Goodbye childhood, Hello death - A Werewolv.es Memoir from Lovepon
I quit. Sunday afternoon, after thinking through the bizarre situation I got myself in, I have decided to delete three of my accounts on werewolv.es and disable two of my Discord accounts to start a “new” clean life. But let’s start from the beginning.
I first discovered Werewolf online when I was around 18 years old about 8 years ago. I watched a Chinese Celebrity Werewolf show and that made me really want to play werewolf of millerhollow. The 4th thing that popped up on the search result was "werewolv.es" and when I checked it out, the game was so barebone that it got me thinking "is this even a real site or is it some sort of a scam?"
I signed up anyways and had to pick a name. I couldn’t imagine myself talking at all, so I named myself “TheSilentOne”. Things on the web page, looked blank and I forgot about it. One day, that magical email came and I probably went “wtf? Yo?”. There were lots of afks but league of legends also has lots of afks so I wasn't bothered. In the end, us the villagers worked together and won? Can't remember anymore but I did feel a lot of raw joy from it for sure, since I kept signing up for more games afterwards.
I think werewolv.es was the game that got me very interested on the concept of small online communities. It is hard to make real friends in typical large online games but in werewolv.es, there is something very special about queueing up for a game and seeing someone you enjoyed playing with showing up again. Chatting, and getting to know people from all over the world and seeing their perspectives on life was amazing.
Werewolv.es really gave me a space where I was able to be a version of myself that I never knew existed, even if at the expense of severe headaches of other players, I am sorry Town for making you jump from the 2nd floor because I was Kleese, I don’t remember why anymore but it was funny. I was a dumb af kid back then, dumb af kid 4 years ago, dumb af kid now, and probably gonna be dumb af kid rest of my fking life. Sorry, thanks for the patience.
Werewolv.es’ Unfixable Problems & What I find fun
The recent incident in the elb-138 lobby that made me, a “newbie” feel extremely unwelcomed. I talk in the lobby, “go join a game!”. Try to open speed game, no one is there. Try to join a game on the lobby, you can’t join if too new. Let me tell Mark_T that I am actually a returning player undercover, before he could even read my message, I am out’d as some public enemy that must be avoided at all cost, and I can’t possibly have redeeming qualities because I spoke badly about Shane (not my intentions), who is a perfect human that couldn’t ever be possibly flawed at anything.
The next four hours was a rollercoaster of emotions. It was much, much easier to describe the feelings of gratefulness I felt, but much harder to describe this jumbled mix and match of confusion, anxiety, and disappointment. “I am on the verge of tears” is what I wanted to type into the game chat, but it wouldn’t have been truthful because I wasn’t close to crying at all. “This is so sick, I am gonna fucking puke” is what I thought the day after when I thought about the situation again, but that wasn’t true either.
Regardless of how I felt, this was a fitting end for a parasite like me, “it will be all over soon” is what I think about anything in life constantly, and this event made it easy to have a reason to kill these old identities of mine online.
The root of the “issue” goes far back to when the game existed. The two sides of ww.es is either very high attachment/affection if the new player perform within expectation, or heavy shaming session if they don’t “behave”.
The way some newbies are treated were… It left a bad impression tbh. There was a guy that tagged @everyone once for example because he wanted to play a game. Then SIX People jumped in to tell him things along the lines of “why would you do that?” “you are being a bad person” even though he explained that he did it cuz everyone in the other server he is in did it, even if his tone was a little bit condescending or just fluttered, a clear cultural conflict rather than an intentional sabotage. But the end result was that kid got shamed so badly he just left the server himself and it didn’t feel necessary at all.
I didn’t feel happy reading that but it wasn’t my place to judge how other people behave, especially since I had strong inferiority complex. “I can kind of see why people talked this way”, I accepted it, I didn’t like it but world isn’t revolved around me. I think over time, these “negative events” stacked up. I am unfortunately a pretty pessimistic person and when I think of the past, I rarely remember the good things in first thought but mostly negative memories at first and everyone’s words/intentions are interpreted in a more negative way than it may have been intended.
Comes February 2024, some guy named ChatGPT joined the server and I thought that was pretty funny, other people did not. He got kicked from the server one day and I remember reading the conversation and feeling like, “this guy didn’t do anything too incriminating to get kicked.” Reading that conversation got me so mad that I just put werewolv.es server in the “inactive” folder instead so that I check it less. Of course, everyone else praised Shane and agreed with his decision.
