Null Parameter
08-03-2009, 02:21 PM
http://i367.photobucket.com/albums/oo114/Null_Parameter/Random/history.png
In the Beginning, There Was Chaos
After Halo 3 was released on September 25th 2007, the Halo 3 Community was awe struck at the possibilities of Forge. People wanted to share their creations with the world, because every one was better than the next. They were being innovative and having fun, and wanted everybody else to have the same experience. But given that Halo 3 sold over 3 Million copies in the first 2 weeks, there was a lot of competition for that attention, and the regular Bungie.net forums just weren’t enough to keep them happy. This is where many sites, like ForgeHub got their roots; as a central location where people could share their creations in a more organized manner.
Many maps and games were born out of these early days, but people wanted more. Forging with archaic methods of having to pin everything down with teleporters was just too prohibiting.
Bungie heard our plea, and thus, the next era of forging began….
A New Beginning
The Heroic Map Pack was released on December 11th 2007, which contained two things that would revolutionize the way we looked at Forge. The first was Immovable Objects.
Immovable Objects rid us of the constant nag of pinning down all of our objects. It allowed forgers to actually build geometry to their liking, with many new and unique pieces to bend to our wills. It made actually designing a map far easier, because you didn’t have to plan around as many constraints, and therefore opened up Forge to a larger crowd.
The second revolution was Foundry, a large open warehouse with seemingly endless possibilities. Almost the entire level was open, and you could delete, move or add to the entire map. The world was our play area. Even to this day, many masterpieces are created on this blank canvas.
As stated before, these new features brought in many more people to forge and therefore many more maps. What was once a crowded Bungie.net forum was now busting at the seams. Somebody at Bungie realized this, and on December 20th 2007, Ske7ch founded Forgery, a Group on Bungie.net made just for all of the dedicated forgers. But, it wasn’t until January 15th 2008 that the group took off, when it got a mention in the Bungie Blog. Throngs of people joined the little group, looking for guidance, direction, friends and fun.
The Death of a Giant, and Birth of Another
Almost immediately after the announcement of the group and major influx of members, Ske7ch disappeared. Being that there were 1,500+ new members, and no assigned moderators to keep things clean, things broke out into chaos. We waited patiently and watched as things broke down around us. A small subset attempted to keep things under control through word of mouth, but only received criticism. It was at this time that somebody took things into their own hands.
Kilq, a fellow member of Forgery, created a side group, to keep things running properly while Ske7ch was away; this new group was entitled Forgery.5 and was founded on January 24th 2008.
In this new group, things ran smoothly. Moderation was done, maps were split into categories, had our first set of Features, Denominator was the first official Map Reviewer and many of the members that you see around today were brought into the mix.
Sadly, Kilq was called back into military action, but he left Thomas in charge in his stead.
Shortly after this change in leadership, Ske7ch showed back up in the original Forgery Group on January 30th! We had our fearless leader back, and this time with promise to assign moderators and he also took this time to lock membership so that it required approval, so that the influx of members didn’t over crowd us. Five pages of applications for Moderators were submitted, but again, Ske7ch disappeared, this time to never return.
Now we were stuck with a group that could never get new members and couldn’t be moderated. Realizing that this was the disease to plague us and end our existence there, we moved back to our new home, Forgery.5 and continued on our way.
Moving to Greener Pastures
After hanging around Bungie.net for a considerable amount of time since the inception of Forgery, we started to realize that things were just too difficult to manage with the Group mechanics available. There were just too many limitations. Thomas, current lead of Forgery.5 got some opinions, and with the backing of us all, went on to create the very first Forum for Forgery.
We decided to gravitate, at least subtly, away from the Forgery name, so we weren’t “stealing” it, but wanted to keep the roots there, so we finally settled on extending it to Halo 3 Forgery.
This first forum was a free forum on the IPB Free forum software, and was started on February 3rd 2008. The free forum worked well for the number of members and requirements that we had. We got a shoutbox. Denominator took the role as the first Master Reviewer, leading Kenny, Defiance and Shellshock to get the review in. The Competitive Team was started by Deathsfriend22. ACloggingtons and Mighty Midgit were our first Moderators. We also continued on the tradition of Forgery Challenges, and this also started the Monthly Challenges.
From Mole Hill to Mountain
After a while, it became apparent that running a site wasn’t a one man job, especially if you don’t have all of the expertise required to do the things that could make a good site great. So on May 7th 2008, Thomas brought Null Parameter into the works as a fellow Admin. Null was a professional programmer for a living, so he had the knowledge to pull of the kind of stuff that Thomas had always wanted H3Forgery to have.
