Rolling Lounge
Rolling Lounge (short form: RL; Sometimes also RLD [from the unofficial addition "Discord" to the server name]) is a community (interest based) server founded in January 11th 2018 by Gems Power and owned by SHAvibe. It is also the center of the Rolling Lounge Network. The server has served and still serves a central place for international Rolling Sky players to chat about the game. After Rolling Sky's death, the server topic core was changed to the community and its interests, which added more topics. It has also partnered with 3 Rolling Sky Fanmades, "Rhythm Join", "Rolling Sky Remake" and "Rolling Fanmade".
History
Foundation - Reflex Games Discord
This time of the server was when the basic structure of the server was built and had taken a shape. This lasted around one month from the foundation of the server (January 11th, 2018) to the (February 12th, 2018) when Reflex Games Discord built upon the basic structure and stabilized it together with a general expansion of the server, making it ready for a bigger community inhabitation. The server was founded by a group of people from the old Rolling Sky Discord founded in 2017 as this group had an idea of making a server where people could host and play challenges about two (three, including Dancing Ball) games by Cheetah Games, Rolling Sky and Dancing Line. As SHAvibe, a popular Rolling Sky and Dancing Line content creator was a part of that group, growing it would be possible quite easily. Therefore the server was founded on January 11th 2018 by one of the group members, Gems Power who gave the ownership to SHAvibe right away. The members of the group joined after and some were given staff permissions to set things up properly, where upon basic setup people were publicly invited outside of Discord through SHAvibe's showcase of the Rolling Sky level "Cloud". This caused the member count to increase high, as the server managed to reach 100 members in around one week already. The first challenges were also introduced at this time. The concept of challenges is that a challenge host/manager gives out a specific mission to be completed inside of a game, which is then submitted to gain rewards depending on how fast the challenge is completed. This concept was taken by the biggest Dancing Line server at that time, Dancing Line Discord, and was applied to not only one game (Dancing Line) but three games (Rolling Sky, Dancing Line and Dancing Ball). A level would be given where you had to reach a specific percentage in that level along with other parameters (like crowns and gems in Rolling Sky). Depending on your speed of completion, you'd get a server-wide currency called "Points" which placed you higher in a public leaderboard. The management system was not a structured system at the beginning of the server yet. Instead, a handful of people who offered their help got access to administration roles which they then used to help the owner with setting up the server. Various people in this old management system were Chorl Fate, EmmaCat, GemsPower and TNTBlower. This was changed until the server had reached 120 members, where a staff team system was established, starting with the first official staff AZMindroma. The server's start was quickly followed with arising problems. A raider with the name "MLG Dancing Line", one who was also an issue in the Rolling Sky community inside of Discord already, had targeted this server and began spamming the then against everyone ping unprotected server with mention spam and general raiding. As one account got banned, the raider used Virtual Private Networks to come back, but it was unknown where the raider was provided with the invite links and the possibilities to rejoin, as it was seen like the raider was expected to be a very young person due to the maturity they had shown. This problem was not solved for a long time until the problem was identified in the Reflex Games Discord Era.
Reflex Games Discord
Reflex Games Discord was the start of the stable server eras, where there was usually a developed server environment and community which had given the server a specific direction. The direction then stayed in the server until a new era came, which changed the fundamentals of the server. Several major events happened in this era contrary to the time before, and it was also met with a big popularity spike. This era's topics were Rolling Sky, Dancing Line and Dancing Ball, as it could be seen in the logo designed for it. This era lasted from February 12th, 2018 to October 3rd, 2018 when Rolling Sky Discord replaced the era.
Promotion
While SHAvibe was the main advertiser for the server before Reflex Games Discord, the Reflex Games Discord era added more YouTubers to the server willing to advertise it in their YouTube Channels, such as Tuan Nguyen. Due to a big Discord Server having Rolling Sky as topic was not present at that time and due to the ability to speak with the YouTubers, it seemed benefitial to join the server / join Discord by itself, as many people had created Discord accounts just for joining the server.
Community growth
The already existing community of the server Pre-RGD was expanded, but in a much larger scale than before. Due to the big influx of members to the server, a lot of people also decided to expand their activity in the server, which didn't only include talking about the server topics, but more personal topics inbetween the community members and the making of friends. Asides from concentrating solely on the server topics, the community started making itself an attraction as well, making a place where even people who didn't play the server games could have a place in. So, Reflex Games Discord was the first era where member bonds were made. This was also shown with several community projects being made and family pictures being drawn for the server.
