[AMA] I'm IcecreamCow - Original Founder of EMC - Ask Me Anything

Was never around while you were active but what’s your favorite thing you took hand in of making into part of EMC. Secondly what’s your favorite community you’ve created through your platform.

Oh, it is an IceCreamCow.

My favorite part has to definitely be involving the community in all of our decisions is what I think made EMC what it was back in the early days. Justin and I were both very good at taking criticism when it came to ideas (and welcomed it!). There were plenty of ideas that we came up with over time that we would almost ALWAYS post to the community first before starting to create it. Some of those ideas got even better after the community discussion and others turned into completely different things completely. After Justin left, that direction kind of went a different way, which also led to me being let go. But, everyone has their own styles. I just always fully leaned to the 'community knows best' idea over the 'we know what they want' method. Both visions have merit in certain situations, but they usually can't co-exist.

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Your second question is definitely impossible to answer with a solid answer. I imagine it's the same a parent would give when asking who their favorite child is. I love all of them in their own ways as they all gave me different experiences and knowledge.

OwnedByAMedic
This community is where I learned a lot of the (very basic of course) tech skills that would slightly give me experience with the backbone of a community. I learned how forums worked, how to use customizations on them, and more importantly how to grow and moderate a community around a similar idea. Team Fortress 2 (the original version on the 360 - not the overly complicated one that exists on PC today) to me and some other friends is still the best gaming we've ever had the pleasure of enjoying as a team and group of friends. We actually still go on it from time to time and surprisingly it still has enough people to have full games even 16 years later! Also, it's where Justin and I originally met, which led to the future communities of course.



GameKrib
This community was very exciting to me because it was the first one that felt like we were professionally running it (and I had a solid partner in Justin who was a programming genius). We came in as underdogs and overtime our strategy (see above in involving community) helped us to not only overcome the already existing social networks at the time, but for lack of better term, destroy them. Most of the members from each of them slowly migrated over to our platform, and the other ones slowly started to fade away. We sent a team of girls to a HALO MLG tournament to represent us as well, so that was pretty cool!



EMC
From GameKrib, Justin and I started learning about and checking out that new "Minecraft thing everyone was talking about". We had our own little 2 person server just to see what it was about. Over time we had a few friends come into it with us. We would tell them something along the lines of, "You can join, but don't tell anyone, the server is only so big." Of course they didn't listen and people kept joining our little humble private server. Eventually, Justin wrote a VERY manual plugin to create protected plots and we had (still not named) a very custom private server for a larger group of friends. At some point Justin and I talked about it and was like, "I guess we gotta do something with this." And so it was.

OBAMCraft
After I was let go from EMC when Justin left, I went on with some others to create another server that focused on very unique mini games and ideas. We had a survival server that had things like Blood Moons, Natural Disasters like Earthquakes, etc. We had a good handful of minigames we created as well that ended up being pretty fun to play, and it was all created without needing client side plugins, which was pretty wild at the time. Unfortunately, the person who was helping me with that one had a quick growing family at the time and some person life situations come up that didn't allow for the server side love that we needed for it to maintain a life. It's very sad to think about this one, because I thnk the ideas we had there would blow up excitement even today.

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All that said, each of my experiences on those were for the most part positive and helped me grow a lot as a community manager. I still miss the itch from that even to this day a decade later. I'm toying with the idea right now of starting up a Sea of Thieves community forum soon to get that feeling back. My friends and I are currently playing that game on a daily basis and have since launch, so it would be a good fit for now, and I know I can setup a forum properly from my original OwnedByAMedic days, haha. I have interest in creating or reviving GameKrib and always have, but that one requires some very technical coding skills that I do not have, so that one is just a dream until or if I end up finding someone who wants to do that with me, again.

That was quite an answer to your question, I just realized how long I babbled, lol. Thanks for coming to my Cow Talk.

I want my life back, so I can play more emc

Lovely post, but I just wanted to say that unfortunately forums do not seem to be too popular anymore these days. You might have better chance of succes with a subreddit.

You don't have any control over a subreddit unfortunately. It's never really "yours" as reddit can do what it wants at any time. And I think forums do still have a place, as long as it's done properly. As long as the owners or creators of them are active, and try and do things keep activity alive, I think forums can be as fun of a place as any still. But, we shall see.

Ah, good point about subreddit control.
I hope you're right about the continued merit of forums!

Tell me about it...

I feel there's a whole section of old people like me that love the nostalgia of forums at least, haha. But I'm like 90% done getting one up so we will see what happens haha.

I gotta say, ICC, it is always great to see old members lurking around. Makes me think of the golden days!

(Especially the time when I tried to become a youtuber)

Seeing this thread I did a little digging around my YT account and found this video back when we decided the fastest way to get rid of TheOlburgens house was to burn it down... well, it wasn't


Anyhow, based on this video my question to you is: what on earth were we thinking?

Oh, and while I'm at it, here's another one from the archives!

i was waiting for this....

as (at least one) someone else said, i just wanted to also mention how much of a big part EMC was of my childhood, despite the cringy-ness of it (lol).

I appreciate you starting EMC, and while it has been through some iterations with time, it, in the end, is still EMC.

idk if you remember me (i was noob and not very social on the forums when you were around) but my username at the time was Cchiarell6914.

I would say we were thinking about having a fun time. It looks like it was mission accomplished!

what is the most weart funny/stupit thing u ever done drunk moment also alowed

if you were to create the GameKrib again, would you still use Minecraft to launch your community or would you use a different game?

I've never really been a big 'get drunk' kind of person, so never really had any of those stories. I've also lived a very self aware life, for the most part as well, so never really had any 'OMG' stupid moments. I guess if I were to be real and not funny, I would say the most stupid thing I did with my life was not pay attention to nutrition until I was in my 30s. I had the "nothing bad can happen to me" approach with fast food / junk food, and it eventually caught up. Though I am doing my best to control it and fix things now.

I finally realised that the OBAM part of OBAMCraft is OwnedByAMedic. Do you still keep in touch with ISMOOCH?

how bad was the premature announcement of dragon tombs in 2012

Indeed it is, haha. Always thought it sounded good after we transformed, so always wanted to keep the OBAM alive. Smooch ended up having a few babies from what I know. Haven't talked to him in years, though.

Behind the scenes, I certainly wasn't a fan of announcing it that early. I was never really big on wanting to announce things for any project I ever worked on unless there was some substance behind it. But the dynamic of things was slightly changing around that time, and I had less of an outward say of how things should be.

A general rule I live by for business, life, or whatever is the popular phrase (or variation of):

"It's better to under promise and over deliver than to over promise and under deliver (or in some cases not deliver)"

You can always add more excitement to an idea once it's finished, but you can never win back excitement that was promised but not delivered on.

It does go on to live as EMC's most popular meme I'd say though. The Dragon Tombs that are coming soon. Haha. Long after I was gone though, old friends and I used to do some 'fantasy booking', for a lack of a better term, on how we could make a Dragon Tombs and how it could be epic.

its such an overused meme at this point TBH IMO. like 2014-2015 it was funny and while its still funny occasionally, some people totally over use it lol.