People are frustrated. The forum they've used for up to 14 years of their lives (12 in my case) is undergoing massive changes which seem to be focused on attracting an entirely different type of culture to what we've cultivated for the past decade. There are plenty of rational posts which explain why the changes are bad, both from the community's general perspective and from a usability perspective. Ignoring those because a few people are understandably upset and post how they feel is just unreasonable.
For the umpteenth time, no you don't.
You literally flip to the last couple of pages, catch up on the conversation and either
continue it
change it to what you want
This is how you participate in a megathread. Unless you have a ridiculously abundant amount of time on hand, nobody goes back and reads through an entire megathread.
Yeah? They're asleep, what do you expect?
I think you completely misread what I'm saying. Whining does not get any consideration from Garry. Constructive feedback, on the other hand, does. But constructive feedback can only get considered if it's not drowned out by useless whining. So whining about the issue is completely unhelpful on multiple fronts.
Whether Garry agrees with the complaints or not is a totally different issue to whether our feedback is being heard. I put a decent amount of effort into my first post in this thread but it's far more likely to get completely overlooked because of all the whining on the pages before it and since I made it.
Obviously we need some subforums, but I thought the way they were divided up earlier was fine, and definitely better than it is now. A lot (probably all) of the subforums that were just converted from megathreads are just too narrow; there isn't enough Overwatch or Fortnite related content on this site to warrant a whole subforum. The Nintendo megathread self-regulated when people who didn't care about the mobile games got sick of seeing so much mobile content, and a second megathread was made. If you try to split these megathreads up into a subforum, you'll have a bunch of incredibly slow moving threads that wont even reach a second page. If I'm looking to keep tabs on Fortnite or whatever, it's much easier to just scroll through one megathread that's at least somewhat active than going back to a subforum every time I want to see if something has happened and seeing only one or two threads have had any activity anyway.
All of this has been said before but I feel like the discussion lately has drifted away from what I see as the deciding factor; how big does a community need to be to warrant a whole subforum?
so like... what's the end goal style of posting here? like i get how reddit works, is that the closest equivalent to what garry's trying to encourage? is it supposed to get to the point where, say, lmao pics closes and we just have a "funny pictures" subform where each thread is "hey look at this funny picture i found" and all the replies are "lol nice?" cuz that's where it seems like it's going right now
idk the forum has changed a hell of a lot since i've been here but we've never had to alter the way we post so fundamentally before
Honestly I don't think this was intended outcome from all of this, from what I've got out of this they want the megathreads breaking down to become more specialized instead of generalized and eating up all the content.
A lot of the major game megathreads that now have their own subforums suffered hard from the megathreads drowning out other discussions and infomation because people would just use them as generic chat threads, and these threads then dominate the section.
Breaking them apart and allowing a more spread out approach is what I see is the desired effect from all of this.
For example instead of just having a megathread for EVERYTHING about one game, we can now have a chat/discussion thread, updates thread, community related content threads, media thread and so on.
Its basically going back to how it was before the dawn of merging everything into megathreads, it makes infomation more seperated and easier to located instead of having to dig through the megathread pages or hoping the OP updates the threads first post with information (which then no one ever checks because they always go to what is unseen/last read).
People using this to now just spam low effort threads are being dumb.
I still think that the changes should have been implemented slowly in test phases to best integrate the ideas into the existing ecosystem, starting with a few extra subforums and encouraging people to make more threads in addition to the existing general purpose megathreads.
Instead the dial was just cranked up to eleven across the entire forum with a blanket "big threads bad, small threads good" and seemingly no logical moderation or game plan beyond this core concept, and the lack of separation from the existing main subforums to make things utterly cluttered and a nightmare to navigate.
Again, if you took two seconds to skim through some of the pages in this thread pretty much all of them have an overwhelmingly negative response to the changes.
I don't know what constitutes "whining" in your eyes, but pretending our feedback is going to be ignored because people were "whining" is a surefire way to convince people their feedback isn't being taken into consideration.
That only makes sense if you've always been active in that thread, it discourages newcomers entirely. You see this long ass thread with like 10 people posting in it, they feel like cliques. Now you can have several different conversations on a popular topic without having to specifically find the posts that are related to the topic you wish to discuss.
I really can't think of any game megathreads that were "chat threads" that discouraged general questions or topics about the game. I've never seen one in my whole Facepunch posting life.
If the defence would like to point to a good example of this supposed problem, go ahead and demonstrate it to me. Put your money where your mouth is.
I'm really curious as to how any new thread is expected to survive in GGD in its current state. Let's say I discover a new indie game and make a thread about it because I want to discuss it with everybody here. It'll sit at the top for perhaps thirty seconds before it's buried beneath three page's worth of DOTA hero threads, TF2 hat threads, Overwatch POTG threads, and Waluigi threads. Now nobody is going to see my thread and the game will never see discussion. Nobody is exposed to new content that they never saw before, which is ironically exactly what this change is meant to accomplish in the first place.