Staff team
Due to the growth of the community, the potential staff candidates also increased, and therefore the staff team was greatly expanded under the new staffing system in this era. The first people also began to get promoted to admin, such as Dzeus, AZ and Tuan Nguyen. Asides of the staff team, an event team was also established which was solely responsible for making challenges, as those were now revamped and improved to increase the user experience. Under this management, RGD was well taken care of with moderation, communitation and interactivity all being covered.
Rolling Dream
Rolling Dream, the sequel of Rolling Sky entered its beta stages in 2018. Once the beta had opened, several YouTubers posted this announcement to their channels and to the RGD announcement channels. Since RGD was the biggest non-chinese community about Rolling Sky so far, it can be assumed that the developers of this new game gave SHAvibe and Tuan Nguyen the job of getting beta testers for the game in the non-chinese sector of the community. This function has been given to RGD, where people would be required to submit their Apple ID in a special channel to be able to reveive a Testflight invitation. Because entering the server was mandatory for the submission, this caused one of the biggest member spikes in all of the server's history, getting it to 2000 members.
Problems
While the MLG Dancing Line issue had been solved by the staff team using a logging method to find out who invited MLG Dancing Line which turned out to be a member called Khoai, with the huge popularity spike of Reflex Games Discord an account had joined the server which claimed to be an official Rolling Sky Developer. The RGD community believed this for a little while until the user was exposed of being fake, where upon exposal the user began to raid the server, mainly insulting the community and especially the owner, SHAvibe. Following their ban, a series of accounts joined in the same way as the previous raider MLG Dancing Line did, however their raids were worse, since they also included 18+ content (Not Safe For Work, NSFW) which had disturbed the community. There have also been claims that towo had the ability to hack accounts, though this hasn't been 100% confirmed. For a big part of the Reflex Games Discord era, towo was the biggest issue which was mainly resolved by bans. Reflex Games Discord was also an era which was significantly shaped by drama due to the community's young average age. People had made several smaller dramas about topics which weren't worth making dramas about, and there have also been conflicts with other servers due to trashtalking which happened from both sides which gave the core communities of both servers a bad image to each other. Those issues were partially resolved, but continued in some way or another in later eras.
Rolling Sky Discord
Rolling Sky Discord was the pinnacle of the server's existence in terms of activity, community size and strength, activities and more. This era has changed the server and its influx still holds until today. This era lasted from October 3rd, 2018 to January 25th, 2020.
Fall of Dancing Line and Dancing Ball
After some time of its existence, the management and the community of Reflex Games Discord had discovered several issues with the contents of the server. The issues were that Dancing Ball lost relevance drastically and problems with other servers arised due to the existence of Dancing Line as a main game, as another server had it as a main topic already. Because of this, both Dancing Line and Dancing Ball were removed as topics from the server once this era started.
Rise of the Server Economy
With the removal of Dancing Line and Dancing Ball, their dedicated challenge channels were also removed, leaving only Rolling Sky challenges. That's why Rolling Sky challenges were expanded drastically, as a new Challenge Manager team under the rulership of RoyalMike had formed and gone through intensive planning for events. The currency $RGD was renamed to $RSD and several other currencies were added, which were used to buy different items. The Challenge Manager team added several new modes to the challenges adding twists and tricks, which made them far more varying and interesting. This increased the participator amount by a lot and therefore the Challenge Manager team put intensive work in creating a Google Spreadsheet showing the entire leaderboard of RSD. In this era, Weeklys were introduced as well, challenges that were hosted every week instead of every day. Due to them appearing less often, the challenges required more time to beat and also rewarded the winners more. Unique to the Weeklys was the role "Challeader", which was given to the winner of the current Weekly challenge.
Community Changes
The community reached its peak size during the Rolling Sky Discord era, reaching ~2500 members at its maximum. Due to its name and defined topic, people could identify if the things that they would like to talk about was included in the server and therefore made the server more attractive. With the growth of the community, the YouTube Content Creators inside the server also increased. One encouragement for joining the server was the presence and for the first time, activity of official Rolling Sky developers outside of Chinese chatting applications. Though the first Rolling Sky Officials already had joined the server in its first major era "Reflex Games Discord", they showed little to no activity. In the RSD Era however, the activity of the officials increased by a bit, causing an incredibly large amount of people to join the chat and try to interact with the officials. While there were a lot of people who solely chatted about Rolling Sky (and its sequel) or people who didn't chat often, there were also a lot of people who befriended each other in the server, expanding the core community of the server.
