I feel you. I'm sure alot of people will disagree with what I'm about to say (but hey, capitalism, right?), but I wouldn't mind at all if there was a subscription fee to the site. Now, before we get to that point, we would definitely need to give the forum skin a fresh look to give it more appeal. I say subscription fee because it we as moderators really wanted to, we could give this site a premium feel. I would love to host leagues and create immersive content, to just really dive into it like I do with my podcast, but I only get really serious when monetization is there for me to profit from. Like, when I left LLL last season, I didn't stop working on content for my podcast, I've spent everyday building up collections for each release, several hours of content for each uploaded collection, and I've been working on album material for more original content that I can add to each collection. I go all out for that. If there was a way to get paid to host a league, I would be like super happy, because, you know, capitalism. Shit, I would even welcome donations. But if there was a subscription fee that moderators could generate money off of from the site, I would never stop running leagues. I would do that shit all year round. When I left LLL I did that because I was going pretty hard despite it being a secondary project for me, I'm not one to go hard on a task where I feel my effort is being underappreciated, especially when doing it for free. At least with Penthusiast I'm reaching out to a much larger audience base and increasing my chances of making good money from it.
Me coming back and doing this shit free now, like with running the Lethal Event Series? That's me being reluctant to see text battling/audio battling die. That's it. I promise you there isn't a single person on this site that has been around the scene longer than I have. I've been around since AOL used to solicit homes with free disks. From AOL Chat Rooms, to the very first text battling sites, Davey D's, ICU, Sethro's, Lyricists Domain, Mr. Blunt's, I mean shit, I really don't want to see this culture die out. At all. So I'm content not getting paid off it or whatever, but getting paid to keep it alive would be pretty fucking awesome. LOL.