hello, hello!
so, recently ive been seeing lots of tef old-timers come popping up on the recent posts tab.. and i've been sifting through old forum posts to find cool screenshots.. and all that nostalgia for a time I wasn't apart of had me wondering:
to the tefc old timers, what is something u miss about the forum? something you're glad is gone? how do you feel about how time has changed the tefc?
i've always been someone who loves asking people about their opinions
. as i've been looking through old tefc posts and come across the most interesting perspectives, i decided i wanted to ask this question!
let me know.
lots of love, luna 
~
pulls up on my
pulls up on my zimmerframeShort boring answer:
I miss when the site worked and wasnt plagued with sudden bouts of lag. When you could change your avatar (man that's a weird thought you can tell apart the older accounts from newer ones; the older ones have avatars). I cant remember if changing your display name AND being able to reply/comment worked though or it's always been broken.
Long hopefully less boring answer:
I miss when people used to make screenshot dumps, you don't see them as much these days, nor do they attract as much attention. Sadly most of the old ones are lost to time having been eaten by Photobucket or other image hosting sites that died.
Players used to have interaction/rp/ask my deer/character blogs where players and/or characters could interact/ask questions about said characters etc.
There used to be so so so many rp blogs back in the day, when interactions actually happened on the site and bios were filled to the brim with rps between characters. These days it's basically all done on Discord. Back then we used to have MSN (crinkles up into a prune of old) and Skype and interacted on those, man sometimes even over email, but I feel like a majority/the major stuff happened on the site and not behind the scenes.
Art posts that ranged from every day drawings to huge elaborate posts with plots that had you scroll for five minutes while listening to a song at the same time. Players would make these to mark big life events for their deer. Some were collaborations between a handful of players while others not and were a solo effort.
Fun/Silly little posts with characters doing TEF news reports/TEF newspapers based on inforest interactions and things they've seen.
When Toyhouse wasn't a thing and we all had to wrestle with css and fight the site in order to make bios. Somewhat related is characters felt more accessible back then given you didn't have to worry about someone locking their characters behind being logged in/permission on TH. Like I get why people do so to protect from theft etc but sometimes it just totally breaks immersion.
Also TEF actually used to have a fully functioning forum (two of them actually) where players could post concepts, ideas, discussions etc and have actual interactions from the devs, however both forums were eventually swamped with spam bots and the devs deleted said forums. And unlike the community site, these forums were properly moderated..ish. However it was Michael that was in charge of deleting the spam bots and welp.
I get why activity has waned from the TEF site given how broken it is and the original community getting older, but it's still sad to see it fade and Michael sweep all the issues under a rug + donation tier (that we now cannot even achieve because he closed the donations).
I don't miss how much drama used to be apparent back in the day, players would hate others for rp reasons because character did -thing- and things would be taken personally and it'd bleed over onto here. arguably the community back then was younger and we've all since matured.
We actually havent had any major petty drama for a loooooooong time and this recent happening on top of how insane it was/is is an outlier.
There's probably more but this is just what's coming to me now.
I'll give a short answer: it
oh, this is fun! here is my
things i miss:
- imo, all the nostalgia around the "old" TEF is just that: nostalgia, and we've ALWAYS been prone to it. there are old posts from 2010-2012 saying basically the exact same thing of "i miss the way it was before! it was better!" LOL. i say this as someone who DOES miss the era of 2008-2012, as well. the more things change, the more they stay the same, etc etc.
- being able to change your display name and avatar while still commenting - yes, Raz, that used to work!
- screenshot dumps! art! posts that weren't just biographies! in general i miss how INTERACTIVE TEFc used to be. i think during the mid-2010s the site barely functioned, so most things moved to discord/toyhouse... the site functions basically fine for me now (minus occasional lag) but the damage is done as far as changing the community's engagement with the site goes.
- character biographies existing only on the site and not on toyhouse
- all the plot stuff that would happen on the site itself; i remember stuff like... my deer would be Going Through Something(TM), and other people would have their deer make IC posts on the site about it, and so on.
- in general i think the community used to just be more interactive with each other. there have always been cliques, but these days it feels like most characters a) aren't "from" TEF, and b) as a result, have huge, sprawling backstories outside of the Forest, along with a complex network of IC connections among the player's friends. which is fine, but it does make it difficult to interact with anyone on a deeper level because like... it feels like there isn't really "room" for your character in their story? personally i don't interact with anyone outside of the site or the Forest itself, but i have friends who have tried for YEARS to develop deeper connections for their deer, but they can't because it's as if no-one else is really interested in doing so. this is part of why i'm glad to see some people primarily using the community site and making characters that are JUST for TEF and don't come from somewhere else haha.
