Taking a step back.

The responses to Xusha's suggestion epitomizes the response TR will receive if we try to base ourselves a single game.

No matter how good of a game one might suggest, there will always be members who don't like it for one reason or another: for example, while TF2 is an extremely popular game that I like quite a bit (and free), only a few members in TR play it regularly. Likewise, only fractions of our active member base play the current top titles, such as Terraria and Minecraft. The point is, we aren't going to obtain the 'ultimate union' some people seem to be looking for in an online game.

Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, no. The reason the potato famine in the 1600's* ended in disaster was a result of all of the plants being the same breed of potato. Likewise, if every single one of us compulsively played a game, the community would have the risk of dying if something happened to the game (or if people were simply using interest in it). It's good that we play different games (with a respective amount of crossover) so we have a strong fabric of discussion for those games. In addition to this, TR isn't based around gaming any more: the art and general discussion (sandbox/entertainment) sections have proven to be quite active on their own.

It's important to remember that the only reason so many people in TR played AQWorlds originally was because most of them were from AQW. You would be hard-pressed to find a community on the same level of activity as TR who have all of their members playing a single title, unless they were a clan of that title (which, as discussed before, gives them a relatively unstable base as a community and makes it difficult to maintain long-term memberships).

This isn't to say that we aren't capable of playing games together for a long time after bringing AQW to a halt. In fact, we have: Spiral City in Minecraft rivals any other SMP's servers creations and DigDog seems to be doing pretty well for his Terraria server.

(( As a side note to this, some people seem to think that TR can't work as a team after Haven and Hearth. I don't think H & H characterizes TR's ability to do so, however. Combined with the game's poor stat balancing and generally hardcore play style, I think it was more a question of stress than actually cooperation. That being said, the majority of our members worked well together in both worlds 3 and 4: certainly, the actions of a few shouldn't represent a whole body. ))

Any-who, what I'm saying here is not to be pessimistic about not everyone playing the same games. In fact, I still encourage people to hunt out new games that we can play together. However, it is worthwhile to note that TR has a generally healthy community stretching across the different sections. This is something that many forums are still trying to achieve and we're lucky to have the level of devoted activity on the union that we do have: this site. Lets keep this in mind when thinking about the next step forward TR should take.

*

V
Hey um. [4:26]
History isn't my forte. [4:26]
When did the potato famine happen? [4:26]

Xusha
Ogod. [4:26]
Ummm [4:26]
Either 1600's or 1700's. [4:26]