Yeah, I think most of us who posted in here(except SolidChamp, lol) still have her on our Steam friends list, a holdover from when the big timezone difference occasionally matched up and she could pop in for some Red Faction Guerrilla FFA.
Seeing people occasionally making topics about and discussing her in threads is a bit surreal.
Aside from that I think I once got to play Guwange with her at like 5AM my time, yeah. Timezones suck. Great poster, though.
Which is also true of RT on the larger sense. It's unfortunate a lot of the posting about RT in this thread has revolved around child prostitution and SolidChamp calling other GAFers cunts, because from my own perspective it was a mostly great place and I think most of the other vets would agree with me. I usually stuck to the videogame forum, and for many years it was a fantastic place for discussion. Without discounting the general quality of people posting there, one of the best aspects was it had a nearly perfect population level. It was big enough so you could have lots of active discussion with various perspectives but it didn't move so fast that you were basically just shouting into the void. I like posting on GAF, it's a great place, but there's so much posters and posting that it can be enormously difficult to really
discuss things with each other. GVD on RT was truly excellent about that, you would often see a lot of long, interesting debates, and people would commonly reference past discussions. Which could also be a detriment, if you were the paranoid grudge-holding type, but most posters were pretty friendly.
Partially because of this tone and history it was also a perfect place to build strong friendships with other members. Many years later I'm still buddies with a lot of people I met on that site (for example the cool dude I'm technically responding to with this essay here), and while I've sadly lost contact with a bunch more I still think of them fondly. RT wasn't a utopia or anything, obviously, but at least the little corner I made my home in tended to be a mostly wonderful place.
Concerning its 'death', from my perspective there's basically two levels to that. On the larger scale my probably accurate understanding is the site went through a succession of owners who were increasingly disinterested in old-fashioned forums. They kept them running, sort of, which was nice. But the forums weren't getting pushed to potential new poster converts, and coupled with the usual user entropy a forum population sees, posting activity really died down, at least in my preferred GVD stomping grounds. Discussion dried up.
On a personal level the forum died for me because of gross technical problems. This had been an issue for many years, terrible stuff like posts getting eaten when you uploaded them -- I still sometimes reflexively copy and paste long forum posts before I finish them for this very reason. Most of us put up with these indignities because we really loved the community. But finally it reached a point where it stopped even letting me log in. Coupled with the gradual larger, slower death the forum was going through I ended up just saying screw it and stopped visiting entirely.
(I don't visit anymore, so maybe there's been a resurrection of sorts or GD is thriving, I don't know. But in my head the site is dead, sadly.)
Anyway, RT was great. Much love to any other veterans reading this fucking long-ass essay about the place, we had some great times. I'm legitimately grateful for all the time I got to spend there. Thanks.
