EP seems dead, long live EP.

Thanks, the name seemed really fitting to us.
We bought her in the British Virgin Islands, and to get here she went through the Panama Canal, past the Galapagos Islands, west along the equator for weeks, then north to Hawaii, spent a couple of weeks there doing repairs, then north to Alaska, through the Alaska chain into the Bering Sea, then up the river to the first lake, where she waited for several weeks there for the barge to bring the trailer we had modified for the boat, then issues with the modifications, then the tires on the trailer blew, etc... lots of adventure and drama leading to a 17 mile portage over unimproved gravel roads to launch into the river that runs out of the lake we live on and were able to bring her here into the National Park where we will do tours with her.
A crazy adventure, and a task many told us was impossible, but here we are! :)

 

Just found this :)

EntropiaPlanets will probably outlive Entropia Universe.

My personal interest in EU in on an all-time low. I'm more or less waiting for the UE5 migration. It could be the make-it-or-break-it moment for EU. I can never stick to just playing, I need projects. A society to develo, events to organize, YT channel, website whatever. For me the joy is in working with other people to achieve more than what one person could achieve alone, seeing projects grow and improve. With regards to EU I was mainly working on EntripiaPlanets Wiki. I'd actually love to really develop the wiki but it does not make any sense to me to pour hundreds of more hours into it just for MA to change once more everything with UE5 or to fuck up entirely. My personal time is too precious for this, so I'll wait for MA to prove they can pull it.

Regarding the activity on the site, yeah, it's down. But not as much as it seems. EntropiaPlanets always had the problem of many people just browsing and only a few actually writing. And most of the traffic is still on the wiki despite it's really outdated by now.

Are the "admins" to blame? Partially yes. But I do see the main responsibility in MA and the EU community. EntropiaPlanets always was and still is an offer MindArk, Planet Partners and "the community" could make use of or not. And I believe EntropiaPlanets always has been a damn good offer:

• EntropiaPlanets starting in 2009 with articles, player profiles, event reports, news etc., no other EU has put out as much editorial content as EP
  
• EntropiaPlanets is free while official site's overpriced setup and administration is paid for by players
• EntropiaPlanets fully embraced the multiple planet universe, with many news, previews and planet partner interviews
• EntropiaPlanets was the first project with integrated forum, wiki and "tracker" in 2010
• EntropiaPlanets published a high quality EntropiaTimes digital & print magazine
• EntropiaPlanets was the first EU site to switch to modern forum software in 2011
  
• EntropiaPlanets managed a multi-streamer Twitch channel starting in 2013
• EntropiaPlanets started the first Entropia Universe Discord with a lot of cool features in early 2015
• EntropiaPlanets managed a society and program for onboarding new players
• EntropiaPlanets is co-running a 30k subs YT channel also hosting Entropia Universe videos
• EntropiaPlanets was co-running a 11k followers partnered Twitch channel also for Entropia Universe streams
  
• EntropiaPlanets is saving abandoned community projects with a lot of effort
• EntropiaPlanets rescued and then maintained the official Next Island forum
• EntropiaPlanets in not at all about competing, in fact EP provides content to planet partner forums for free and support them
• EntropiaPlanets gives all content EP produces to the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (the other forums claims they own all user content)

The problem with MindArk is that MA never ever correctly approached community relations or media relations in a professional way. I get offers from other game devs / publishers on daily basis, offering interview opportunities, game key, offering actual money just to get covered! With MA it always was a pain in the ass. They never took us seriously, always hindered us, always were very reluctant to interact at all, never gave any real support. And then there was one significant "breakpoint" for which MindArk and only MindArk is to blame and which is probably a very good example of how MindArk operates:

We had an interview with a Planet Calypso employee who also talked about what he had been working on. That part revealed that in fact he had been working on Planet Calypso AND on assets for one of MindArks partners. Now the thing is that a little earlier was really suprised that Planet Calypso released a feature that actually was that partners original idea but they were told by MA that this feature wouldn't be possible to implement. The partner was alarmed, supposing that MindArk basically stole the idea they were told would be impossible to implement but MindArk assured that the team working for that partner and the team working on that Calypso feature were entirely seperated. But as a matter of fact in the interview that MindArk employee confirmed exactly the opposite: that he had been working on Calypso stuff and on exactly that partners stuff. So the partner learned from our interview that MindArk had been lying to them and there was a quite a chance that their "impossible to implement" idea was actually stolen and used for MindArks own planet. We only learned about this after the interview when the partner contacted us an shared this info in private. However, the result was that MindArk management prohibited their employees to give interview to us. And that was the end of our anyway difficult relation with MindArk.

The problem with planet partners is, that they all were happy to use EntropiaPlanets, give interviews, etc. during there launch phase but then simply decided to start their own forums and by starting their own forums abandoning EntropiaPlanets. Nevertheless EntropiaPlanets was always more successful than any planet partner forum and even last time I checked (May 2022 iirc) still more successful than all of them together, lol. Over the years two individual planet partners made offers to buy EntropiaPlanets to boost their community project but as you can see EntropiaPlanets remained independent :) I have absolutely no idea why Planet Partners do no post their updates on EntropiaPlanets an thus massively increase their reach, it's clearly a total marketing fail. In a message a planet partner kind of critized that we hadn't covered their latest expansion and I just thought: wtf, is it my job to promote your business, why don't you just go to EP and post it yourself?!? :)

The problem with the community is that people tend to use the site whereever they seems to get the most feedback for their activities, similar to rats in a skinner box. And old habits die hard. Also the EU community just like MindArk has always been lacking behind the general gaming community, only reluctanly adopting new stuff. As listed above we've started the first community based Entropia Universe focussed Twitch channel, with multiple streamers and planned TV-style programming. That was in 2013. Obviously too early, lol. I guess no other Twitch channel with regular EU content ever achieved our professionality after. One of the persons that has been asked to join back then but didn't find any reason to do so started her won channel 3-4 years later and is now probably the most watched EU channel, also unfortunaly yet another standard stereotype Twitch channel foccused on total monetization. Also 5-6 years after our EU Twitch channel and other EU streams displayed on EntropiaPlanets MindArk implemented that feature for the official EU website, lol. Well, we moved on, with a general gaming Twitch channel, achieving regularly 500+ concurrent viewers and this Twitch partnership in early 2015.
Same with Discord. We've started the first EU Discord also in early 2015, when Discord servers were still in Beta and only available to Twitch partners. We had cool features, more planned and the general idea to have the Discord server run/managed by the major EU community projects. But guess what, noboby has been interested in it, lol. Now people are using Discord, the server originally created for the personal benefit of its owner and spammed for a year almost anywhere before people really started using it. And as an early adopter and heavy user when Discord was still closed beta it still baffels me for what people are using Discord, like cumbersomely organizing info & knowledge, instead of actual co-op gaming. Weird. But that's EU and probably it always will be, always too late, always too little.

As mentioned at the beginning of this wall of text: EntropiaPlanets will probably outlive Entropia Universe. There aways was low frequency activity "behind-the-scenes", we've been working for years on the integration of another long abandoned community site also abreviated EP. I have to check how far we are with that. And after that's done we can update the forum software the the latest version, add new features, redesign the frontend, etc. And maybe I'll contact 2 specific planet partners and check whether they are up for some ideas ;)

Thanks for using EntropiaPlanets :)