Changes, Challenges, Cthul- wait...

Allow me to apologize for not having any new entries for over a week. I do have a valid reason, though - I caught a bad cold, and it's kept me off the computer for a goodly amount of time. Heck, I'm not even fully recovered yet...

...That, and I was busy finishing up the completely awesome Mask of The Betrayer expansion pack to Neverwinter Nights 2. I got one of the sub-optimal endings... and got turned into a freaking immortal demigod. How exactly that's suboptimal, I don't know. But I won't spoil anything else... I highly recommend it to all RPG fans - even better for Forgotten Realms geeks, although Dragonlance is closer to my territory. Steam has it, I believe.

Another of the lesser reasons for not updating has been deciding why exactly I want to destroy the Earth... and the unstability of things on W-H. What with the 'hack' panic (*coughnoyouwerenothackedyouidiotgofindoutwhathackingactuallyiscough*), Sunset quitting, Top 5 turmoil (although that's beginning to become normal), and Karl adjusting things.

Oh, and the rollback with the recent update, even if only for a few days. Is it just me, or does it strike you as completely unnecessary to roll the entire site back in order to update the layout? I mean, seriously... we've never required rollbacks for updates before.

On another note, the night before the rollback someone appeared to have destroyed Ambrose, AL, and a few other packs. It seems to me that the rollback was intended to restore that more than anything else... really too bad that it wasn't done back when Alphyn was hit.

At least it has, for the moment, left Sunset's XP untouched. I'm not entirely sure whether or not it'll be removed again. I suppose that entire issue could take another entry, but I think I'll stay out of it... for the time being.

And then we've got the layout changes. Ultimately, I like them; much easier to navigate. Plus, apparently the drop-down menus don't work for Internet Explorer, and IE incompatibility is always a good thing, because it means more people use Firefox/Safari/Chrome/etc. Forcing people to stop using IE is doing them a favor.

On an off note, the staff list appears to have disappeared from navigation (still accessible via url). Whether this is by oversight or is an evil scheme by a certain communist hat remains to be seen. If it was intentional, it begs the question: why remove the staff list and leave the Credits page that has been inaccurate since around the time I joined?

And then we've got the primary issue in this entry... the removal of Challenges.

I'm not arguing against it. Hell, I agree with it; they were never used. But I'm still going to miss them, you know? They were a part of W-H since before I was on, and I have some fond memories of playing with them back when the site was young...

To be honest, I've never been entirely sure why they never took off. Yes, DP is worthless now, but there was a time when it was actually valuable, and we didn't even do challenges then. They've always just been idle competition.

I suppose part of it might be how you were never able to see the results. Karl's argument against showing them back in the day was if people could see them, they'd give up and never do one again... which would be a valid point, except people were never doing them in the first place.

On the other hand, maybe the community just wasn't ready for them when they were introduced. There was never much interest back then, but what if he had introduced the feature now instead of way back when? There would probably be a lot more interest. Well, at least at first. Past that... Eh, who knows?

Enough playing 'what if?', though. They're gone now, though there's always a chance they'll be back. Heck, I'm privately hoping they come back better than ever, but that's probably slim. Still, they were fun while they lasted.

I suppose it also means that there will be no more challenge tournaments, which means the SN/BM one is the only one in the history of the site. Maybe we need veteran badges for participants...

Plus, now you can talk about them to newbies and pretend to be ancient and experienced.

Oh, right, I almost forgot... Since they're gone now, I'm free to reveal some more pointless 'firsts' regarding them:

I am the first person to win a challenge for the maximum possible amount of $9,999,999 DP.
I'm also the first person to completely bypass that maximum, allowing an infinite amount to be wagered. I believe I won around $20 million.
I'm the first (and only) person to challenge myself for negative infinity. Seriously.
I'm the only person who ever was able to challenge other people for negative time (which actually resulted in winning the challenge before it started. I was also able to successfully complete a challenge before W-H even existed).

As I've mentioned before, I really hate firsts. So, if you're not going to stop blabbing about them... at least shut up if you can't top these.