A year of lurking in the ww.es server. How many speed games were opened? Ten? Twenty? And it doesn’t really matter, this isn’t anyone’s full time job, but it is still sad to be unable to join speed games (20 min-1 hour long ones) randomly anymore. It is also hard to have appetite for speed games after playing the long form ones for days straight.
I lost interest in speed games as well after playing it on and off for maybe 1 year-ish. The roles were the same, the players were the same and the numbers are dwindling down at the same time, and the “monthly random new role added to the host” thing wasn’t enough to keep me interested.
Type “werewolf game” to Google and the first result, a page with easy to understand rules, recognizable symbols, buttons to instantly join a game to play. Whereas werewolv.es, I would never have found out that there was actually an unofficial wiki if not for Konim96 giving it to me to help my preparation. On the official site, the wiki has no images, lots of words, doesn’t show up in Google search and no one cares, and no new players comes in, the playerbase ends up being extreme hardcore regulars who has “seen it all”.
“I played other social deduction games before and I am passionate to learn” doesn’t make the cut in 2024 werewolv.es anymore. If you don’t have a WLF game under your belt, then please show your Town of Salem elo, level of education, how much you adore Shane’s diet habits, and other detailed social deduction game / real life communication related achievements in a 1-2 pages document.
And the idea that playing a WLF game can prepare you for a Multi-faction based game… They are two completely different game mode. Playing 100 WLF game can probably make you a 10% better Multi-Faction based game player.
Wolf games has two factions. Wolf and Villager. There is a very clear goal for both: Wolves kill villagers at night, villagers tries to execute wolves in day. Villagers work together to give each other most useful info possible while wolf tries to dilute the dynamic and make things confusing.
Once you introduce three factions. Wolf, Villagers, and Coven… Well. Villagers can work together to kill the evi- Ah shit we executed too many wolves and now Coven won. Ah shit Wolves hit Coven instead of Villagers so Village now has advantage. And it is like, how do you act now as a villager or any faction? Do you act like a villager and try to cooperate or you act a bit more sussy like a Coven and hope you don’t get killed? The cooperation/goal changes drastically with a new faction that has multiple members in it.
And then you introduce five factions in a round, along with infinite amount of items. And that is where the unhinged random debate between me and dataforce comes in in #lobby, what makes a game Werewolf? Imo, when you introduce so many factions and so many items, the game isn’t Werewolf anymore, it isn’t “let’s work together to kill the werewolves or let’s work together to confuse the villagers” anymore, but some sort of weird political standoff where, everyone is evil, the village faction is outnumbered by non-villagers, but they are gonna claim they are some sort of villager even if it is godly fucking obvious that they are not and there just isn’t enough vote buttons to kill all five of these obvious sus mofos at once.
Weewoo Weewoo. Hold on, what is this? This obvious evil guy claiming as villager can’t get executed because there is another guy that literally just out’d themselves as a coven, which if you think about it, isn’t the biggest threat of the game at all compared to whatever the Undeads are doing, so it makes sense to out themselves that way given the game state. Err well, since this guy is guaranteed to not be a villager, we have to vote him out, even if the faction is 11 evils vs. 5 villagers atm with 5 Undeads alive, got to protect the village amirite?!
“Please go play a WLF first, even if it barely prepared me for this fuckery of multi-faction political dance-off game.” Yes, none of my wolf games back then prepared me for Coven too even if it was 8 years ago, which I recall Town being like “I TOLD YOU COVEN EXIST” and me unconsciously reacting be like “how the fuck was I supposed to play this game” after the results were revealed. I revealed my role, played as a good villager, we executed a non-village player (I think) almost everyday, and we lost.
The gameplay of these multi-faction games always felt super awkward and unfun to me and I could never concretly point out why officialy until now sadly. I didn’t like the unclear goal and the pretentiousness behind those gameplay. I guess I enjoy formats of a Village fighting one evil faction and there is 1 or 2 neutral players. Tanner funniest role.
But I always think, I might be wrong, I haven’t played multi-faction all that much as a Speed game player mostly after 2018. The site has existed for so long and it seems like the game has evolved itself. Which is why I wanted to play the elb game badly. I don’t have much time left, is what I always think. There was never an opportunity for me to jump in and say, “I want to play ww.es” until now, floating and feeling lost with life yet again.
I will just play 1 game, and once I get the Resident role, I would have just liked to casually talk in #random with old friends time to time anonymously. Playing elb game would also give me at least, a glance into how the multi-faction dynamic must be navigated, how the player base and language has evolved and that interest the “game designer” side of me, even though I have yet to create anything.
