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| The Pirate Caves CaveMakers Association (PCCA) Wednesday, June 24, 2009 10:19 pm — Posted by Livio |
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The PCCA was the most active guild of the Old Interguild, and through its lifetime it set many precedents for the current Interguild. The PCCA was started on April 12, 2006 by Acceleron_3000. He started the guild with a full-screen layout made out of one giant image (with some text) that amazed all those who saw it. Through the giant image layout, he was able to fit more information on the front page of the guild while getting around the character limit. It was this layout that played a huge role in getting more members throughout the guild's lifetime. The layout included things such as: a tiny section for the latest news, another providing brief information on the Interguild and links to the other guilds, a list of the current staff members and their jobs in the guild, information on the current guild competition, competition rules, information for new members, link-back buttons so people can help advertise for the guild, a quick-links section, a weekly featured cave decided by a weekly poll, and a primitive CaveList (a large image that contained a list of several hundred HATPC accounts).
Getting Big
Not much happened in the PCCA during its first five months before it joined the Interguild. But that's where the PCCA's large amount of different features were developed, and it slowly gained members. In fact sometimes it got kinda boring. There was actually one time when one of the guild's staff members gave his password to a hacker, and the hacker deleted everything in the guild layout. Some people actually left the guild thinking that they had given up on it, but it was no big deal, since Accel was able to put up a new layout. The layout before the hack was actually very small compared to the one that the PCCA became famous for.
Then one day, there was a new member in the guild called Jebby, and he said he wanted to create some sort of Inter-guild between the two largest guilds about HATPC. From then on, both guilds became fairly active and a lot of time was spent going back and forth between the two guilds and it was fun. Eventually the Cavers' Guild was added, and then the HATPC Raters. Near the end of November, two months after starting the Interguild, they set up a forum outside of neopets and all of the Interguild's major activity moved there.
Basically with the Interguild, the four guilds "shared" members, because if one member wanted to stay updated with all that was going on, they would make a side account and join the other guilds with it. This became unnecessary after the Interguild Forums were set up and what logically followed was a diminishing amount of activity in the guilds. But the PCCA's system was set up to keep its members constantly active. Not only did it keep its members with something to do, but it eventually became an inseparable part of the Interguild. And it would always be remembered as the biggest guild of the Interguild simply because it refused to die off so quickly.
The Competitions
Those good old competitions. The PCCA began its first competition a month after joining the Interguild and it was themed as Halloween. Acceleron set up a fairly tight schedule for his competitions: They would start on a Saturday, close at the end of the Saturday of two weeks later, have a judging period of one week, and start a new competition the following Saturday. While the guild couldn't always stick to schedule (sometimes the comp could be extended for an extra week; sometimes judging took too long; and sometimes they downright forgot), the competition system kept the PCCA active until its end. The PCCA actually referred to the comps as "Caving Comps", so then when referring to an old competition, one would say "CC #12", for example. A few of the early competitions had their theme determined by a poll, but mostly after that, Acceleron would have to usually think of a theme himself.
The PCCA held around 16 competitions before the guild unofficially died. The competitions were continued on the Old Interguild forums until around Comp #23 before the Interguild stopped calling these competitions "PCCA Comps". Once the new Interguild was started, all of the old PCCA competitions were logged as official Interguild competitions. Probably some of the best competitions held by the PCCA would be the Steel Comp, the Random Word Comp, and the second Holiday Comp. You can click here to look through the other PCCA comps (HATPC Comps #1-23), but only the first three winners of the comp were ever recorded by the PCCA.
The PCCA CaveList
The original CaveList was started by Acceleron as a list of HATPC usernames to play when he got bored. Then he found other lists of names that other people had made and added them to his list. By the time it was put on the PCCA, the CaveList had a little bit over 100 levels on it, and the list had to be uploaded as a giant image in order to save text. Eventually, new names were added gradually, and every once in a while several names would be added at once by other members. The amount of names gradually increased into the 300s, then the 500's, the 800's, and finally it reached over a thousand.
