Warning opinion alert... But HTC asked for feedback and this post is still unlocked, so here goes.
Community does make the game, but the O-Club was not the game. There was more "community" in the H2H forums than there was in the HTC O-club. In my worthless opinion, most of the o-club posters were ex-players who liked trolling, arguing, being tards, and enjoyed the place as a generic, fairly rowdy chat room. The O-club had almost nothing to do with the game.
The O-club quit being "the community" when toad quit posting his toad stories, when the last ah cartoon was posted, and when the book of dweeb quit being updated with o-club posts. After that, it was a mixture of interesting but completely off-topic discussions and outright idiocy. That isn't the AH community, that's a lateral displacement from an AOL chat room.
Anyone who wants to spend time as part of the AH community needs to give something back to the community, something more than trolls and retarded "my schlong is bigger than yours" posts. Come up with a scenario, or volunteer to run one. Too big of a project? Volunteer to make ads for the scenario. Or just volunteer to help with the scoring. Or anything. Make a skin, terrain tile, or ground object. You can do all of those things and never pay a dime because of the H2H arenas and forum. That's "community", not a bunch of guys who used to play the game sitting around at work or at home drinking beer in their dirty underwear, wondering how retarded they can make their posts before people really get mad or skuzzy has to lock the post (or kill the forum). Don't gripe about the o-club forum being the "community", because it hasn't been about the game or the game community for several years.
If you don't contribute something to "the community", then frankly you're a leech and ought to be happy with what you're given. I wrote a couple articles a few years ago and back then I felt like a fully contributing community participant, but in the last years I'm just another low-time player. I found the o-club entertaining but it's over the top to pretend that it represented more than a wart on "the community's" butt. I haven't seen a positive community contribution from the HTC o-club forum in years. The community avoided that place and posted in the real community forums like the screenshot/films forum, the gameplay/feedback forum, even the H2H forum where the unfunded part of the community hangs out.
I'll caveat that by saying some of the "real AH community" (ie. current players who contribute more than just idiotic forum threads) DID hang out in the O-Club, but they were the exception, not the rule. If you need help identifying who these people are, just search for posts by them on the whole BBS. If they are regular posters in other forums, chances are they actually contribute to the game and community. If they have 5000 O-club posts and almost nothing elsewhere, then the community and the game probably won't miss them much. And if they are non-subscribers that still consider themselves part of the community and are upset that the o-club is gone, prove it by showing up in H2H occasionally and contributing a bit. If you're too lazy to play a little H2H or even participate in the dueling ladder, then you're not really here for the game eh?
In my opinion.