This new forum worked out great for our initial purposes, but it was just never enough for Thomas. As with most free things, there are limitations in comparison to the ones you pay for. Why not have the best for our members when we could definitely have it? After diligent research, Thomas and Null decided to take the next leap up on the totem pole in forum software and move over to the cream of the crop, vBulletin.
They worked hard to get this new forum up and running, well beyond anything they could have dreamed about on the old site, and finally, on June 13th 2008, the new Halo 3 Forgery was opened to the masses. This new site gave people the first version of the Map Submission Form, provided the in thread Official Reviews, XBL Leaderboard and much, much more.
People joined, people rejoiced and things were good.
Expanding the Domain
Months went by, more features were added, more people joined by word of mouth.
In this time, there were such enhancements as adding Blogs for Supporters in July, and Image Resizer, Automatic Media Embedding and Post Info Tabs in August.
Then at the beginning of September, there was some scheduled down time for H3F, but only a very small handful of people knew why. After three days of hard work, lots of frustration, and an intake of caffeine that would kill a horse, something new rose up out of the ashes on September 8th.
This wasn’t Halo 3 Forgery, it was XForgery. But what the heck was XForgery?
XForgery was a crossing into a new domain. A new adventure into the realm of user created content. On the horizon was a new game that was going to revolutionize user map creation, and we wanted in on the fun. We adopted Far Cry 2 into the line up, and given that the Halo 3 prefix no longer applied, we decided to go for something a little more general. X was used in the sense of a universal variable, like math, where X can be anything, like Halo 3 or Far Cry 2, for instance.
September brought a few more things into the works as well, such as the Map Statistics and Map Search. And then in October, a new contender entered the ranks, and LittleBigPlanet was added to XForgery.
Sadly, Far Cry 2 didn’t take off like expected, due to the difficult of the map creator and many flaws in the Multiplayer, and LittleBigPlanet just didn’t have the initial audience it needed within XForgery, being that it was a PS3 only game. Both games were later removed as major parts of the XForgery experience, and it was brought back to it’s Halo 3 roots, but they both still exist in sub-forums so that people may see what existed during the time and possibly utilize them in the future.
Around this time, Thomas, the original Admin of H3F, took a leave of absence, putting the site into Null’s capable hands, which opened up XF to a world of change and possibilities.
Population Explosion
Again, things were great. We were a group of ever-expanding friends, having fun with forge and our unbeatable community, which is what we still strive for to this very day.
During this time, Denominator had to resign as Master Reviewer because of school and general life. In that time, Morphine took over the role and drove home a lot of reviews and brought a lot of new principals to the table, like Employee of the Month, which are still in use today.
Although things were great, some people wanted more for us; they wanted us to be known throughout the Halo 3 Community. And one person showed up that gave us the ability to do that; AZN FTW.
AZN provided a lot of networking abilities for us and helped, with his “influences”, to bring in a new throng of members that were all looking for the same thing, Community. Many of the other forging sites had lost their sense of friendship and were instead being driven by the need for glory, which is the attitude that many people wanted to get away from. We welcomed them into our world with open, loving arms; this is a tradition that we keep today, as can be seen in every new member’s Visitor Messages and every Introduction thread.
Before this drastic increase, we were getting roughly 20 unique, registered users to visit everyday. Now we are averaging well over 120, and things are only going up from there. So you can see just how much of an impact we have seen since that time. Now people aren’t coming because of AZN, but because of what we are. Friends are telling friends, people are talking about XF in matchmaking, customs and even other forums. We are getting the word out, and things are growing exponentially.
Change, For the Better
With this massive influx of members came a lot of change, and a drive to become a site dedicated completely to the Community.
Given the new increase of members, and therefore posts, more help was needed on the moderation from, because at this time, Null was basically working that all on his own. He grabbed PsychoBucket, for his dedication and hard work at making XF a success (he does have over 150 referrals), and made him a Moderator.
In order to become completely driven by the Community, many changes, systems and adaptations had to be made, many of which were unexplored in the realm of forging communities.
Our Feature system was taken two steps back, wiped out and given a complete overhaul. Instead of staff or the Review Team picking features, all of the members were going to do it. That meant that everybody in the community got a chance to pick and vote for their favorite maps. This is the final system that is still going strong to this day. Every week, we take member nominated maps, use a smaller subset of members to pick a Top 5 from the nominations and then allow the entire Community to vote on which should be featured.
