Hey Nick,
Yeah, I disbanded Laudanum.
Basically it goes like this:
No way to track user activity.
Clunky society interface that provided little real reason for existence
Users going inactive for extremely long periods without notification and leaving me to guess where they were and if they would be back.
A majority of users being sweaters/non depositors and demoralizing others due to constantly never having enough capital to hunt
=
Nobody wanted to do anything.
When Rookie Chat came forth, I found a way to help people out without them constantly nagging me to basically subsidize their hunting with my own money. Basically the majority of folks did not want to participate unless they were guaranteed profit. Their profit came at a loss to me.
The players who were interested in EU continued on after I disbanded the society. They've done pretty well, one of them coming up and actually thanking me for not being around anymore, as it gave them the inspiration they needed to do things on their own.
The others are gone. Probably for the best for everyone involved. If folks dont have the ability to hunt on their own or desire to work hard ingame to create that ability, they really dont belong in the game.
All in all I spent almost $2,000 USD trying to help the group with prizes and incentives, and more by subsidizing hunting costs by underwriting the profits of others with losses on my end. Mostly it was people using me for free stuff.
Count in the endless hours of labor I spent on a website people never used, but always seemed to offer some sort of 'constructive' criticism about, and the free TS3 server I provided which almost nobody used and I basically saw no point in going forward.
It was a one sided dependent relationship which needed to be severed.
