#openttdcoop

My dear fellow ‘coopers,

as most of you would probably not recognize: #openttdcoop started more than five years ago – in early/mid January 2005. This is clearly something to blog about: a review of our community – a personal, subjective remembrance that is.

As far as I am concerned, I am by now the last one of the very early crew still hanging around the servers. The server was hosted by guru3 back in 2005 who is nowadays still a more or less active part in the OpenTTD-community. He hosted our very first server, back in times which required waypoints in order to create a decent rail network. OpenTTD had a lot of restricitions back these days and most networks we have built could look ridiculous from today’s point of view. Thanks a lot guru3 for the game as well as the web server.

However, for me there are several clear signs that our community influenced the playing style of OpenTTD itself for so many players all over the world, as well as the progression of OpenTTD’s development enabled new concepts and ideas to be cultivated by #openttdcoop’s players. This mainly happened because we had and still have a vital backbone of persons in our community who are constantly fiddling around with blogs, wikis, servers, IRC stuff and of course game development itself. Right in 2005, Osai joined our community, soon followed by Ammler . Both obviously decided to stay and remain highly active for our community until today 😉

At this time, we had our very first root server, kindly provided by Brianetta. His hosting services enabled us to create new game server, such as the Sandbox Server (now named Public Server). Also, he invented autopilot – a key application for our community. On the other hand, a key structure in our community was mainly developed by Osai: the Blog/Wiki system which integrated our Wiki we have created earlier. The old content was all written by myself – the new wiki system added a new quality to our community. I still remember several nights being spent on reworking the wiki during that time.

What I always liked is the strong connection between #openttdcoop and the development of OpenTTD itself. A lot of bugs were tracked by our members and somewhen back in the old days, we even had our personal customer service programmer, TrueLight 😉 He really helped us out a lot – quite a few times.

Well, most of you might have recognized, I am not at the servers to often lately. A lot of time has passed – at least, I consider five years as quite a long time for a pastime transportation game and a community which was founded with the sole purpose of playing 2-3 games together. In all these years, I had times where I played at #openttdcoop on a daily schedule – and times with no playing at all for months. But as most of you might expect, I am also here to stay. This is because I like this pastime transportation game. Also, because I like all these players proofing so many ambition and creativity while doing the same thing over and over again – building networks. But mainly because of all these great guys in the background, forming a unique community by bundling creativity, knowledge and fun.

So there is one thing for me to promise at the end of this article: you bet to read another blogpost from me again in some 5 years 😉