We also took this time to emphasize that every member is equal. There is no preferential treatment for those members that are on staff. Basically, the color of your name means nothing; we could remove them all and everything would function completely the same. The only reason we keep the colors there is to keep away confusion from new members who don’t know who is who; we wouldn’t want them to have to search for a couple hours just to figure out who the Admin is.
Another big things that was implemented was the Weekends of Win, or WoW. Oft confused by new members with World of Warcraft, this is XForgery’s weekly custom game nights. WoW is different than anything else because we don’t emphasize the need to sign up prior or organize into particular parties; again we push the open Community aspect. Anybody can start a WoW party, invite everybody else from the XF Friends Lists and enjoy a nice night of customs. It can be used to test maps or just mess around. In the end, it really isn’t any different than just starting up a customs game with your friends, which is the beauty of it, because you always end up making new friends by venturing out into the world of XF.
And Yet Even More Additions
Things are still coming up, changing and being made better; as they always will. We strive to meet the wants and needs of the Community, because keeping them happy is what we are all about.
Denominator has since returned to Master Reviewer, after Morphine had to take a permanent hiatus for work related reasons. The review team is going stronger than ever with a huge team that is pumping out constant reviews.
We’ve added in a new role of Event Director to help organize our tournaments that we’ve been having on a regular basis, as well as announce details for WoWs and other various things. Shellshock has joyously taken over this much needed role, and has since adopted l33tmeerkatslol as his partner in crime.
Recently, we also adopted in a new Moderator, to help lighten the workload. Coyote1023, with his past moderation experience, was happy to jump in and clean up some of the mess around here.
Even more recently, we held an application process for a journalist like position that got a lot of feedback. In fact, there was so much feedback, that we had well over 20 pages of applications to sift through. As always, there were some good, and some great. Two applicants were decided upon, and thus the Pencil Pushers were born in aMoeba and Letol. They have been writing up the weekly Features, and will be taking on more responsibility in the near future.
That's All Folks!
Well, not really.... That's the things about a Community, things will always be changing, growing, adapting. I hope to see all of you around here years from now, no matter how ludicrous that may sound right now. I've made many friends here, as I'm sure most of you have as well, and that kind of experience doesn't just sink away, it stays with you. Here's hoping that XForgery has given you an experience that will stay with you forever.
In the Beginning, There Was Chaos
After Halo 3 was released on September 25th 2007, the Halo 3 Community was awe struck at the possibilities of Forge. People wanted to share their creations with the world, because every one was better than the next. They were being innovative and having fun, and wanted everybody else to have the same experience. But given that Halo 3 sold over 3 Million copies in the first 2 weeks, there was a lot of competition for that attention, and the regular Bungie.net forums just weren’t enough to keep them happy. This is where many sites, like ForgeHub got their roots; as a central location where people could share their creations in a more organized manner.
Many maps and games were born out of these early days, but people wanted more. Forging with archaic methods of having to pin everything down with teleporters was just too prohibiting.
Bungie heard our plea, and thus, the next era of forging began….
A New Beginning
The Heroic Map Pack was released on December 11th 2007, which contained two things that would revolutionize the way we looked at Forge. The first was Immovable Objects.
Immovable Objects rid us of the constant nag of pinning down all of our objects. It allowed forgers to actually build geometry to their liking, with many new and unique pieces to bend to our wills. It made actually designing a map far easier, because you didn’t have to plan around as many constraints, and therefore opened up Forge to a larger crowd.
The second revolution was Foundry, a large open warehouse with seemingly endless possibilities. Almost the entire level was open, and you could delete, move or add to the entire map. The world was our play area. Even to this day, many masterpieces are created on this blank canvas.
As stated before, these new features brought in many more people to forge and therefore many more maps. What was once a crowded Bungie.net forum was now busting at the seams. Somebody at Bungie realized this, and on December 20th 2007, Ske7ch founded Forgery, a Group on Bungie.net made just for all of the dedicated forgers. But, it wasn’t until January 15th 2008 that the group took off, when it got a mention in the Bungie Blog. Throngs of people joined the little group, looking for guidance, direction, friends and fun.
The Death of a Giant, and Birth of Another
Almost immediately after the announcement of the group and major influx of members, Ske7ch disappeared. Being that there were 1,500+ new members, and no assigned moderators to keep things clean, things broke out into chaos. We waited patiently and watched as things broke down around us. A small subset attempted to keep things under control through word of mouth, but only received criticism. It was at this time that somebody took things into their own hands.
