For me, in mid 2017 ish The Village was a fun new thing in a fucked up game, DayZ.
@BarelyInfected and his community wondered if you could have a sanctuary on an open server and the idea was that it would be a base run by the community and any volunteers to try and give group safety to anyone that wanted to come
It wanted to be on a non-passworded / non-whitelisted server so that the randomness of DayZ was maintained
It was all a lot of fun and laughs and people met new folk, some died, some lived, some people making videos about the server with nazi propoganda intros got banned. The usual.
It was meant to last ’10 days, maybe 2 weeks’ but as the experiment failed in a shit comet of beautiful tragedy people were having fun. So I just kept the server going
A few people added opinions here and there and as with anything that is allowed to find its own course it started wandering around a bit, but we try really hard not to tell people how to play DayZ and so it was left to go and go and go, some might say it was adrift
And that was fine because it was fun
But we had people asking us ‘I found 3 walls in Khelm, is that the village? Did I find it?’ and of course they hadn’t, but the mission had become polluted for those people
It slowly became less and less fun with demands and bickering and a discord full of hate and bile and misconceptions (and I daren’t even mention the venom from Reddit)
Over the last 3 years the admins have suffered more misery and pain with this server than any of the others put together because The Community are not a happy community playing a computer game to get away from real world worries.
So in the last few weeks we worked, with the community, trusted players from The Village to try and reset the server back to being more around it’s original ideal
There’s a Village on The Village, there’s probably people there, you could go try find it and trade or chill or whatever, when you find it you will be in no doubt you’ve found it.
Factions were the biggest erosion, competing bases, people taking those resources rather than contributing resources, so The Village just became just another faction base on just another faction server. And there’s loads of those types of servers. In my opinion they get a bit boring after a while
But even within the trusted community of The Village the overhead has gotten so far from ‘having fun in DayZ’ that it’s just not my thing anymore. It’s not fun, we do this for fun
Some of it was a challenge, The Village is asking people to break their usual human traits and breaking those very visceral traits (to feel safe by hoarding for example) would ‘win’ DayZ, But DayZ’s game cycle so panders to the failings of humans that it’s unbeatable
Over the years there’s been a lot of talk here and there about how The Village could be nomadic, that the members who make up the core village could just nominate a server between themselves and then go set up on that server, and maybe a different server after that
With much sadness, I’m inviting them to try that out