Suggestions for Improved Games Subforum Clustering - General

The current selection of subforums in the Games forum is rather arbitrary and could be improved, in my opinion. Rather than dedicating an entire subforum to one game or franchise, I suggest creating subforums that are dedicated to well-known developers or publishers, or even genres if applicable. I would change the current situation as follows: Keep VR Gaming, Games In Progress and Jaykin Bacon: Episode 3 as is. Merge TF2, Counter Strike, Half Life and DOTA back into Valve Games & Mods. This would also give Left 4 Dead and Portal threads a home. Merge Fortnite and PUBG into a Battle Royale subforum. Merge Far Cry and Rainbow 6 Siege into Ubisoft. This also gives us a place to talk about Assassin's Creed, The Division 2, etc. Expand Fallout into Bethesda. This would also give us a subforum to talk about The Elder Scrolls, Doom: Eternal, Quake Champions, Prey, Wolfenstein, Rage 2, Starfield, etc. etc. Expand Overwatch into Activision/Blizzard. This would also give us a place to talk about Starcraft 2, Call of Duty, Destiny, and more. Expand Mario into Nintendo. Tons of topics to post in this subforum, self-explanatory really. Expand GTA into Rockstar Games. Also gives us a place to discuss the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2. That would reduce the current number of subforums to 10 and expand their scope to include more possible topics. In addition, I also want to suggest the following subforums: (I'm sure you can think of more) EA Games: Place to discuss stuff like Battlefield, Battlefront, Need for Speed and so on. Retro Games & Mods: Place to discuss the original Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, their mods, as well as upcoming retro style games such as Ion Maiden, Dusk and Amid Evil. Gaming News: A place for the newsbots to spam in. I believe this restructuring would help with user orientation around the forum, would improve filtering, and have every individual subforum be more active as a result.

I can see why people think like this, but I don't want broad categories like this where the threads inside are megathreads. I want forums that are on specific subjects, where the threads inside are threads.

I second OP’s post.

Its better than having 16 subforums that don't get used.

Can we at least give it a shot, and see if the subforums truly do cluster into a few megathreads? I know that oldpunch basically worked this way and it resulted in megathreads, but the original Valve Games and Mods resembled what the OPs idea seems to represent. A few megathreads here and there for games that no longer warrant active discussion (like Half Life), and frequently occurring new threads that sometimes even related to megathread discussion. My main concern here is that the "broad categories" approach has been suggested a few times and shot down in fear of megathreads. In reality, a fair amount of the current GGD subforums simply aren't working, and might see some revival if we experimented with a braoder approach.

So the answer is a no? I'm going to take this opportunity to pitch my own subforums. Abolish all current subforums, they will always ended up with post-yours and megathreads. Reddit does game-specific discussions way better. Introduce contextual subforums, such as Funnies, Gossip, Opinion, Help-Questions, Fanworks, etc. Bots and News are the default, shouldn't be subforums. You wanna kill megathreads? There you have it, let loose one to two more bots in Games and even newborns will be buried within a day.

there can still be specific threads inside those? a lot of these games just don't have much movement when it comes to posting though, so it makes them look dead

People have referenced 4chan's /vg/ board when discussing this and I think it's a pretty good example to follow. 4chan was already a website where concurrent, long-term threads focused around a single discussion couldn't really work. But the community kept drifting towards them, and a place was created for them to thrive. Facepunch is having significant growing pains trying to adapt to a megathread-less system, but when it eventually arrives there, I think you'll find the community will spring up megathreads around certain topics regardless. Trying so hard to stamp them out may not be the best approach. Instead, lets really experiment with the system you've created and see how megathreads could fit in. I think you'll find there are certain topics that allow a combination of conversation to occur in which both Oldpunch-style megathreads as well as frequently created new threads can exist together. My previously mentioned Valve Games and Mod example is a prime example from Oldpunch itself, and I seriously think there's potential in ideas like a Battle Royale or a Bethesda subforum.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with megathreads so this anti-megathread crusade is ridiculous tbh.

4chan and reddit work properly in terms of people creating new threads, because your new post inside a thread isn't going to get read. The threads become more unusable the longer they exist. This forum is the opposite in that no-one posts new threads, so new threads hardly get seen, so it's better to post all content in a popular thread to get seen. The threads don't get more useful the bigger they get, they get more useless. Information isn't partitioned and accessible, it's lost and overwhelmed. This isn't about being anti-megathread. This is about being pro-thread. We've cultivated this situation where people are scared to make new threads, so fewer threads get made, and now we're trying to un-sew those seeds. You can still have megathreads, but we're trying to not shrink into a single forum with 12 megathreads. We feel like creating forums will encourage that. We don't care if there are empty and unused forums, it costs us the same amount of money.

