BAN THIS SICK FILTH.¹⁾

Way, way, way back when Improbable Island launched in 2008²⁾, text based games were still considered a brand spankin' new medium. There was no guidebook on how to gather feedback from players because very few people had actually tried. But forums? Yeah, we know those. They're slow. Easier to link to interesting comments than in the 2,000 IRC channels in a trenchcoat that make up the island. That oughta do it.

So CMJ made a forum. And they were fun - but to quote, “bloody useless for helping with game design.”³⁾

bla bla bla some things the forums were used for:

• Posting Bug Reports: The pilot had a petition system much like the one we know today, but those weren't made public, and everyone kept posting the same shit over and over again by mistake. So, season one introduced a bug report forum - which proved too unwieldy to navigate and keep track of reliably. Then people started using a page on the Old Wiki like a stoneage Google Doc, and that was a right mess, and finally we stapled the petition button to the old wiki page to get the public petition system we know and use today.
  
  
• Monster Idea submissions: Prior to the addition of the monster sighting tent in the Jungle, people would post their writing in the appropriate forum section. Again, this was a pain in the ass to track. And it came with a side effect of your writing being laid bare for the whole internet to see, which wasn't a problem in 2008, but may cause latent psychic damage to anyone realising some random Australian is currently reading their standup comedy and judging their work some fifteen years later.
  
  
• Holding conversations: Allegedly. I feel like the world's shittest archeologist.
  
  
• Probably some other stuff: Can you tell I never had a forum account?

Years of hopping servers took their toll on the forums. By 2017, nobody was able to sign up or make new posts. And by November 2023, the fifth⁴⁾ server move finally killed them stone dead - offlining them entirely and taking every dumb comment we've ever said there out of the public eye forever.⁵⁾

Not worth porting over, just half articles I'm using as “sources”
“why don't you just ask cmj” I like doing things the hard way, apparently.

• The history of the chat channels, circa 2018
• Season Two suggestion box. One way to date what was around before the reset.
• Nobody ever wrote a PVP guide. Hellfire.
• The monster list - retired monsters. also has “possible scavenge options” - not sure if that's the actual scavenging drop data, or just hypotheticals?
• Season one bugs, before it got replaced with the petition system.
• Season Two changelog. Only I could find this interesting.
• jesus. things you post on the internet really do stay forever. hello, person reading this.

• Improbable Island's codebase was, initially, built off a much older game called Legend of the Green Dragon. (Which in itself is apparently based off the single player game Legend of the Red Dragon, but that's a little too much backstory for this)
• Similarities - fight monsters to gain exp, fight your master to level up, at level fifteen you go off to kill the big bad and become the hero of the realm, four hour game days
• LotGD is open source, with its code being CC0. btw you can still donate to the devs so i'll have to shill that at some point
• I should probably play LotGD at some point so I can figure out how different it was to the Pilot
• Anyway link to the Old Masters article somewhere in this mess of a preamble

I'm actually not sure what features the Pilot had gameplay-wise, other than the Old Wiki's entry saying things were super unbalanced. It may have been largely the same as the pilot, but with janky initial stat numbers?

The things I know that did happen are largely community based:

• Occasional Watcher-run contests. (Such as awarding special boons to people who got the highest Glory score in a set timeframe)
• Newbie Tuesdays (days the game would be advertised, so existing players would prepare to welcome them)
• The Watcher apparently hung out on the Island in a place called Disgrace?

• No stamina system - there were separate points for travel, combat, PVP. Systems were in place to convert one type of point for another, such as Heidi's Place allowing you to trade PVP turns for more Jungle fights.
• PVP enabled. Contestants could kick each other's asses for fun and profit.
• Sheila's shack actually had limited stock, and players could salvage scrap from monster fights or the junkyard to craft more gear?? wild
• Speaking of, armor and weapons could be gifted (and stolen!).
• Dwellings instead of Places! i don't actually know anything about the bingo hall i just thought that was a funny headline to steal
• Something called the Strategy Hut - not sure if this was an outpost thing or a player run thing, honestly. Precursor to Basic Training?

• PVP removed, sheila's shack stocks endless stuff
• Dwellings obliterated, places added
• Brand new stamina system, which is currently set to be replaced with the even newer stamina system if the latest motd is anything to go off of
• I don't know when each outpost got its own Banter, but S2 is when Banter became Global.
• Breaches came and went
• Trains. Choo choo
• oo fancy new UI oooo