Gameamp Post Mortem

Reflects a moment in time,
A special moment in time,
Yeah we wasted our time,
We didn't really have time,
But we remember when we were young.

Gameamp has come and gone.
Sure, for now visiting http://www.gameamp.com/ still shows the semi-hopeful message "Hang in there everyone, we'll be back with a few more words! " but I/we know better.

Gameamp always stood out for a few great things, an emphasize on being nice, polte and non inflammatory in the policies, the ability to rank up Credibility by getting people to rate your posts and by contributing useful information to the site's information, like some of the best maps at the time for Guild Wars, CoX and WOW. Or by writing up Guides or Articles, showing of your Screenshots of lush backgrounds, impressive in-game feats or just funny moments therein. It was also one of the first sites with a profile allowing you to store and showcase the characters and games you'd played over the years.
The network, for that's what it was a network of fansites, was never the best or foremost at anything except maybe for a while Guild Wars maps which luckily were ripped by many other sites so they're still around this day, in many things especially the site's tech it was mediocre at best. It did have several of the nicest, most respectful of one another and downright friendliest communities ever and for years it was home too. Or maybe Cheers, if there's a difference.

I met many great, funny, hilarious, weird and loveable people and charicatures during my time there. Gameamp even landed me a job one time, though that didn't work out well in the end.
An age has passed, not for the world 99.999% of which never knew it existed, but for me and about 10.000 other people who'd been regulars at one time or another.

The network had its peak in 2005/2006 when in the wake of Guild Wars' lack of Official Forums and WOW's multi-million community spilling over from that games OF's resulted in an influx of people looking for a place to post about their favorite waste of time. Of those inclined not to waste their time reading page upon page of insults and attempts at wit after a newby question was asked, a lot ended up at Gameamp. Mind you, there also used to be an active and very friendly City of Heroes community at Gameamp as well. After the peak at the end of 2005 the decline of the network set in as despite an influx of money from investors, no noticeable effort was done to consolidate the things that were going good by improving upon the existing tech.
An investment was mdae into China to make an in-game browser overlay with access to AMP's databases, but no effort was spent at making data entry other than a bloody inconvenience.

By 2007 investers had withdrawn, things had gone wrong in the personal lives of the devs (read: those who got the money) and the Community Manager Jeni, who'd poored her heart and soul into into her work was laid off. Gameamp had not succeeded in getting any of the additionally created fan-sites on the network to work and draw in new members while the tools available to keep existing sites running continued to age. The network ambled on with declining WOW & CoX communities, upstaged left and right by better information focused sites utilizing Wiki(alike) technology and data-mining game-clients, until the end of 2008 when it was clear to all but the factually blind that the network was dying.

During Gameamp's time in the Sun countless (ok, actually they're countable but that doesn't sound well) volunteers poored time and energy into their community's site on the network, only to run into walls of inefficiently and inflexibly set up infrastructure. I'd like to take this moment to thank any and all of them for their efforts, whether effective or not. Our Special moment in time has come and gone.