- related to the above, i miss when most deer were just... deer with human faces, and not um. chimeras or unicorns or wolves or whatever else ksdjfnsdkjfn. i also miss when not every deer wore the skull mask, but i can't complain about it because a lot of mine wear it now too LMAO
- when you'd enter the forest and people were actually playing and moving around instead of AFKing all day (no judgment there, imo as an adult there just isnt much to DO in TEF)
things i don't miss:
- THE DRAMA. my god, the drama. the public passive aggression and sniping at each other because we were all traumatised teenagers/early adults who didn't know how to communicate.
- the inability to separate OOC/IC. like raz said, you could get run off the site if your deer was Mean(TM) to others - but only if you weren't popular. if you were well-established in the community, especially if you were an artist or played a popular male deer, you could do whatever you wanted.
- not being able to criticize the devs publicly LOL. i think people are more forgiving of that now given the state of the remake, even if it mostly stays on discord.
- warning for discussions of grooming and inappropriate online behaviour.
early TEFc was not a safe place for kids. a lot of kids and teens grew up here, myself included. in the late 00s and early 10s, the online culture surrounding friendships between people of different ages was... VERY different. there was almost no discussion or awareness of appropriate boundaries, or of the ways someone's behaviour could be harmful even if no ill intent was there. in TEFc it was even worse, because we were (and are) a very small, insular community, and back then you really could NOT speak publicly about your issues with someone without being flamed to hell for it. good intentions always outweighed impact. so you had plenty of situations (some of which i experienced personally, some of which were experienced by those close to me at the time) where someone was engaging in sexual or otherwise inappropriate roleplay or OOC conversations with someone younger than them (not necessarily MUCH younger either - for teens, an age gap of 3-4 years can be significant!) but it was seen as completely normal and a non-issue. it was very "if you're fine with it, then it's fine!" because nobody was really thinking about these teens as the kids they actually were. i think today, if someone saw an 18 year old doing sexual roleplay with a 15 year old, there would be backlash. rightfully so.
TEFc has always heavily normalised feral NSFW, abusive relationships, and sexual abuse in character interactions/backstories too - to the point where, at least in the 2010s, i really don't think people were even aware that they WERE writing abusive dynamics. because it was always depicted both IC AND OOC as a beautiful love story or whatever. i had multiple interactions as a 15-16 year old with people who were 4+ years older than me where we were writing/drawing all of those things together when we absolutely should not have been. and i don't even believe that most of those people were predators! they GENUINELY did not know any better, because like i said, all of this was NORMAL on TEFc. nobody really took age into account with this stuff. it was a very different time with a different online culture, unfortunately. i still see some echoes of that culture today in the general trend towards abusive relationships/dynamics and the sexualisation of feral characters, but a) i think people are generally more self aware about it, and b) the explicit sexual stuff is usually kept to toyhouse and discord.
(to be clear, i talk about the normalisation of feral NSFW because in most online spaces, and certainly IRL, it is generally criticised and frowned upon, or at the very least it's understood that this isn't something most people are okay with or into. TEFc is really the only community i've been in where it's just unanimously enjoyed non-critically to the point where if you express discomfort with it, you're criticised for that... i don't personally care what people enjoy doing (and i will always advocate for creating dark content, just not uncritically) but i would love to be able to talk about the way TEF's normalisation of feral NSFW + rape culture contributed to multiple people being groomed by actual zoophiles and sexual predators within the community in the past, without being called hysterical for it. alas. i digress, though.
The nostalgia for me was
The switch to toyhouse definitely dampened that experience a bit, because characters are no longer easily accessible. It can be harder to find players, and then the characters themselves might be locked behind needing authorisation, which is lowkey anxiety educing to need to ask if its okay to be authorised asdfgh. It's made things feel a bit fragmented. But at the same time, I completely understand why players have taken the step to keep their characters protected. Theft has always been a big fear, and I'm pretty sure TEFc has suffered from being scalped in the past, and art work has appeared on stock sites for sale as NFT's, and this was before the AI pandemic started.
Virtualfriend mentioned characters not being from TEF, which is very interesting. For me this change started happening when the community began showing signs of shrinking and that switch over to toyhouse. The forest activity alone was no longer enough to sustain muse, so I think a lot of players, including myself, started creating our own worlds that other players could also use to keep activity going. (Now i wonder if that contributed to killing game activity even further). Characters were given human forms, and suddenly they had always been 'human' but travelled to the forest as a 'break' from their lives, instead of being an animal that was born into the forest and stays in the forest. I find this interesting because I started to yearn for a simpler character after a while, because sometimes a character can become so complex that they're too hard to play? I think a few of us tried the 'feral deer' character, but I found it hard to keep the 'simpler' characters active in a forest full of complex creatures that were actually assassins or viking's or vampires or mafia (literally listing all of my own characters lmao), and there was some epic plot involving a war in someone's headworld, while my simpler animal character was just derping in the background. Two types of roleplay/character types that don't mesh together maybe, so they stay away from each other, and thus less interactions are made.