This core community almost solely used Rolling Sky Discord to chat in all of Discord and built a lot of projects together to increase the community feeling or benefit the server in any other way. Notable projects were the continuation of the Family Pictures and the extreme growth of the Rolling Sky Discord Community YouTube Channel. Many other "unofficial" artworks were drawn for the server and a website dedicated to RSD was also in the works.
Problems
Raiding problems continued in the RSD Era, with two figures, towo and Ramesh being the biggest issues coming from outside the server. However, due to its peak of activity and community size, Rolling Sky Discord suffered from a lot of drama coming from inside the server. A lot of arguments happened at this time for various reasons, may it be because of Rolling Sky, specific moderation measures taken against members, people feeling disrespected and more. Some dramas in this era also caused parts of the core community to either temporarily or permanently take their leave from the server.
Rolling Lounge
Rolling Lounge got rid of Rolling Sky as a central topic and instead prioritized the community, using their interests as a base of the topics present in the server.
Fall of Rolling Sky
As the year 2019 progressed, the Rolling Sky community's satisfaction with each update started to decrease. The levels seemed to lose quality, and the philosophy of Rolling Sky's developers which made rare reuse of special game mechanics and no new interesting, game-changing ones made the community desperate for the developers to listen more to suggestions. The community did a lot of suggestions and people in closer contact with the developers transmitted those suggestions to them, however only one suggestion was implemented, it being a relatively insignificant one. That's when the community started a type of strike/boycott against Rolling Sky('s developers) and wanted to start a new server era independent from Rolling Sky as main topic. A referendum was held and as result, the server was rebranded to a community server.
Unstable start
A lot of channel changes were done as a result of the change of the server, but ultimately, it didn't seem like a proper rebrand due to the same icon being used generally, no big changes being seen. The rebrand seemed to be done prematurely as there wasn't much of an idea about what to do with the server now, and due to a giant drama in the management team, server development was immensely slowed down. As a result, the events quickly became very inactive and there wasn't much going on in the server anymore. With an unstable staff and event team, a substitute staff was searched to help continue the server development, and so eventually, one with the name of "Skye" was added. A new community had built itself up, which partially consisted of Rolling Sky Discord Core community members who were holding on, and friends of the new staff Skye. This boosted server activity despite the community size shrinking, as the few ones who were in the community were very active in it, making Rolling Lounge their "home", just like the previous core communities did. However, this community overtook the base community due to the 18+ (Not Safe For Work/NSFW) topics being one of the biggest topics due to a lack of moderation.
Server Revolution
In other servers the new change was receptioned very negatively. As a result, one part of the staff team (the ones against the Pre-Nuke segment) wanted to break up with Rolling Lounge. Parts of the second part (the ones who were for the Pre-Nuke segment) recognized at this part that an unity had to be restored as soon as possible, as this break up would also break up the entire community, so they tried to unify the staff team again. As a conclusion, a staff which had been seen as problematic and responsible for the current state of the server would need to get fired from the staff team so that the original team could reunite and start working on Rolling Lounge from scratch. While in the process of firing the staff however, they had given staff roles to their friends and started to kick people, delete channels and mass create roles out of rage. The staff and their nuke associates were quickly banned.
Reparation
The whole staff team was satisfied with its position in the server now and the split-up idea was scrapped. They began to work on the server from scratch again and new staff policies were added. Parts of the older community partially started to return to the server and chat again. The goal of the staff team now was to complete the premature transition from Rolling Sky Discord to Rolling Lounge. As a result, the server fundamentals remade from scratch. As the community's only interests didn't only consist of Rolling Sky, the interests of the community were inspected and support for them was added by the server which at that time included the 4 games/categories Cookie Run, Geometry Dash, Minecraft and Rhythm Games. The server started to slowly rebuild its reputation again, causing members who had previously shown hate to the server to rejoin the community and also partially become active again. Smaller events featuring the community were added, however, there hadn't been a event/currency remake yet, which was just started in 2021 under the name of "Project Amelioration" (Amelioration meaning "making some bad better"). This project caused the creation of a new central currency called Rolling Tokens (RT) and the removal of other currencies except of Gems (serving as an item able to get one of many items from the shop for free).
Partnerships
At the time of reparation, Rolling Sky had already found its end of life and therefore projects had been founded in remaking it from scratch with an inbuilt editor. The first project which had already been in the works for longer was called "Rhythm Join" by Small Garfield, which commited a partnership with the server, serving as the official server for the game. Later the game "Rolling Sky Remake" by Pão and "Rolling Fanmade" also found their way partnering with Rolling Lounge, making Rolling Lounge an important hub for these 3 Rolling Sky Fanmades.