Who'd've thunk it? So here I am, helping run salvage out near Arcturus, and we stumble upon an old Cerbie base shot to Omega and back! After a little scouring we found a few old server racks that were left intact and (after yours truly had set up the appropriate firewalls) booted them up.
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You can imagine our disappointment when we found out we stumbled upon the old Cerbie news servers, and not some of the juicy intel that tightwad gov'ts prefer to spend their creds on. Still, the trip back to the station was long and I was bored, so I got to reading the old archived forums. And hey, there was some pretty keen stuff on there! Right up until the Crucible went and tore the galaxy a new one, people were posting. That's dedication!
You could say that inspired me, which is why I brought a few of the old racks back online. Gave the layout a proper salarian lick-and-shine (I love humans, but you guys need to get with the times on your code), and put it up for the galaxy to see.
Always wanted to run my own newsfeed, anyway.
Yeah, before you start filling my inbox with hate mail, I know the name's going to touch a few nerves. But the galaxy needs a little more willingness to laugh at what's happened this past year. It's been tough going for the whole lot of us, so maybe here's a chance to sit back and have a chuckle at a few of the idiots we left behind.
If you used to post here, and somehow stumbled upon it, double-welcome to you! I hope you have some good stories. The ones you left behind made for great reading.
So here you go. A top-quality news aggregator, and (with a little luck) the best conversation online this side of the "What Happened to Shepard" underweb. My name's Grenoh, but you can call me
The Administrator
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Shortly after the release of Mass Effect 2, Bioware did something special: every day, they released a news story, related to the greater Mass Effect universe. With a few exceptions, these updates had no bearing on the games and DLC. They were just there to add a little extra colour to an already engaging universe.
Soon after the updates began, a man by the alias "Rook" started up a website, cerberusdailynews.com, which collected the updates online. Since it was a quick-and-dirty job, he used Wordpress. Not too long into the run, he enabled comments.
That's when the fun began.
Instead of treating the matter overly-seriously, and picking apart each post in the hope of pulling out sort of meaning meaning and greater insight into the ME universe, the few (at the time) souls who were following the site did something unexpected: they began posting in-character. The idea of aliens across the ME universe posting on a board supposedly run by the pro-human group Cerberus immediately caught on, and soon spiralled well beyond the capabilities of a simple Wordpress site.
So Rook helped out, and added a forum.
It's a simple concept, yet such a compelling one: Cerberus Daily News isn't a roleplaying board, it's an internet message board, set inside the Mass Effect universe. Its characters aren't just living out their lives for everyone to read, they're taking the time to shoot the breeze on the extranet, just like you would online today. This idea sucked a frightening number of players in.
Two years, hundreds of characters, hundreds of thousands of posts, one change of ownership (we miss you, Rook!), and one controversial trilogy-closer later, and here we are. At the end of Mass Effect 3, the community decided to keep on moving. Settling on skipping ahead a year and creating a backstory to segue between the ending of Mass Effect 3 and the events of "today" (you can read them all here), Cerberus Daily News rebuilt itself, and is once again open for business.
If you've a regular, you didn't really need to read all this, so thanks for sticking around! If you're new, welcome! Read, lurk, hop right in, whatever you like! CDN aims to be the best Mass Effect roleplaying site on the internet, and the best way for that to happen is if you join in the fun.
For those of you wondering, we are not associated with Bioware. We're just a bunch of fans who love to play space aliens in the sandbox they built. The company knows we exist, but don't expect to bump into Patrick Weekes or Mark Meer here.
Thanks, and post more!
The site uses a built-from-scratch forum system, nicknamed "Valiant", to help make roleplaying multiple characters easier. If you encounter any bugs or problems, please let us know.
Credits:
Ivica - Administrator and owner
Drew - Web design
Koen - Valiant
Bioware - Doing all that other hard work