There's way more to talk about my brain said no so have this for now.
Quote:Virtualfriend mentioned
thank you for talking about this! i'm very much in agreement with everything you've said here; although i'm nostalgic for "simpler" characters, i completely get WHY players branched out and used TEF more as a temporary reprieve for their OCs rather than their main location. myself included; I 'moved' all of my old TEF OCs to other worlds for the same reason. I wanted to keep playing them, but they were stagnating in TEF, and it was getting harder and harder to interact with other people.
it's definitely more difficult to maintain those more traditional TEF deer when you're surrounded by more complex OCs, and it's also very difficult to play those complex OCs in such a simple setting as well - i hadn't actually thought about this quite like that until you said it, but i think you're right. it's a weird double-edged sword.
yes to all of this especially!
hi everyone, i hope you are
i started playing around 2015 (mb 14? 13 I cant remember), i think. then i had an almost two year break, and i came back in 2017.
tbh, i do not remember every single best friend from that time, but names like louise, hauta, goro-ma, oqu, fly, adolf, sirius, tarter, hunter, isetore, maekrix, and a few other beautiful people are still very present in my memory. they supported me with my then still-not-perfect english, especially through skype, and i will always be thankful for that.
what i miss the most is the ease of character interaction. i cannot fully remember how i “ended up” in the game at first, but i truly think i spent most of my time in rp and chats, not only on the forum, maybe around 90 percent, because the brightest moments for me were the warm conversations and roleplay energy in-game and through skype, with real contact.
sometimes it can feel heavy to join a group that already settled and knows each other. and i want to be careful here: it is not that people are “bad”. it is more that many are quiet and reserved, and for some reasons nobody reaches out first. from my side, that can feel like people are a bit distant or closed off. i am an extrovert, so i naturally try to take initiative, but i genuinely get tired when i feel like i am the only one keeping the roleplay moving. for me, roleplay is best when both sides put in effort, because shared effort keeps the fire burning, and i really believe that makes everything better and softer for everyone.
i also struggle a bit with certain behaviors in-game, especially the “high and mighty” types who interact with your deer at first and then disappear without a word. i personally love clarity, in relationships both for myself and for my characters. i do understand that life can happen, and i do not judge people for being busy. but silent vanishing can hurt, and it is something i find difficult to understand.
i would honestly love more warm screenshots from the game and more sweet, funny little rp stories between characters, even if they are quiet, and even if they stay only in-game.
and i want to be very clear about one personal boundary: i do not support 18+ content between animals. that is why i changed all my characters to human forms. for me, it is an ethical choice, and i do not want to turn it into a discussion or a debate. this is my firm stance, and i am keeping it.
as for the forum itself, if i could add one or two wishes, i think it would help to make “available for rp” options more visible and clear, to add more roleplay prompts, and to encourage small first steps, especially for new or returning players. i believe that kind of support makes the community feel safer and more welcoming for everyone.
thank you for reading, and sorry if anything sounded too direct. i truly care about the community, and i am writing this with kindness because i want it to feel warmer, calmer, and easier to connect for everyone.
*
just a small note to end on: i’m sharing this purely to speak my heart, and i’m not looking for any evaluations, unsolicited advice, or "opinions on my opinion." i kindly ask that you respect this boundary. i believe that truly kind and respectful people honor the requests of others, and for me, a supportive response is one that simply listens rather than tries to teach or correct. please understand that i will be leaving any unsolicited advice or critiques unanswered, as my focus is only on positive and respectful connection. thank you for understanding.
Quote:The nostalgia for me
100% this, it was like reading the morning paper HLDNHDH
But also yeah like, as you said you used to be fully in the know with what was going on with players characters. You'd see a cluster of pictos inforest and realise something was going on, check the map and be able to go into bios, read the updates and be all "oh someones getting beaten up" or "oh someone's had a baby and this is all family". Sometimes there'd even be a stand alone birth announcement post, but now you see none of it.
I've also had so many moments where I've wondered what's happened to a character, and having to end up going onto TH, digging through a handful of character links, only to see an x next to said characters name and that's it you'll just never know (I mean I guess you can always ask but...)
Same goes for character relationships it's now just "wait what when did that happen???? huh ok"
I always feel like I'm being annoying if I see a picto and I have to go ask someone who I don't really know "hey can I get access to your TH" just because I'm curious.
I feel this so hard, even just having "good" characters inforest to try and get good natured, meaningful interactions is a nightmare when every other character seems to have ulterior motives or are manipulative and Really Really Want to Break Your Innocent Character (like no shade to those players I'm just not really looking for those interactions).
Also adding onto this while I still have my original TEF characters, I just don't put them inforest anymore because I feel like, despite being there from the start, they just don't fit in anymore. Draak has so much dust on him it probably rivals mt everest.