Fed Up With Being Fed Up

I don’t really write FM articles if I’m honest with you, my 75 readers, (I lie, my 75 views, its shocking) and I’m sure me and my style so to speak, do not appeal to a mass audience. Not everything to do with FM has been done out there, as this article points out, but everything that could be done can easily be done to a better standard than I would do it. I can’t right guides, I can’t even play FM well without cheating sneakily, I was even just writing a ramble about my ‘anti-LLM is cool, Top Teams rule!’ stance and upon reading it through I was horrified. But what I can do is go off on a rampant about some silly and meaningless issue for the Football Manager Community, so, let’s start with a quote:

‘What I am bored of is people saying how boring the scene is, or threads asking if peoples bored of the scene. It’s a common thing on all sites, at some stage we all loose interest. Some more than others, however there’s no need to keep asking as that’s pointless and helps nothing.’ Cleon, Throw In Forums, 9/1/07

I couldn’t have put it better. Cleon, a scene veteran, or at least formerly well respected Susie admin and so called tactics genius (I’ve yet to see what’s genius about tactics though; move a few players about, twiddle a few buttons up and down and shout at the players at half time – hey presto, you’ve won! God, I’m so bad at this game) has summed up my view of the scene, and peoples discussion of the scene over the last few months I’ve been browsing since my long hiatus.

So, lots of us are fed up with being fed up, and can you blame our poor scene wary souls. Many of the old timers and even members who have been on the scene for little over a year have already scene it all and brought the T-Shirt, they know the whole cycle of things. Around one time of the year numerous threads pop up for us to read, complaining about how the scene is boring, how it’s no give and all take, how someone stole my work and I’m really sad cause I spent ages on that blah blah blah. The new ‘hotpot’ on the scene for scene discussion is Throw In, which has a small and relatively unnoticed sub forum where interested scene members can voice there views. And the place, if I’m totally honest, is lifeless, not activity wise, but it’s just plain boring. You skim through the first page and there seems to be little positive discussion (minus and awards thread and an intersite competitions thing; I lose interest), just threads about people moaning about everything, or. I ask, if you are as fed up with the scene as you act a) why are you here? and b) do something about it – and I know this has been dragged out before, but c’mon.

Less than a year ago the scene discussion wasn’t about people droning on about how we should innovate, how we should conbobulate and how everything is crap, because it wasn’t. Footgamer was the hub for lively intelligent conversation, critiquing the scene and having pages upon pages of back and forth argument. Susie was the heart of the scene, with bitching to pranks to actually quite good insightful reading all being included in there one scene area. Where did this all change to the corpse of the scene discussion we have now? Nostalgia is shite and depressing, but the closure of Susie’s scene forums and the sad gradual decline of one of the greats, FGN, brought about a sense of, well, ’sigh’ in the scene and then we really were all fed up. But, as they say, New Year new start and all the bollocks, so have some fun for gods sake.

So back to point b) – do something about it. I’m not going lecture you about different things and schemes you could do with sites, that’s up to you (although this link is very useful for that), and I’m also not going to tell you that you must make a site, a graphic, do your part etc. etc. because not everyone wants too. But in essence the scene is the same as it was a year ago. We have the same sites, the good mix of people and great opportunities to make this place a little bit more…spontaneous. Don’t sit there and say nothing, even if something great has already been said ages ago, say it again (unless it’s that the scene is boring; cause then you’re in for a slap). I don’t want to see TI clogged up with threads about how Susie isn’t working well, where you go for fricking downloads and tons of scene nostalgia. The past is the past, and no matter how great it was, it’s time to get out of our little rut; do you really think at its current state people are going to be having scene nostalgia – as least concerning the scene and scene related topics – in a year’s time. Let’s make some future nostalgia, eh?