[Fantomen]

No one ever forced anyone to play a certain way. What is being said is that certain strategies beat other strategies and if you handicap yourself with imaginary rules you won't win any games. That's not saying you should play a certain way, just that playing a certain way against good players will lose you the game. It's just like chess, refusing to use the optimal moves will lose you the game. Now if you want to win or not is up to you, just don't tell me I should play suboptimally against you just because you do.

To pit "playing for fun" against "playing to win" is a false dichotomy, everyone plays for fun. Also, most people play different kinds of games, casual games, competitive games, duels, blitzes, role playing games and so on. It is not a valid generalization to try and pin playstyles to players, especially not in the case of dom3mods and Shrapnel, because playstyle never had anything to do with the split. Heck, dom3mods was started by sombre who only plays casual "just for fun" games himself.

Complaining about other people ganking you is actually trying to force them to play differently, and so is not an example of playing differently yourself. No one is forcing you to gank anyone, and you can't tell them not to do it either.

If you don't play to win there is no reason to complain about anything anyone does to you in game either, you shouldn't care about that if you don't mind losing. So when someone complains about something under the guise of "playing diffentely", I don't really trust them. They are free to play differently without complaining, or to arrange their own games according to their own preferences. So why complain unless you actually want to win and are trying to force others to handicap themselves so your own suboptimal play stands a chance.

Regarding the forums, they are interfaces to the same community. You can make up imaginary differencies but you're kidding yourself if you're expecting different responses to the same questions. Especially if you bring a discussion from one forum to the other, it makes to difference where it is, it's largely the same people reading it. I don't think anyone is trying to kill this forum or any other, that's pure conjecture, probably trolling. It wasn't a group of a particular attitude that "bled off", it was a few people forced to set up an alternative because they were banned. Everyone would have preferred to stay here originally, both the idea that someone is enforcing a certain way to play or that anyone is trying to kill any forum is just conspiracy theories.

It's true that there was a grudge with Shrapnel the company, because of the bannings, but there was never a grudge with the forum itself, and since Shrapnel is out of the picture both in terms of distribution and moderation (they don't even answer support tickets anymore, so we can assume the forum is largely unmoderated by now), there are no actual barriers left.