Eventually on the old Interguild, the list was put into a database and a very, very primitive version of the current Interguild CaveList was put up, but all you could do was look at the list-- and that's it. There was also a random-cave that showed up on the homepage of the site from the CaveList, and it was used so much that the Interguild still has the random cave display on their sidebar today. But the old CaveList database was so badly made that there was no way for members to add their own additions to the list. It wasn't until about six months after the "new Interguild" started that the CaveList was revamped into what it is today. But the CaveList image at the PCCA hasn't had many updates since its death, but it managed to reach 1,022 caves, which allowed the guild to put up a banner that said: "The PCCA's CaveList: Over 1,000 Caves!", and the image reached final dimensions of 225 pixels wide and 17,252 pixels tall.
The Featured Cave
During the early days, the featured cave was called the Weekly Cave, and it was started by an early PCCA member named hatpcguild who said he would make a cave every week for the feature. The questionable logic behind that idea derived from the fact that the guild didn't have too many members during those days, and there had to be at least one new cave every week for the Featured Cave. Then one day Acceleron wanted to reform his guild staff, so he fired hatpcguild and looked for a replacement to run a real featured cave system for him. When several people said they wanted the job, the PCCA held an election for the position. The election, along with its campaign, was held in January of 2007, and it postponed some competitions, too. Voters could choose from fungus_amongus_1193, Flame, and even hatpcguild, who wanted his job back (even though he had been somewhat inactive through most of the PCCA's life).
Fungus won the election and started the system of using a poll every week with the latest levels made by Interguild members, and the winner of the poll would be featured cave of the next week. Sometimes there would be ties, which would be broken by a standoff poll, thus delaying the featured cave. Sometimes there wouldn't be enough new levels made the previous week for a poll, so they would take random names from the CaveList and run them in the poll. There was also an attempt to archive all the poll winners, but only 54 of these featured caves were logged.
Death
As time moved on, the activity within the guilds themselves naturally, and somewhat rapidly, diminished. The HATPC Raters was always dead, the Cavers' Guild was very small and never too active, and the HATPC Guild seemed to be just barely holding on to some activity. The several things that the PCCA was known for, including biweekly competitions, featured caves, and even the crazy layout, were all tactics that were mimicked by the other guilds to an extent in an attempt to stay alive. At one point, Acceleron even remade the HATPCG's layout for them.
The Interguild may have struggled with the "two big guilds and two small guilds" imbalance early on, but eventually the three guilds we announced "dead" in May of 2008, but they've probably been dead ever since mid-2007, except now it was official. They were to be emptied, but not deleted (except for the Cavers' Guild which was deleted beforehand), and they would post links to the PCCA, now the "Official Guild of the Interguild", or in other words: the Interguild's last remnant on Neopets.com for the sole purpose of hoping to attract more HATPC players away from Neopets and to the Interguild. The Interguild was also beginning to work on a way to reform itself, and Acceleron had less time to work on the guild. The PCCA was also trying to recover from a period of inactivity caused by the so-called "Great Uploader Glitch of 2008". Because of all of this, Acceleron passed on the position of guild leader to jdoubld04w. It was at this point that the old giant layout that the guild had become so famous for was deleted, and Acceleron replaced it with a full text layout that tried to follow the style of the image layout, but with less color. The point was so that jdouble could keep the guild updated without having to work with a giant image.
Jdouble was only able to run the guild through one competition: Comp #18: Ladders. After that, jdouble passed on the position of guild leader to Isawithappen (Isa) because he could no longer stay very active in the Interguild. Isa was able to keep the PCCA running until the new site was released.
Later that year, the new Interguild website was opened. The first HATPC competition in the new site continued the PCCA's count by calling it HATPC Comp #24, but it no longer bore the PCCA's name. Also, on January 1st 2009, Acceleron made one last edit to the PCCA's front page telling people to go to interguild.org for PCCA activity, and it was the official closing of the guild. Like the other guilds, the PCCA was never deleted, but instead it was left as a sort of monument to all that had happened there.
The PCCA's front page today.
User Comments (2)
| Ckjr | ||
Age: 30 Karma: 28 Posts: 1324 Gender: Male pm | email |
The holiday comp link leads to the steel comp page. | |
| Livio | ||
Age: 31 Karma: 470 Posts: 9620 Gender: Male Location: Arizona, USA pm | email |
copy-paste error fixed | |
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