To make this idea work, there needs to be an option to filter out subforum posts at the bare minimum. Also, in exchange, make subforums a bit easier to access from their parent forums. Right now the only way to access a subforum is to click the link on the homepage, and that doesn't make for a fluid browsing experience.
Well the games forum is now almost useless. All I see are TF2, Overwatch and DOTA threads, which I have no interest in, so it's all wasted space. Pretty much never going to find the threads I want now without having to do a lot of searching. I don't want to see the content I don't want to read, it's wasted space.
No, it doesn't??
I've posted in tons of megathreads once or twice that I haven't gone back to. Arma 3 (I even joined in an OP with them at one point), FFXIV, Albion, Rocket League, etc.
I don't know why you're making posting in a megathread out to be such a big ordeal. It's no different from posting in a regular thread.
On the contrary, In my opinion I find it better that there's a single thread where I can throw out a car related question for example without making a whole new thread about a little sound my car is making.
What if I just bought a new car or something? Why would I post that in the forum?
I think what is happening now in games is a perfect example on how this is all a bad idea.
Makes everything harder to navigate
Makes it hard to find anything at all
Allows for a bunch of threads that have no business being threads anyway
Anything worth talking about is pushed off the front page to make room for threads for every single character in dota/overwatch/tf2
It fragments the community over 100 threads instead of maybe 1-2.
PUBG and GTAV's megathreads come to mind right away.
They seriously drowned out any discussion that didn't follow along the current topic and the media posts broke everything away.
You'd get pages of just videos and screenshots that would drown out questions and other topics.
And it making it a bitch to organize anything within them as it'd get straight up ignored, this is one of the cases where breaking down the megathread is constructive.
If you guys are making "donkey dick" threads, you're should probably be posting your actual opinion into the OP, not just copypasting Crapt's quote.
Better yet, find me a game megathread that doesn't have several different conversations going on one page.
Yeah, I kinda read the thread, thanks. You're still managing to completely miss what I am saying. Torrents of unconstructive feedback make it easier to overlook valid feedback. They're not useful posts and are completely counterproductive.
Janus Vesta's post I originally replied to, for example. It's not remotely constructive. It only serves to make it more difficult to find constructive feedback. It's just whining about a change he didn't like while providing no useful criticism (other than "it's bad!") and wasting space. The people making those useless posts should not be making them if they want Garry to listen to us. They should either take the time to make constructive posts or just refrain from posting instead.
This is a really simple concept. I don't know how you guys are still missing this despite me repeatedly explaining it to you.
If there is going to be subforums for all those games, there needs to be more specified moderation. At least 1 moderator on duty per subforum, making sure nobody is making any meme threads or things that are way too specific to have a thread about. Basically, we might need more mods if it's going to be this way and I kind of doubt that will happen.
I found the big TF2 threads a bit inaccessible mainly due to the speed at which they moved and the communities they developed.
But jeez, I'd gladly take feeling slightly out of place over this monstrosity.
So what if his original post wasn't constructive? That doesn't negate the dozens of other valid criticisms throughout this thread or water them down or obscure them or whatever terminology you're wanting to use.
The thread is literally flooded with negative feedback (as are multiple other threads). If the complaints are ignored it's not because they were missed due to people whining.
I think the real lesson here is that "it depends" on whether something should have a megathread or not.
Something like that depression/suicide/mental health thread definitely should be a megathread.
If what you say is true then pubg should have a few different threads for different topics; cool plays, new map discussion, strategy, etc.
I personally like the way 4chan organizes, /g/ for example, some threads are big, like the honda thread, or the stupid question thread, or the motorcycle thread. But some things don't really need a big/recurring thread, what kind of car should I buy, "dumb opinion here", "what tools should I buy if I want to fix my own car" etc.
Don't worry, anything I don't agree with is whining too
Dude literally 90% of the last 20 pages of the GTAV thread are about upcoming/new content, with three entire posts worth of blocks of media which were funny GTAIV videos.
Like I can hyperbole all I want too, but that doesn't take away that it's mostly on topic discussion.
Jesus christ how much more clear can I possibly get?
Let me try this a different way: What do you think is more visible? Ten constructive posts and forty whining posts or 25 constructive posts and five whining posts?
One only has 30 total posts but is far more useful because the constructive feedback is far more freaking visible. Do you get what I mean yet or do I need to somehow simplify this even more? I have never once said that the whining invalidates the constructive feedback. I said it doesn't help and is counterproductive. (As well as Garry simply being more likely to completely ignore the issue altogether because of the whining since people arne't being constructive.)
You literally just reinforced the point I was making.
The thing is that it then becomes "we need two or three threads, maybe a couple more if the game is really active" and not "we need thirty mostly repetitive threads". One thread might be too little in some cases, but the solution isn't to nuke it and make loads of threads.
There have been constructive posts all over the place. Do you want me to go around and pool them all together?
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