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Table of Contents   TTA’s All-Time Best Player

The understatement of the year is that online Triple Triad has come a long way since TTA opened 5 years ago.

The two of the changes that have been made in the long history of online Triple Triad affected the community in various ways. One is a very big positive and the other is a very big negative. Keep in mind that these major changes are relatively speaking, so if you are on the newer side as a player, you may not have seen the magnitude of changes as other players have.

The importance on the game Triple Triad has significantly decreased.

This is a given. There are several factors that contribute this realized truth.

Where are the new players at? The market for new players is very saturated and there simply isn’t a demand for an online Triple Triad game. And what happened to the old players? The current players have considerably decline their amount of play. These two factors make for an extremely inactive website, relatively speaking. I know I remember the days of a hundred players online and playing. Look at it today and that number is considerably smaller. And who would have thought this? Even Grat is declining in his amount of play! Oh, the humanity!

One of the things that has always been an issue is lack of tournament games played and having to cointoss winners. While this has always been an issue, look at the past few major tournaments. The amount of coinflips needed to determine winners is almost embarrassing. However, this tournament is better than most. Why enter a tournament if you have no intention of getting games played? Maybe we still enter these tournaments because we feel we should. With distinct favorites like Karmazin and DocEvil long gone, these tournaments are up for grabs but that still isn’t a key motivator.

But don’t take it from me. Reread issue #3 of the Occult Fan, my first newsletter. Soujiro’s article, Why I like TTA, briefly mentions his like for the game. However, he distinctly says that the people keep him here. I think most of the people on here can agree with that. Most of us that are in clans are in it for the people and not necessarily the Triple Triad experience.

Finally, take a look at the phenomenon of skill-based clans. Clans like the Zodiac Braves thrived because there was so much emphasis on the game back then. With elite skill clan Zodiac Braves long gone and other skill-based clans X-men and Devas in recession, it’s a definite indicator that the game is losing its importance. It also makes me wonder what’s going to happen in February when Clan Wars VI gets started. There used to be as many as 16 clans that entered this huge event. It’d be surprised to see half that many enter this year.

But with some bad, there’s some good that comes out of it.

The amount of conflict within the community has significantly decreased.

The v3/TTX2/TTA wars, abusive mods, actual clan wars, massive egos, conspiracies, excessive amounts of bans, and a general hatred between people on the site. Remember all of that? Seems like ages ago to me and I was a perpetrator of quite a few of those.

Sure, there’s still friction now at times because that’s a simple part of life. But there used to be full-fledge fights that took place in TTA Chat. And it wasn’t just a couple people, it was a lot of people over a number of different reasons. But let’s not even divulge into those reasons. The people that were here remember all of this. The people that weren’t are probably better off that I didn’t inform them of the problems of the past. The list from above will suffice.

You know what is a shame, though? The community is so great now with all the people generally respecting each other, yet the game isn’t what it used to be. If the great community from now and the great game from the past were combined, imagine how great of a community this would be.

As TTA celebrates its 5th year, maybe we should make a goal to restore this community to what it used to be. The members that are still here have expressed a large amount of interest in building the community to make it better. I recommend that a serious effort be placed into rebuilding the game utilizing the togetherness that you all have formed over all of these years.