What is the new age of werewolv.es? Even though I didn’t play, I got my answer. The game has evolved and became something that a mortal like I, cannot comprehend, cannot touch, cannot interact with without destroying the livelihood of everyone else on the ship. Hyper dedicated understanding of role interactions, item calculations, and how everything must affect the speech/voting/night action dynamic is necessary and if even one single person deviate from the expected standard, the game is done. Whether you are Sherlock Holmes, Magnus Carlsen, or Albert Einstein, it doesn’t matter. No job experience in WLF? Out!
But maybe, just maybe if I just told Shane how much I loved his hair or his lack of hair, that would be enough to qualify me to play the game.
The Destiny of a Bad Ending
Funnily enough. The history repeated itself. In both Collective and werewolv.es, I went anonymous in a game, people didn’t like how I behaved, I “fought” back anonymously, and everyone lose their minds in some shape or form. Both are also games with a very small community. The end result was that I write a donezo manifesto to vent off my feelings, colouring myself as some sort of a victim, even though none of this would have happened if I just communicated and expose my true identity like any normal sensible human.
This time. This time I will make things different. My angst in Collective didn’t result in new positive changes. But I have learned my lesson this time and the opportunity for improvement is right in front of me, clear as day. if I am going to feel miserable, I must make it productive! Time to design a new character, a cute wolf girl who belonged in the village of WereVolves, she was loved, but when she got a new mask, she was beaten up and kicked out of the village, Brutally. I will never forget this humiliation, she says, as she dives into the world of high stakes gambling.
Here is a quote from Brandon Sanderson on the rules of writing: “If you want to write relatable books that sells, you must first live a miserable life!” Check out his podcasts and lessons on YT, great guy, I am never going to have any patience to read any of your books though (This is a self-deprecative joke making fun of my lack of patience to read rather than the boringness of Brandon’s books, I probably should have wrote disclaimers like this for every arrogant jokes I made on the werewolv.es server as Anonymouse.)
That is about it I suppose. I wrote messages to Emkay / Rox about how I appreciated their time and gave out a list of people I wanted to thank to Rox, but there was a horrible mistake: I think I forgot to thank Farmer_Wolf so this is for u: This bro is a tank (he probably wouldn’t call me bro back tho lol). I throw so much troll shit at him and he actually answers them seriously, he is so different from everyone else in the server and this dynamic was hilarious to me so I appreciated talking to him a lot. The night where he got drunk and started to talk about his old crush, so cute. Farmer_Wolf best wolf.
Err yeah I didn’t expect the reactions to be so overwhelmingly negative for things I said in the lobby (Wow, this Anonymouse / Lovepon / TheSilentOne doesn’t feel genuine sorry, is he a sociopath?). Did I lose some ounces of common sense from being less talkative in the past few years, was it my history of talking like a lunatic on the server, and maybe even unrecognized confidence boosts from having a job, made me just say what is on my mind without overthinking it? I didn’t like how Dataforce was talking to me/Thom so I explained why I wasn’t a fan of it, and the more Dataforce talked, the more agitated I felt. To me, I was just doing the “I am not gonna be a doormat here” thing, and if wanting basic respect and discussing why I thought I deserved it makes me public enemy #1, it is what it is I guess.
Also no, I am not Thom. Thom is a pretty weird guy but what else could have been talked about if he was the only one opening up conversations in #lobby? It could have been fun to Wolf-Off that guy though but I am cutting ties with the community 100%, and Thom would probably get kicked in the up coming week for being too rude, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
“1v1 Werewolf is real. A wolf-off is the purest form of Mafia.” God, what a sick and goosebumping line. Sucks that no one else understood the truth. If I ever make a 1v1 Werewolf game, I don’t want it to be out of spite for the non-believers, but out of respect for a Hero like you.
Oh well, time to date anime girls in Memories Off instead.
Final notes. Tbh if I read If I read https://blog.werewolv.es/page/12 earlier, I probably would have had a less of a negative view of the game. The memes from the past were funny.
I also really haven’t updated this blog in a while. I hope to make it a bit more active again, at least more than once a year, and not just have it be a yearly Drama-Alert blog, Kusa. (Kusa is ‘lol’ but in Japanese).
Werewolv.es arts used in this blog belongs to https://www.tumblr.com/wheeler-draws/. Good luck in your art school studies, Ignoramus (Sorry if I got your name wrong).