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These forums are so dead


Tenacity

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It's pretty unusual, IMO, to have a gaming forum - especially for an MMORPG - that can have the same posts with no responses for days or even weeks at a time. The class forums here have only gotten a couple of posts and replies in the past two weeks, and even the general discussion subforum is slow. That's usually an indication of a game's decline, but I think in this case it's also due to the fact that only subscribers are able to create or reply to posts.

 

Personally I dont feel that's healthy for the game. There's a lot of non-subscribers still playing, and those players are unable to discuss the game here. They cant ask questions, they cant answer questions, they cant discuss updates or make suggestions. It's not a good idea to cut out a huge portion of your dwindling player base from one of the main communication outlets available to them.

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Was this response fast enough for you? :D

 

Anyway I wouldn't say responses are slow, its just that there are around 100-150 ppl which post stuff on the forums regularly and read regularly. Others either dont post at all, post one 1 or 2 times, or just read, but many surely read the forums at least.

 

As for the Class forums, I stopped watching that totaly, The main ones to read are General, PVP, Servers, PTS, Ops/FPS/Heroics maybe GSF but the rest is too specific like Crew Skills etc. The F2P people also have a way of posting, mainly on the reddit page, where they can post and ask stuff for free.

 

If you have something you need help with just let me know!

Edited by merovejec
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It's true that most social players have gone off to other games because there haven't been new social content in game to sub for, and only subs can write here...

 

The majority of current active forum posters are new, or RP/dating sim enthusiasts who make giant threads they disguise as X appreciation thread and then spend majority of their time on that thread discussing their lives, characters and inside jokes that actually don't have anything to do with the thread lol.

I don't know what's the purpose of these threads in the General area anyway, pretty sure they should be at RP and off-topic area.

 

But yeah we're all very aware the player counts have pretty much halved since kotfe/et, excluding the initial launch peak.

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That's because it's summer - people are outside gardening, mowing and riding bikes rather than posting on the forums. ;)

 

I kid above...yes they are...very dead. I remember the days when you'd post and by the time your post was accepted and the display for the front page reloaded, your post was already on page 3...

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That's because it's summer - people are outside gardening, mowing and riding bikes rather than posting on the forums. ;)

 

Exactly! Except us here, we already look so fantastic - we don't need a tan. :-)

Edited by Khaleg
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I think some of the slowness is due to the PTS being up and running again. I know that I've focused most of my forum posting in the PTS thread. Also, it is summer, and I have been out engaging with people face to face more. Granted, it still takes lots of coaxing and offers of free food to get me to venture out of my nerd cave, but venturing has been happening, lol.
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Was this response fast enough for you? :D

 

Anyway I wouldn't say responses are slow, its just that there are around 100-150 ppl which post stuff on the forums regularly and read regularly. Others either dont post at all, post one 1 or 2 times, or just read, but many surely read the forums at least.

 

^^ I agree. And almost every possible topic has been discussed to death over the years.. so repeat discussions are at a minimum really... until someone newer to the game comes in and reignites a topic, and even these literally get little actual discussion traction.

 

The reality is.. and you can go back in the history of this forum and see it for yourself I you are inclined... most gaming forums are a furious arena of complaints and rants early in the life cycle of a new game (be it MMO, or single player, or mobile). Eventually those that are complaining and ranting move on to some other game and if you actually follow some of them (a good example was TSW forums, which had a lot of SWTOR refugees early on) you would see that forums are generally not a productive discussion platform, but rather a ranters hangout. In the case of TSW... in a good number of cases I saw the same exact forum names being used by the same players and those who ranted loudest and with the most anger and emotions in the SWTOR forum were doing exactly the same thing in the first year of the TSW forum.

 

Generally though ... forums are a dying medium for gamer discussion (really any discussions) on the internet and has been on the decline for years. Personally, I still prefer a forum format as it actually allows different viewpoints to present and discuss differing views in a more coherent manner. People can actually have meaningful and nuanced discussion, agreement, and disagreement. Social media channels simply do not offer that opportunity, as it is mostly a role play of blind folded badminton using unpinned hand grenades as the birdie.