Kilq, a fellow member of Forgery, created a side group, to keep things running properly while Ske7ch was away; this new group was entitled Forgery.5 and was founded on January 24th 2008.
In this new group, things ran smoothly. Moderation was done, maps were split into categories, had our first set of Features, Denominator was the first official Map Reviewer and many of the members that you see around today were brought into the mix.
Sadly, Kilq was called back into military action, but he left Thomas in charge in his stead.
Shortly after this change in leadership, Ske7ch showed back up in the original Forgery Group on January 30th! We had our fearless leader back, and this time with promise to assign moderators and he also took this time to lock membership so that it required approval, so that the influx of members didn’t over crowd us. Five pages of applications for Moderators were submitted, but again, Ske7ch disappeared, this time to never return.
Now we were stuck with a group that could never get new members and couldn’t be moderated. Realizing that this was the disease to plague us and end our existence there, we moved back to our new home, Forgery.5 and continued on our way.
Moving to Greener Pastures
After hanging around Bungie.net for a considerable amount of time since the inception of Forgery, we started to realize that things were just too difficult to manage with the Group mechanics available. There were just too many limitations. Thomas, current lead of Forgery.5 got some opinions, and with the backing of us all, went on to create the very first Forum for Forgery.
We decided to gravitate, at least subtly, away from the Forgery name, so we weren’t “stealing” it, but wanted to keep the roots there, so we finally settled on extending it to Halo 3 Forgery.
This first forum was a free forum on the IPB Free forum software, and was started on February 3rd 2008. The free forum worked well for the number of members and requirements that we had. We got a shoutbox. Denominator took the role as the first Master Reviewer, leading Kenny, Defiance and Shellshock to get the review in. The Competitive Team was started by Deathsfriend22. ACloggingtons and Mighty Midgit were our first Moderators. We also continued on the tradition of Forgery Challenges, and this also started the Monthly Challenges.
From Mole Hill to Mountain
After a while, it became apparent that running a site wasn’t a one man job, especially if you don’t have all of the expertise required to do the things that could make a good site great. So on May 7th 2008, Thomas brought Null Parameter into the works as a fellow Admin. Null was a professional programmer for a living, so he had the knowledge to pull of the kind of stuff that Thomas had always wanted H3Forgery to have.
This new forum worked out great for our initial purposes, but it was just never enough for Thomas. As with most free things, there are limitations in comparison to the ones you pay for. Why not have the best for our members when we could definitely have it? After diligent research, Thomas and Null decided to take the next leap up on the totem pole in forum software and move over to the cream of the crop, vBulletin.
They worked hard to get this new forum up and running, well beyond anything they could have dreamed about on the old site, and finally, on June 13th 2008, the new Halo 3 Forgery was opened to the masses. This new site gave people the first version of the Map Submission Form, provided the in thread Official Reviews, XBL Leaderboard and much, much more.
People joined, people rejoiced and things were good.
Expanding the Domain
Months went by, more features were added, more people joined by word of mouth.
In this time, there were such enhancements as adding Blogs for Supporters in July, and Image Resizer, Automatic Media Embedding and Post Info Tabs in August.
Then at the beginning of September, there was some scheduled down time for H3F, but only a very small handful of people knew why. After three days of hard work, lots of frustration, and an intake of caffeine that would kill a horse, something new rose up out of the ashes on September 8th.
This wasn’t Halo 3 Forgery, it was XForgery. But what the heck was XForgery?
XForgery was a crossing into a new domain. A new adventure into the realm of user created content. On the horizon was a new game that was going to revolutionize user map creation, and we wanted in on the fun. We adopted Far Cry 2 into the line up, and given that the Halo 3 prefix no longer applied, we decided to go for something a little more general. X was used in the sense of a universal variable, like math, where X can be anything, like Halo 3 or Far Cry 2, for instance.
September brought a few more things into the works as well, such as the Map Statistics and Map Search. And then in October, a new contender entered the ranks, and LittleBigPlanet was added to XForgery.
Sadly, Far Cry 2 didn’t take off like expected, due to the difficult of the map creator and many flaws in the Multiplayer, and LittleBigPlanet just didn’t have the initial audience it needed within XForgery, being that it was a PS3 only game. Both games were later removed as major parts of the XForgery experience, and it was brought back to it’s Halo 3 roots, but they both still exist in sub-forums so that people may see what existed during the time and possibly utilize them in the future.
