I remember when I had to go through countless forum posts because "shit" was considered a "no-no" and eventually caused Forum Bans for a couple days. Now we're allowed to use big boy/girl words without too much fear.
Also, Quacks had a secret message above every forum/thread that was only able to be read when it was highlighted over. Pop-Quiz... What was his message? ;)
I didn't think I'd see the day that you would step down. I was there when you first made admin, and I happened to come back on to see you step away. Crazy. I can't say I'm surprised, though. When I was doing the work of helper and secretary on here, I know how hectic that was in the background. I could only imagine all the things you went through as an admin. Needless to say, the time that we did spend chatting on here, it was good. Good luck with your future endeavors!
I'm currently in a phase similiar to this. Questioning myself on whether or not I want to dive that far back into the game to play catch up. A long time member of the Torn community and I'm far behind people whose ID is in the 7 digits. Being involved in the game for upwards of 10 years, you'd think that I'd be much further than I am. Take away some of the downtime that I took back when I was an avid player, and I should still be 80x farther than my current status.
The easiest thing for someone, like myself, to do to get back into the game and play catch up, is something that wasn't really obtainable back then. That's getting a ton of money; fast! For the most simple things these days you can earn your loot in a big way. Signatures, if you're art savvy, are at a high-end pay out. Considering that when I first started making them, the highest payout I think I got was $5mil. That was on a very, VERY, generous competition. At that time... I probably put several hours of touching up into the signature to ensure it was perfect enough for me to get such a high pay out. Now... 5 mil can be made just by making something small enough to be a profile picture.
My character, then, would really have to take the risk of getting involved with drug benefits. While a lot of you are probably aware, during my time, the stats weren't all into play. Needless to say, most people from when I played heavily, never focused on defense [at all]. Having 9mil in strength was not just an accomplishment, but also put you high in the rankings as one of the heaviest hitters in the game. At this point... I'm doing (up to) 5k in damage on a lucky shot. Back then, 10,000... 100,000 in damage... It was nothing. Just a matter of who hit first. So my stats would be the hardest part of making a come up. Everything in between would be, for lack of better terms, a cake walk. All you would have to do is apply the time.
I've been around for a long time. I don't play consistently but I come on to see the changes and improvements that Torn has made throughout the years. I feel it's unfortunate that I wasn't along for the ride and continued going as these changes were made.
One thing that hasn't changed, however, is the quality of the players playing the game. Like you. Quick to cast judgement on the entire game based off of some minimum security issue. All the while, wondering when the game is going to get its next update to make you and the people like you, happy.
Back when I was working with the rest of the staff, I had to deal with issues like this on a daily basis. There's a lot of inner workings that nobody gets to see. On average, I'd have 3-5 emails asking me to fix certain bugs, questioning certain aspects of the game, and so on. Along with those 3-5 emails; I'd have an equal amount of emails suggesting ways to do our jobs to fix the game; otherwise "nobody will continue to play"
There's no solid middle ground. Someone like you, and a post like this, is a prime example.