 

People still do drive-by rants and hyperbolic complaining and conflating in this forum... but in most cases it also gets tempered by fellow forum members who see it for what it is and push back (even when they may agree with the context of said ranting and complaining). And of course we still have thin skinned and defensive players that take someone's comments personally, or in fact issue personal attacks (but forum rules and moderation generally take care of that). Overall the forum today is much more objective in terms of discussion...even amongst a wide range of disagreements between players at times.

Edited by Andryah
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It's pretty unusual, IMO, to have a gaming forum - especially for an MMORPG - that can have the same posts with no responses for days or even weeks at a time. The class forums here have only gotten a couple of posts and replies in the past two weeks, and even the general discussion subforum is slow. That's usually an indication of a game's decline, but I think in this case it's also due to the fact that only subscribers are able to create or reply to posts.

 

Personally I dont feel that's healthy for the game. There's a lot of non-subscribers still playing, and those players are unable to discuss the game here. They cant ask questions, they cant answer questions, they cant discuss updates or make suggestions. It's not a good idea to cut out a huge portion of your dwindling player base from one of the main communication outlets available to them.

 

The forum mirrors the game - many Players unsub due to the decisions and changes made by an dev Team which has lost the connection to its player base.

 

They ask for Feedback, they become Feedback, they ignore the Feedback - why should we continue to discuss with them?

 

On the other side there is no new Content for months and thier Roadmap is a joke - there is no hope for the future because they have no ideas what to do. Suggested they want to bring an Addon like WoW there are more than two years for conception, implementation and test and that with a Team they will never have.

 

So there is no hope and the forum shows this.

Edited by Master_Morak
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Every time I see one of these posts, I can't help but SMH. Forum activity has no correlation with the number of active players. This should be obvious. The decline in activity you claim to be seeing has nothing to do with people leaving the game/not playing, it's purely related to NUMEROUS other things like:

  • the surge of new players are too busy enjoying the game to post
  • previously-active posters/old players have run out of things to say, and are spending time re-playing old content
  • those who've shifted away from backlit keyboards are now posting less at nights, bringing overall activity down
  • people who have backlit keyboards are now catching up on other forums they used to be unable to post to
  • studies show that an increasing number of new gamers avoid forums with black backgrounds and yellow lettering
  • the incessant and unyielding negativity on the forums drives droves of posters away--except for love threads
  • numerous potential posters have been scared off by the fact that the web site has been a "not secure" http site
  • many counselors and therapists are advising their patients to limit forum posting to once per week at most
  • though summer wasn't invented in 2018, its "rediscovery" in 2018 led many to spend posting time outdoors

 

All of this assumes there is even a decline at all in forum activity which is highly doubtful. No one can really confirm that's the case. The numbers of posts and responses isn't a good indicator of forum activity -- only the devs have this information. So people should just stop making assumptions about things and stuff...

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Every time I see one of these posts, I can't help but SMH. Forum activity has no correlation with the number of active players. This should be obvious. The decline in activity you claim to be seeing has nothing to do with people leaving the game/not playing, it's purely related to NUMEROUS other things like:

  • the surge of new players are too busy enjoying the game to post
  • previously-active posters/old players have run out of things to say, and are spending time re-playing old content
  • those who've shifted away from backlit keyboards are now posting less at nights, bringing overall activity down
  • people who have backlit keyboards are now catching up on other forums they used to be unable to post to
  • studies show that an increasing number of new gamers avoid forums with black backgrounds and yellow lettering
  • the incessant and unyielding negativity on the forums drives droves of posters away--except for love threads
  • numerous potential posters have been scared off by the fact that the web site has been a "not secure" http site
  • many counselors and therapists are advising their patients to limit forum posting to once per week at most
  • though summer wasn't invented in 2018, its "rediscovery" in 2018 led many to spend posting time outdoors

 

All of this assumes there is even a decline at all in forum activity which is highly doubtful. No one can really confirm that's the case. The numbers of posts and responses isn't a good indicator of forum activity -- only the devs have this information. So people should just stop making assumptions about things and stuff...