Would it be possible then to have the categories inside of categories like keeping elder scrolls and fallout categories inside a bethesda category so we dont have to see every single game listed under the games forum?

I think a part of the reason why new threads get ignored so easily is because the subforum system in its current state is extremely barebones and bizarre in some parts. The subforums that are currently implemented only allow a single game a lot of the time, which means the parent forum (Games) gets cluttered by everything else. Fortnite threads go in Fortnite subforum, PUBG ones go in their subforum, other Battle Royale games? Dumped into Games, where they're less likely to be seen by fans of Battle Royale fans. Dota threads go in Dota subforum, other MOBA games? They all go in the Games section, again to be less likely seen because there are so many more threads there than in the other subforums.

A lot of people think like this. "What if we have 500 subforum games, this isn't going to work". It's a matter of presentation, it's not a big issue, it's not something we have to deal with now.

Thing is, I think we all understand that at this point, and keep that in mind when suggestions like the OP's are put forward. You seemed to imply the fault with the OP's idea is that it would result in megathreads. That makes it appear that you're making choices to actively discourage megathreads rather than allowing new threads to form naturally. IMO, I don't think broadening the current GGD subforum categories would have a negative impact on how many new threads are being created in them. In fact, with how some of the subforums are currently just flat-out dead apart from their megathreads, this idea can only prompt more threads to be created in these new broadened categories. Again, why can't we simply try this idea out? We've been running with the idea of very specific subforums so far and they largely aren't working.

Also maybe make "Mario" into a better subforum, right now the subforum text says "Every game with the word "Mario" in the title" which makes it easy to think that it doesn't really allow other Nintendo games in which probably isn't the intended result (if you really do want it to only have Mario games in it, then I'm mistaken I guess)

its arguably bizarre to have several game subsections for games that have already died. the two active threads in mario arent even mario related, and the far cry subforum is so dead that nobody's even bothered to remake the megathread in 3 days. if its a matter of presentation, how do you find it fine that several parts of the forums are sitting gathering cobwebs when they were previously pretty active when everything was under a ggd discussion banner? at least if you go by publisher or genre you have at least the propensity for users to post more, and in this day most games under one publisher are pretty similar anyway. it doesnt make sense to expect people to post *more* with more fragmentation.

Trying to discourage people from posting in a certain way will never work. 4chan tried to ban general threads for years and it never worked. If you want people to make new threads and explore more of the forums you need to encourage that behaviour, not try to discourage people posting in megathreads. Maybe actually give the suggestions people make a chance, rather than deciding to do something without user input and ignoring, or disparaging, their reactions to it. Specific forums for games don't work because mos games don't generate enough discussion for them to be worth it. The problem garry sees is that there aren't many threas being made, because for some reason he equates more threads to more activity, but all you have to do is look at any game subreddit for a game which doesn't have a massive following to see that more threads just means more dead threads. You'll see many more threads but most threads only have 2-3 replies, often less. There's a lot of threads being made but there's fuck all discussion or conversation.

This is anecdotal, but for the most part when I see a megathread with like, fifty pages on any site I usually quickly check the OP incase it has anything interesting/pertinent, then skip to like, three pages before the most recent one, and then catch up. If anything, it's the posts between the first page and like, the most recent two or three that are going to be ignored, not the new posts. That may just be how I read threads though and I may just be an outlier.

You’re not. You join the discusssion at the relevant point. It’s what I’ve always done.

Doesn't the current system still result in the same problem for any game that doesn't fit into those categories? If I make a less popular game thread in the Games General, say for Age of Empires 4, it's going to get some posts, but probably still fade onto the second page where it's now basically dead. If there were more broad categories, my thread has a greater chance of surviving on the front page of that subforum. A "Strategy Games" subforum, for example. The problem is whether a single thread should be the go-to place for discussion about a single game, or if games should be split into multiple threads. I think, for the most part, genre subforum allow us to make new threads for more games, without them being pushed into obscurity of the second page. A genre is broad enough to allow people to make multiple fallout threads if they want, perhaps choosing from a list of thread icons representing big game franchises, or creating a custom one like labpunch, but still keep the subforum unpopulated just enough that other RPG game threads never get pushed to second page unless they're really dead.

Pretty much, this is how it works on SA (tho I just lurk.) Threads there get up to hundreds of pages and people just ignore what's in the middle.

I really think megathreads aren't going away as a thing people want. If you want to keep things relevant and accessible, enforce a post limit. I dunno if it's possible to make a thread only exist for a year, regardless of how many posts are in the thread.

