LONG BLOG
RAE - Timeline
G'day guys, hope you are having a great week. Now this is more of a personal blog. I thought it was about time I told you the full story about the beginning and end of RAE on IGN and the transition from IGN to Destructoid.
In 2009, I was playing a PS2 game that I struggling with (interestingly enough it was Futurama) and I went online to search up cheats (I was an asshole back then - literally), because I was too pussy to complete the game the hard way, and the first site that popped up was IGN, and it interested me, as several times over the course of 2009 - 2011, I continued to revisit IGN for walkthroughs and cheats, just to make life of playing a video game that little bit easier. By mid-2011, I checked out their community group, known there as MyIGN, and I became interested in exactly what they did. I planned on joing their little (it wasn't huge back then, and it has declined miserably since shortly after I left) group in late 2011, however I spent 6 months away from the video game industry in general, and boy did I miss a lot. I didn't hear about MyIGN again until June 2012, and I decided that I would join there in July or August, but due to issues with Internet problems did not allow me to properly join until at least September, and I still didn't have an e-mail account. So, I ignored IGN for a while until I got an e-mail account in May 2013, and I finally joined their community at the end of the month, after a long wait.
When I joined MyIGN, I was known as Ajax217, which at the time was some weird name I decided on. My first post was released the next month in June, which received a huge amount of response, and I was quickly gaining response during the early months until about late August. I actually took some time off in September to focus on my studies, but I returned in October with a new post, which didn't get as much response as my past posts, but I quickly got my numbers back up for the remainder of the year.
But by the beginning of 2014, numbers were dropping and a lot of my friends that were on MyIGN were either kicked out by IGN editors or they decided to quit for mostly unknown reasons, but the chances are that most of them left because they had better things to do with their lives, which is clearly understandable. I then dropped sharply in my number of responses, and dropped from 20 responses to about 8, and I was questioning about how much longer that I would be a part of the community due to lack of responses and lack of users. It then picked up slowly in the middle of 2014 (E3) but it was nowhere near where I was in 2013, and I had to do something about it. I tried to talk to a lot of people on there, but a lot of them had already gone, which was ashame as some of them have since returned to their community since I left. I decided that I would leave their community after TGS 2014, because of the lack of numbers there, and the community actually became uninteresting. But I changed my mind shortly afterwards, revamping as RadicalAjax, whilst the username was still Ajax217, as for some apparent reason, they can't allow you to change your username. But nothing was going well, I continued dropping in my responses, but the responses eventually didn't matter to me as I was flat out worried about the number of users on there, as the numbers dropped from the thousands to hundreds (and is still dropping from what I hear). I wanted to leave after E3 2015, but my mind decided to leave at the beginning of that year, and I announced my farewell, shortly after revamping again as RadicalAjax Entertainment, and I would do a bunch of posts leading up to my departure (whenever it would be) as I had no official date at the time. I got to as far as two posts after that, and nothing was coming out of it, and a month after I did that post, I abruptly left their community, with them still asking why the hell I didn't finish the posts that I was planning to put out.
Little did they know I was already planning where I would go next. I searched the Internet for places that I would go as alternatives to IGN, and three major options were available for me: Kotaku, Destructoid and GameSpot. I plucked out GameSpot the moment I looked at it, and had a tough decision over a week about where I would go, before deciding Destructoid because of a good amount of numbers, and they seemed friendly. And hell, you guys have been the friendliest bunch I know, even better than the IGN community and their editors (if anyone from IGN sees this, no offence to them). I made it well aware that during my study periods that my appearances would be sporadic, and I spent March trying to fit in before finally putting in a proper post in April and May, as well as July, whilst spending June and August getting to know the people that were here, and again, you guys fit in as people to hang out with in the long-term, and I have already stated in a recent post that I have no plans on leaving this group until January 2017, which will be when my time with Destructoid equals my time at IGN...unless something dramatic pops up and I have no choice but to leave. You guys have respected everything that has popped up in front of your screens over the last 6 months, and I hope to continue that for a lot longer.
Yeah, so I need to make a little mention further about the original IGN members (at least original when I joined). These guys have been friends with me for a long time, and most of these guys still are, even though some of them have now left the community, including myself, obviously. I got to the point where I have invited former IGN members and even current ones to join me in this community, and they all have so far declined, as either they feel no need to continue this posting, or they want to continue the "success" that their little community has had, despite the fact that their numbers have been dwindling down recently, and though back in the first few months after I left, I wanted them to turn that around, I honestly couldn't care less anymore. Despite the fact that these guys have a lot of respect for me and I still have that respect for those guys, my focus is on you guys now, not them, as I don't post on there anymore and have no intentions on returning there for a very long time, if ever, unless there is a huge demand for me to return, or I could do an IGN-Destructoid crossover post next year, which will probably get me kicked from both sites, so that won't happen, that's for sure (jokes - you think I'm serious about that?), or I have nowhere to go to after I leave this community, IF I leave this community at all. The MyIGN community is actually on thin ice right now, with senior editors being focused on problems with some other random thing that they have on their website, and if that means less MyIGN users, hopefully that may lead to more Dtoiders, which will allow this website to grow more and more as the years go on.
Going back to the timeline, and why did I bring in the Entertainment part of this Username? Back when I was an IGN member, I was all about games, and as the months and years went on, I slowly became more about other parts of entertainment, and now, I am covering general entertainment, and I hoping to cover comics by the end of this year as well. By moving to Destructoid, I wanted a fresh start and it was important to cover more things than just games, as I did over there.
Thanks guys for reading this far. I'll talk to you guys more about the future of RAE at the end of the year, but in the meantime, I will be posting a little thing about what has drived me and my friends from Nintendo to Sony (you probably already know why, but we'll go further in depth this time around), before releasing a post about the improvement of graphics in games over the last few generations of consoles. I have no idea when these posts will come out, but I am hoping that they are released sooner rather than later.
Cheers guys,
RAE
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