That list gave me a good laugh, thanks for that :p

 

Forum posting absolutely gives some direction on how the playerbase is doing... When was there most players in SWTOR past 3 years? At the launches of KOTFE and KOTET. When was there a peak in forum posting during the past 3 years? At the launches of KOTFE and KOTET. Odd how that connects, isn't it.

Same for pretty much every other expansion- or other content launch. There's a peak in playerbase and forum postings on the same months. It's be foolish to insist there is no relation.

 

Personally the less reason i have to log in-game i have the more i find myself logging on forums (to try and find reasons to validate my next month of sub..)

Edited by Kiesu
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  • the surge of new players are too busy enjoying the game to post
  • previously-active posters/old players have run out of things to say, and are spending time re-playing old content
  • those who've shifted away from backlit keyboards are now posting less at nights, bringing overall activity down
  • people who have backlit keyboards are now catching up on other forums they used to be unable to post to
  • studies show that an increasing number of new gamers avoid forums with black backgrounds and yellow lettering
  • the incessant and unyielding negativity on the forums drives droves of posters away--except for love threads
  • numerous potential posters have been scared off by the fact that the web site has been a "not secure" http site
  • many counselors and therapists are advising their patients to limit forum posting to once per week at most
  • though summer wasn't invented in 2018, its "rediscovery" in 2018 led many to spend posting time outdoors

 

Ooh, ooh, facetious speculation is fun!

 

 

  • decline mirrors decline of Facebook--people just aren't participating in social media as much as they used to
  • many posters disgusted that their constant attacks of the developers haven't led to more firings like at other studios for lesser transgressions (such as having breasts, among other awful things)
  • the forums are actually deader than you think--most threads are just two people going at each other for five pages before the one mod wakes up and removes the nonsense. Then the two players go at it again in another thread or just keep going in the same one, even going so far as to necro week-old threads just to get the last word in
  • that Genoharadan with a woman's body and man's voice was too much for a large portion of the posters and they left en masse to protest this thing called "life"
  • the forums are actually the last place people come to after Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, and by that time their little fingers are so sore from tiny-tapping their phone keyboards furiously in their quest to get more developers fired
  • CracyCT, the most vociferous forum white knight, stopped posting and a sharp decline followed shortly after the conquest changes (coincidence? I think not :rak_01: )
  • the forum's 1,537th "game is doooomed!!!11!" thread actually broke the camel's back when one brilliant, terrible post convinced most die-hards to abandon ship

Edited by aerockyul
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All I know is that I went to the GW2 forums this week and my god people are posting there all the time. This forum really is dead by comparison. Say what you will but it's summer there too and the frequency of posts is MUCH higher.

 

Of course the devs do respond there more regularly as well, but clearly it's a lot more active over there than here.

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All I know is that I went to the GW2 forums this week and my god people are posting there all the time. This forum really is dead by comparison. Say what you will but it's summer there too and the frequency of posts is MUCH higher.

 

Of course the devs do respond there more regularly as well, but clearly it's a lot more active over there than here.

 

Here is an interesting site, that estimates in-game activity based on reddit activity.

 

https://mmo-population.com/r/swtor/

 

Clearly off, and I certainly don't think that there are 150,000 swtor users daily, but it is interesting nonetheless (it ranks SWTOR as number 11, behind a bunch of things including GW2, which is ranked 3).

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All I know is that I went to the GW2 forums this week and my god people are posting there all the time. This forum really is dead by comparison. Say what you will but it's summer there too and the frequency of posts is MUCH higher.

 

Of course the devs do respond there more regularly as well, but clearly it's a lot more active over there than here.

 

Yeah, WoW forums are a lot more active than these as well. But there was pre-patch this week leading up to a massive full expansion in 3 weeks so that's got a lot to do with it, too.

 

.

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