Around this time, Thomas, the original Admin of H3F, took a leave of absence, putting the site into Null’s capable hands, which opened up XF to a world of change and possibilities.
Population Explosion
Again, things were great. We were a group of ever-expanding friends, having fun with forge and our unbeatable community, which is what we still strive for to this very day.
During this time, Denominator had to resign as Master Reviewer because of school and general life. In that time, Morphine took over the role and drove home a lot of reviews and brought a lot of new principals to the table, like Employee of the Month, which are still in use today.
Although things were great, some people wanted more for us; they wanted us to be known throughout the Halo 3 Community. And one person showed up that gave us the ability to do that; AZN FTW.
AZN provided a lot of networking abilities for us and helped, with his “influences”, to bring in a new throng of members that were all looking for the same thing, Community. Many of the other forging sites had lost their sense of friendship and were instead being driven by the need for glory, which is the attitude that many people wanted to get away from. We welcomed them into our world with open, loving arms; this is a tradition that we keep today, as can be seen in every new member’s Visitor Messages and every Introduction thread.
Before this drastic increase, we were getting roughly 20 unique, registered users to visit everyday. Now we are averaging well over 120, and things are only going up from there. So you can see just how much of an impact we have seen since that time. Now people aren’t coming because of AZN, but because of what we are. Friends are telling friends, people are talking about XF in matchmaking, customs and even other forums. We are getting the word out, and things are growing exponentially.
Change, For the Better
With this massive influx of members came a lot of change, and a drive to become a site dedicated completely to the Community.
Given the new increase of members, and therefore posts, more help was needed on the moderation from, because at this time, Null was basically working that all on his own. He grabbed PsychoBucket, for his dedication and hard work at making XF a success (he does have over 150 referrals), and made him a Moderator.
In order to become completely driven by the Community, many changes, systems and adaptations had to be made, many of which were unexplored in the realm of forging communities.
Our Feature system was taken two steps back, wiped out and given a complete overhaul. Instead of staff or the Review Team picking features, all of the members were going to do it. That meant that everybody in the community got a chance to pick and vote for their favorite maps. This is the final system that is still going strong to this day. Every week, we take member nominated maps, use a smaller subset of members to pick a Top 5 from the nominations and then allow the entire Community to vote on which should be featured.
We also took this time to emphasize that every member is equal. There is no preferential treatment for those members that are on staff. Basically, the color of your name means nothing; we could remove them all and everything would function completely the same. The only reason we keep the colors there is to keep away confusion from new members who don’t know who is who; we wouldn’t want them to have to search for a couple hours just to figure out who the Admin is.
Another big things that was implemented was the Weekends of Win, or WoW. Oft confused by new members with World of Warcraft, this is XForgery’s weekly custom game nights. WoW is different than anything else because we don’t emphasize the need to sign up prior or organize into particular parties; again we push the open Community aspect. Anybody can start a WoW party, invite everybody else from the XF Friends Lists and enjoy a nice night of customs. It can be used to test maps or just mess around. In the end, it really isn’t any different than just starting up a customs game with your friends, which is the beauty of it, because you always end up making new friends by venturing out into the world of XF.
And Yet Even More Additions
Things are still coming up, changing and being made better; as they always will. We strive to meet the wants and needs of the Community, because keeping them happy is what we are all about.
Denominator has since returned to Master Reviewer, after Morphine had to take a permanent hiatus for work related reasons. The review team is going stronger than ever with a huge team that is pumping out constant reviews.
We’ve added in a new role of Event Director to help organize our tournaments that we’ve been having on a regular basis, as well as announce details for WoWs and other various things. Shellshock has joyously taken over this much needed role, and has since adopted l33tmeerkatslol as his partner in crime.
Recently, we also adopted in a new Moderator, to help lighten the workload. Coyote1023, with his past moderation experience, was happy to jump in and clean up some of the mess around here.
Even more recently, we held an application process for a journalist like position that got a lot of feedback. In fact, there was so much feedback, that we had well over 20 pages of applications to sift through. As always, there were some good, and some great. Two applicants were decided upon, and thus the Pencil Pushers were born in aMoeba and Letol. They have been writing up the weekly Features, and will be taking on more responsibility in the near future.
That's All Folks!
Well, not really.... That's the things about a Community, things will always be changing, growing, adapting. I hope to see all of you around here years from now, no matter how ludicrous that may sound right now. I've made many friends here, as I'm sure most of you have as well, and that kind of experience doesn't just sink away, it stays with you. Here's hoping that XForgery has given you an experience that will stay with you forever.