here's my hot take as i was told to post one:
1. Like it or not, forums themselves are a dying breed this day in age, which I assume in a way has to do with just how the internet has changed back in the decade. Pretty much all of us """boomers""" on this forum got introduced to the internet before the real rise of reddit/social media/discord/etc over the past decade (going from slightly under 1 billion users in 2010 to over 3 billion users this year) and back then if you wanted to have a discussion about it you had to join a forum, there was no facebook group/discord/reddit/whatever for something. Now that there is other platforms that conveniently with also host all other communities in one place as a central hub there just really isn't any reason to go even look up and find a forum.
2. RA2 itself is just an old old old game with not much left in it (at least for me). Any sort of "competitive" meta (Stock & and DSL-S) really isn't fun to me anymore as everything has been perfected and there's nothing more I can do with them, at least in an AI based tournament. Meanwhile IRL at least has some creative draw but the fights themselves with how the bots have become are either a curbstomp or just constantly havok restarts until someone gettings pitted or something just because of how dumb the AI is. I honestly cannot stand watching AI fights for IRL tournaments because it's just so awfully boring and you see the AI literally kill itself so often. I rather have a tournament where just 2 people drive all the bots since I know PvP is a bitch to organize than have the AI do it because it at least adds some sort of human element to it and makes it feel less artificial and dull.
3. As others have said GTM users have had a uh, "unique" style of posting that isn't the most welcoming. I won't even say it's a recent thing, because I honestly saw way worst sh** when I joined back in the day
(if you don't believe me he's one of the countless threads I can pull up lol), but people now have options as GTM isn't the only RA2 community around. I also again feel like it has to do with just how the internet itself has changed over the last decade and how things how our lives online have become more increasingly interconnected with our personal lives, how literally half of us know each other on a first name basis and could probably pull up someones facebook profile easily if they wanted to so there's no really screen name to hide behind when you wanna talk sh**. Then you got the fact pretty much all the robotic communities are interconnected now and how other people will literally look down on people for even associating with the "sh**posters on gtm" (which to me is pretty messed up, but whatever, I can't be the moral police) and you got a reason why people don't wanna join and why people who have moved onto IRL robotics will want to distance themselves from this place.
4. As for the future of GTM itself, what I mainly see is it just being a resource for RA2 files (like it always has been, since there site was started to literally to host the DSL mod) and potential just a place to advertising their tournaments as a central hub or something since as a """boomer"""" I hate the fact I have to join a new discord server for like every god damn tournament to know whats even going on but that's just me
5. Echoing what Somebody said, at the end of the day even if it truly does "die", this place has lived a hella of a long time for one community considering it basically ended up being a continuity of the original RA2 forums that came around in 2002 and closed in 2008 (GTM itself being around since 2004). It's funny to think this website itself is actually older than some of the people that use it, lol. The fact it's still alive even though it's on life support at this point is pretty amazing considering the amount of different admins/mods/users/etc that have passed thru over the years. Yeah it's probably my fault why it's even more sh**ty now due to coming under the same amazing apathetic state of mind to it that basically ever past mod and admin has went into when they realized there's not much they can "fix" about this community without getting sh**ted on by someone.
tl;dr this is probably somehow my fault and i apologize and i am a bad person sorry guys and if theres is someone thats wants to be admin please raise your hand
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, if there's something major missing let me know please. Also a reminder forum staff has the mandate of heaven and if you do something really really dumb that isn't explicitly outlined you can still get muted/banned for it.
emojii woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 
