group turned up first - the active guys or the veteran members - there would be the "other" group somewhere else. At best, sitting in another channel. At worst, hiding in a completely different Discord, each refusing to mingle with the other.

After I quit the clan, I created a Discord for the active guys, and asked that our veteran members create their own Discord where they could game together.

Looking forwards at the time, I didn't know what the choices would be, but I just knew that things couldn't keep on as they were. I just wanted to game with everyone, have everyone get along, and see a stop to the endless drama, politics, bickering and bullshit that had become "normal" for us to go through each week.



It was a pipe-dream though, and once I realised that, I saw that backing away from the whole shambles was the best choice for me. I figured I could choose to game with whoever I wanted to, once the two groups were separated. But once I genuinely had a choice for once, I saw that there really was no choice at all.

I started joining the veteran member's Discord almost every night, and helped make sure that all of our semi-active veteran members knew where to connect to, when they finally got online.
I think I used the other, "new" Discord about twice in two months.
And without me there to constantly shepherd our so-called "active" members, they all broke off and drifted to wherever the heck they are now. All without so much as a goodbye.  Truly, it's a perfect example of the "quantity over quality" policy that I'd been running at the clan here for so long (far too long).
They just disappeared, and I really couldn't care less.



Because I've personally had more enjoyment, and less stress in my gaming in the last 3 months, than I've probably had in the last 3 years. Relaxing with a small group of mates - all of you guys - rather than "dealing with" the various demanding, stubborn, ignorant and insulting members that arose within our clan.

And at the same time, the "veteran" members seem to have become more active, and grown from 4 or 5 users, to sit at around 10 people that we hang out with on Discord almost every night of the week.  Maybe a place to hang out and relax without the drama, is exactly what you all needed too.

I just hope that we can keep things going in the right direction. Chilled out gaming, with a small group of good mates - and maybe the possibility of bringing in a small number of new people, who genuinely fit in with our group.


Anyway, that's it from me. I just wanted to get all that crap off my chest.






I'll just say one last thing before I go:


Another thing about Jokers 3.0 is that I don't want anyone to get "bogged down" in reading the forums. My massive posts over the years have definitely been a slog for people to get through. But at the time, with so many members, and plenty of drama surrounding the group, I felt that big posts about important topics were not only necessary, but needed.

I'd really love to move away from that here. No more essays. No more lists of rules. We're adults, we don't need (or want) any of that sort of parenting from what is essentially our own little club.



So this potentially being my biggest post for a while, I'll close with saying thank you to all of you who've been mates with me for so many years. We've spent thousands of hours together (if not tens of thousands), and I look forward to having plenty more laughs and games together in the future.

Make yourselves at home, post up about anything that you want (or don't), and enjoy some banter on the forums here too if you like.


Thank you again, and welcome!


- Lylow