I seriously don't understand how you can persist on thinking that changing what has worked before is going to do the forums good. The majority has voiced against this approach even long after you've messed around with moderation rules and thread tags/subforum. I mean no disrespect when I say this, but at this point you should take a step back and look at how the community wants things, and not just how you want things. Otherwise, I suggest you drop the general forums completely and keep Facepunch just Facepunch Studios-related, and leave the other parts to someone else.

As others have already mentioned, I don't see why the immediate conclusion of introducing a more broad subforum clustering is more megathreads. The existing megathreads would simply get moved into a single subforum, but there's going to be just as many megathreads as before, only with better filtering possibilities, and more chances for exposure. Instead of being located in the base forum, they would simply be located in the corresponding subforum. Furthermore, you say yourself that you think the megathreads are more useless the larger they get - so wouldn't more numerous, less consolidated megathreads actually be a good thing? Also, I believe a larger, more active looking subforum that encompasses a wider range of subjects may give people more reasons to actually post individual topics. There's not really much to talk about in Overwatch or Far Cry that isn't already covered by its mega thread, which is why you won't really get many substantial individual threads in those subforums. Furthermore, many of the current threads involve games that are likely to massively lose popularity soon, or already have. Do you really want to have one-off subforums where you'll eventually have to bother with removing them and creating new ones for the currently newest popular games? Or would you rather have a subforum that encompasses a more general topic, such as a publisher or genre, which are likely to survive for years to come, with new games to be discussed in additional, user-created threads in the future?

If you want to move away from megathreads it seems way too jarring to go straight to very specific subforums. To me it'd make more sense to ween people down from them by starting with more broad subforums like OP suggested and then MAYBE get more specific if the subforum actually becomes too big.

Again, I'm more interested in what people viewing and joining the forums will want, rather than retaining the current membership.

Surely people joining a forum would want things like they currently are on many forums (megathreads) and people wanting a reddit style where there is a thread for everything, would join Reddit instead? Why use something like Reddit when you could just use Reddit.

Quite frankly, FP is not going to be as Reddit. Size is what allows Reddit’s style to work. Facepunch is not going to get to that size.

This post ended up straying from the subject hard, but I guess just bear with me. I fully agree with the idea of a company/publisher/current industry trend based child forum division. I'm gonna take Nintendo as an example here for how threads would hopefully form. You have multiple kinds of megathreads that each touch upon a more limited selection of games in the franchise: 3D Mario titles, 2D Mario titles, Mario Kart, Mario minigame games, Mario sports, 2D Legend of Zelda, 3D Legend of Zelda, 2D Metroid, 3D Metroid, and so forth and so on. If you have a specific point of discussion you want to bring attention to, you make a thread for that specific subject, limited to that matter only. For example, you have old Nintendo hardware that you are looking to repair, or a thread talking about the limited stock of Mini editions and how much it makes you want to tear your hair out. This would form some considerable thread bloat, but inactive threads could be weeded out and merged with others until the remaining threads stay active while not being too broad. There shall be no General Nintendo Thread on the Nintendo child forum, but a collection of smaller partitions that are easier to search through. Don't punish people for making threads for specific issues or points of conversation even if it is being/was discussed in a larger thread already. (The last point is more aimed towards the user base than the site staff.) If thread diversity in these child forums disappears, it simply means the structure does not work. Perhaps allowing unregistered guests to post would encourage activity, but that might create difficulties for moderators with the influx of poorly mannered newcomers who don't have to worry about their message being attached to a recognisable title. Facepunch has always been a quality over quantity forum to me, and that's the way I hope it will stay. Currently even new members who end up sticking around simply do not want to make new threads for everything as questions about old subjects can be brought back up and quickly answered. Additionally, the vast majority of subjects discussed in megathreads don't hold enough practical import to be worth seeking out. I suggest that if a technical issue is discussed in a megathread, the issue should be then turned into an isolated thread where it could be solved, or if it is already solved, have the solution be contained in the OP of the issue's thread. It's unlikely such threads would garner much in the way of activity, but at least it would make troubleshooting more convenient. Facepunch's user base is perhaps too small at the current time for these threads to garner a pool of idle talent, but you could always give it a try. (As a wild idea, you could have a tagging system where users could opt to be tagged with tags pertaining to their area of expertise. Pinging this tag would alert everyone with that tag.(Yes, let's just turn Facepunch into a dedicated tech support forum, that's fantastic idea, just like hammering nails through our corneas)) And I suppose technical support is all small limited subject threads are good for in the end.