#openttdcoop

2006 has been another year full of heights and lows – #openttdcoop slides into its third year of existence. Within the past year, #openttdcoop managed to grow, become a comprehensive community, standardize its servers and spread its reputation to play a solid part of the OpenTTD-universe. A year which is worth to be both reflected and celebrated. Lets have a short review:

January – February 2006,
the Wiki-period. #openttdcoop decided to “port” its website to a Wiki. As a summary, one could say, it was probably one of the best decisions ever made by the community. A Wiki develops its own dynamic, therefore encouraging people to contribute stuff and so our wiki grew to a never-complete but always-good starting point for new players. A lot of new players entered our community in early 2006. Osai and e1ko are two members who showed up at #openttdcoop during this period.

March – April 2006,
with this massive boost of activity in early 2006, #openttdcoop entered a more quiet time during these months. But ever since early in 2006, our community and its grown number of players managed to have at least certain amount of activity left. Nevertheless, there are better times and worse times and March as well as April had certainly rather inactive days and weeks.

May – July 2006,
where to start…. a LOT changed between May and July 2006! Actually, the whole “platform” on which we operate was reinvented – except OpenTTD itself, of course 😉 . We decided to start this Blog (thanks to Brianetta who persuaded us to do so) therefore replacing the news-section on our Wiki. Again, our community experienced a boost in terms of user activities. We restructured and redesigned the Wiki, recruited some very important new members (XeryusTC to name an example) and Brianetta managed to automate our Sandbox Server by creating his Autopilot. Altogether, these changes led to the nowadays well known foundations of our community (Blog/Wiki/Sandbox/Mainserver).

August 2006,
as of this month, we have a public accessible history of our community! Osai managed to redesign the whole Blog/Wiki-System, with WordPress and all its features coming along. Furthermore, our new and IMHO best idea so far, the “Coopetition” has been developed and concepts were written all over our Wiki. Have a peak on the dedicated category – you won’t miss much to be able to dream about a whole league of Coopetition! Unfortunately, 2006 did not give birth to our suggested league system. Stay tuned on this topic in 2007!

September – December 2006,
as mentioned earlier, #openttdcoop managed to gain some base level of activity, even when key players have their idle times. The recent events show that this level of activity is still increasing and so one can’t say that late 2006 was a period of little business. In this review, I’d rather call it “business as usual” with many new interesting maps, constructs and concepts. Therefore we established the “Concepts“-Section at the Wiki where everyone may publish his gameplay ideas or concepts.

At the beginning of 2007, I finally want to wish all of you a happy and prosperous new year. I wish our community all the best, many new players, new games and new and more bug-free versions of OpenTTD 😉