Hi IC-community,
Lovely face-lift, a shame about the headcount. Ironic how IC was booming whilst it’s developer (Sven/Stan?) was inactive (~15 years ago).
I originally joined IC in 2003 as an early-teen (not this account) to help me build relations with my recently acquired but distant/disinterested step-father (OscarTheGrouch). It helped. It’s a game he played a lot at the time.
After a couple of rounds, I was hooked to the game. It was the community more than anything. It was far more mature than I was used to. It was really engaging having conversations with relatively mature, very funny, and intelligent people (Primo, TU, ZoZ, Wendy, etc.). iRC and the forum was wonderful. I never met any of them in person, which I regret.
Beyond this, IC exposed me to and helped me mature characteristics teenagers don’t really get the opportunity to work on: long-term teamwork, strategy, planning, coordinating, delegating, maintaining cohesion, etc.
I was active from 2003-2008. I was best known as Pixies, but went by Razack originally and Caboose for a while. I didn’t do anything memorable or spectacular in my time (I was likely viewed as “the annoying but active/useful teenager”). I eventually led a few fams, and I think we may have won a round of Pinwheel once…!
IRL: University beckoned me away from IC and I’ve not really been back since. I got a PhD in Aerospace, got married, had a couple of kids, bought a house, worked in a space technology company for a few years, and a couple of years ago kicked off my own space technology company. This may sound tenuous, but I genuinely think IC played a tangible role in aligning my career trajectory towards what it has become. Thank you.
I certainly don’t have time to play actively going forwards, but I would be very happy to engage in conversations regarding how to rebuild the game/community to its former glory, how to get new users (but more importantly, how to maintain a high user retention-rate). It’s been done before. And though the world/market has changed drastically since then, I have no doubt it could be done again.
Still suck? Yeah, probably…
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Our current roadmap is described 
I hope your company is doing well.
. I married an English psychiatrist. My emotional intelligence compared to hers … it’s like she’s playing chess with a blind slug sometimes.
. You may be on to something. If we reviewed the wider influence of beer-spam on forum activity, testing out one beer variant each day (Leffe, Duvel, etc). Yep, that’s definitely science. It’s gotta work!