Damn right. But, I do have something to say now. Something related to how, even being Holy Week in my country and thus being in holiday (spare time FTW), I haven't felt like answering letters the latter days.
If I go back to my first arrival in this game, which happened pretty much by hazard, I found it slightly exciting, though I was dissapointed by the turn system (why do I have only so many hours to use? That's silly! - those were my thoughts 
)
Still, I read the manual, the RP guide and nearly everything the wiki had to say about the game. Then I thought: heck, this thing has potential. Let's stick to it.
Some months later, I won my first region (yay, Port Nebel!) and started getting involved a little bit more with the politics and all that. That's when I said: dude, this game's awesome!
But do you know why did I say that? Not for politicking, not for the region and definitely not for what was happening. It was all about the atmosphere. After playing so many directly competitive games, BM was refreshing as hell, and above all: I thought it had an extremely healthy environment, where everyone was kind and everything went fluent, no grudges between players and all kept within IC.
Errrr... no. Now I'm close to the 2 years mark, and even though I still consider myself a sort of newcomer, since there are people who have been here for ages, my opinion of the atmosphere has changed quite a bit. And it all started by OOC bitching and, especially, my first visits to the forum. Hell, no. That was not healthy anymore. Some of it had indeed quite harsh words between PLAYERS, and resentments hold for literally RL years.
Has anyone considered that the loss of players may be simply because of a "professionalization" of the game and the change in atmosphere? Those two things tend to scare casual players as myself, and were I not as involved as I already am in some stuff I would possibly say: that's it, here it ends.
Anyway, I don't even know why I have written this here. Perhaps because I don't know where else write it, perhaps only with the vain hope that people may start being nice to other people again so the overall feeling is improved a bit and IC becomes important one more time. Apologies for the long post.
I'll second this; the Dwilight forum in particular is very bad for this sort of thing. There appears to be some genuine OOC resentments between certain players of opposing realms that regularly manifests itself on these forums and it really makes the whole game, both IC and OOC, less fun to play in. Logging onto the forums only to see the conflict you were enjoying IC turning into a massive OOC flame-war is not very nice, and were I a new player I would certainly have been discouraged by it.
