The End

Hello, Club Penguin Armies.

My name is Bluesockwa2. In December 2008, I joined the Army of Club Penguin as a rogue recruit on the server Mammoth. Since that time, I have ascended to high ranks in various armies and organizations, most notably serving as the CEO of CPA Central from 2012-2014. Alongside my brother, Bluesockwa1, I spearheaded the era which has come to be known as the Second Golden Age. I have been part of this community for almost ten years. I have seen a great many things. In all honesty, never did I think I would see this day.

Club Penguin, the game which has been both the platform that lifted us to new heights, and the enemy which nearly destroyed us, has finally closed its doors. It is for that reason that I make the announcement which has been long rumored: after the conclusion of the various end-of-site events currently in progress, CPA Central will close its doors as a news organization.

This site will remain open for public viewing (though its domain name will eventually drop back to the original WordPress: cpacentral.wordpress.com), and over the next few months I along with my upper staff will be working to put the finishing touches on this site’s various memorial pages.

It is my hope, that with the closing of this site, I will have removed the final thread tying this community’s disparate actors together. There has been much talk over the years of moving Armies to a game all their own — perhaps a Roblox or a CPPS. It is a thought that B1 and I have always vehemently opposed, and continue to do so now. Removing “Club Penguin” from “Club Penguin Armies” destroys the very thing that makes us unique. It tears apart the very fabric of Club Penguin Armies to remove them from the game in which they were born and by which they have been constrained for the past 11 years. To place them anywhere else would be a destruction of this community equal to, if not greater than, the simple closing of Club Penguin itself.

Moving armies to oft-proposed options like Roblox and Minecraft lends various problems — entrance cost, existing, significantly larger communities, fundamental changes in the way “battle” is done. The community becomes incomprehensibly more massive, uncountable and uncontrollable in its size, and everything, from our graphics to our very names, has to change as we move away from penguins. The constraints which have governed our battles and ranking and tournaments removed, the community’s unique style of war is rent asunder and forcibly remade anew, absorbed by whatever different venue in which the fighting now happens. Our history falls into ruin, superseded by the “new” way that has come to replace the old.

Moving CP Armies to a new game will simply end up being “Minecraft with some people I used to be in CP Armies with” or Roblox, or AtWar, or whatever other option we should choose. It would not be a continuation of this community, but rather would destroy it by allowing its uniqueness to be subsumed by some much larger, much different, and much less controllable game. And I will not allow what we have built here to be destroyed like that. I recognize I have allowed various views on this subject to propagate on this site, but let me be most clear, here and now — from one of the ones who helped make you great: let it die.

CPA Central will be left to stand as a memorial to what we have created here — yes, we, including each and every one of you, from the lowest recruit to the greatest of leaders. In the last eleven years of this community’s existence we have created a game all our own, with rules and players and motivations made entirely by you and me. We fought a hostile host game that would gladly have stamped us out at every turn, lowlife trolls with nothing better to do than seek to destroy what we have made, and infighting that nearly tore us apart. But through it all, Club Penguin Armies, with its players and rules and politicians and reporters and diplomats and soldiers, endured. That alone is a testament to this community, which has brought people — teenagers! — from across the world together in a shared spirit of cooperation and competition. We have made children into leaders, writers, publicists, organizers, reporters, politicians, and so many other things. I encourage you to read the writings of various legends of this site on why this all mattered — especially Splasher99 and B1 himself; they will show you why all these many thousands of hours were not in vain. I provide you a brief excerpt below:

The centralized truth of the human experience, in Armies or beyond, is that we don’t know. There is one guarantee in this journey — that you can’t take your persona with you. It will die, and you don’t know when, but you are only guaranteed so many years here, and you are only guaranteed so many years in life. There are only certain things you will be able to take with you — the lessons you learned and the people you met. Life is irrational and radical and doesn’t make sense, and just as we stand as a buffer against the death of this community, you need to stand as a buffer against your life becoming irrational.

Keeping a stable life might sound like a difficult task, and I grant you, it is. To prevent your life from becoming irrational, you have to accept that the very nature of everything you do is irrational, because there is no hindsight in this community or in the real world. So fuck it, go meet new people, fall in love, achieve success and pass on your story to all who are willing to hear you talk, because as much as we all like to pretend we’re warfare veterans and media moguls, we’re a bunch of scared kids, and this is a convenient way to mask all the little things we want to do. When it comes down to it, the only way to overcome being scared is to accept that being scared is okay.

B1, CPAWM Board Chairman, September 28, 2014

I have tried to keep the archives of this site as untouched as possible over the years. What remains will stand forever as a testament to this place, to our triumphs and defeats, to our petty disputes and grandest of conflicts, to our successes and our sorrows. And even after our last TV cameras turn off and our printing presses stop rolling, we will all remember what this place was and what we built here. Because ultimately we will remember nothing more than the lessons we learned and the friendships we made. We will all remember that, at one time or another, this place, like so many other things, scared us. And that’s okay.

And so, from all of us here at the CPA Central news desk, thank you, and goodnight.

B2