For the old-timers here: how (if at all) has System Wars changed over the years?

What are some of the big differences you notice as the generations have passed? What keeps you coming back here after all of these years? Also, what do you miss from the past either here or elsewhere on the site?

I miss the unions and the user leveling system. GameSpot sucked all the fun outta this place

There was the old System Wars Hype game. A hype thread would be made to establish an expected score. If the game met or bet the score then the winning faction could rub the other factions face in it for a week or 2. If not, and the game flopped*....ouch. especially if a really anticipated game flopped (i think the biggest was Twilight Princess....maybe Killzone 2).

*a flop being defined as a game failing to meat its hype score...so a game scoring a 9 could still be a flop if it was hyped to be a 10. Note that only the GS score mattered. Some would try to weasel out of it by saying site X scored a game better...didn't matter. GS score was gospel.

Hardware was also more interesting and more debatable up to the PS3/360 gen. Even now some still argue that the PS2 was more powerful than a Gamecube. They are wrong but they still exist. The PS3/360 debate raged on for ages (the end result, i think, was the PS3 was more powerful. But not by much and that power came at a cost which wasn't worth it).

Nowadays what is the most powerful console is settled by the time the spec sheet hits. The XSX is more powerful than the PS5. The PS4 was more powerful than the X1. There is nothing to debate on these points.

People may be a little nostalgic for it, but it's always been trash. Gertsmann has said/written many times this board was intentionally created to be a toxic cesspit, because people kept arguing about which system/exclusive is "better" on the Games Discussion board. Back when this website had decent traffic, Games Discussion is where it was at.

The 2013 redesign was the death knell.

Worst part for me was it locked me out of my old account and I forgot the password lol

Of course it has changed. But you gotta blame GS, they have semi destroyed this forum. I am pretty certain that if they fully reworked this forum, and made it more modern, a section named SYSTEM WARS would be poppin, cuz fanboy wars is only bigger nowdays, and you can see this on twitter, youtube, etc.

@hardwenzen: doubt it tbh, people don’t really frequent forums the way they once did, not it’s only Reddit, twitter or whatever the newest trend dictates!

Forums everywhere have largely died.

For sure, but if you put it up front, it will attract a decent amount of people. I don't know of any other forums with a section called "system wars", and some people want just that. Not to mention that there's still a ton of posts on the SJW forum called resetera. GoldenElementXL is a massive enjoyer of that forum, so he can chime in on how active it is😎

Compared to 10-15 years ago? Yes. But there are some that are still very active. resetera, gamefaqs, etc. System Wars is a section i see being very lively.

Don’t see that many Nintendo fanboys as before.

Used to be VASTLY better threads during the 6th and 7th gen. SWs is like a shadow of its former self. Used to be addictive.

I liked Tom McShea back in the day as well.

I have no doubt that SWs was designed to corner off the fanboy wars, but it was always the liveliest Gamespot forum. Much more thread traffic.

What was your original account name?

Most seem to have jumped ship a long time ago.

Lmao! That place is an echo chamber. A cult. I caught a ban for “dismissing racism” because I said I didn’t agree that all white people were racist. I’m a half black man married to a white women. Me not calling her racist is dismissing racism apparently. And my white mother must be a racist… Right?

ResetEra has turned into a place for the most extreme outcasts to feel like they belong somewhere. Except now, they have become so woke, that not even the most progressive people can openly discuss things without getting banned. The Jussie Smollette thread turned into a graveyard of people banned for ”victim blaming.” I caught another ban there for discussing the oddities in the Kobe Bryant rape case the day after he died, when people were telling him to “rot in hell” over a case that was settled out of court…

ResetEra is dying, but it’s because the mods are trying to out woke each other. And for what?!?! I still haven’t figured that part out. And I hate even using the word “woke” and the phrase “cancel culture.” But ResetEra is the epitome of those things.

Miss the older style of forums prior to the big change of 2013. Never frequented other places besides here and GameFaqs. Mainly still just come here out of habit these days.

Umm KZ2 didn’t flop. I think the original KZ did ( I wasn’t around here during the ps2/GC/OG Xbox generation), but KZ2 didn’t flop, in fact I think that KZ2 exceeded its initial hype.

Gamespot killed their community with the site redesign and the death of unions.

In a discord era forums are hella useless. Even my Gaf/Gaf 2 browsing been gimped because most of the people I want to actually chat games with I can jsut chat with on discord. Without the sheer ridiculous stupidity that comes from the forums group. ....well to a point

Beyond that the new wave of trolls are trash. Your gimmicks suck. Yoofuu now that was a gimmick, gingerdavid? Classic. That pancakes vs waffles thread? Legendary. Da Bomb owning all the fucking nintendo nerds when he told them gears of war would outscore Zelda, and how absolutely savage the nintendo nerds were about it. IT was aweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesome to read that thread again.

I want to say some penguin guy had a whole history of SW thread at one point, that had a lot of funny stories. The great cow meltdown of 04 when their games flopped. Can't say it was all bad, I had my fun years with Gufu, and that extended to our crew having a lively chatty group to this day.

Every now and then we laugh about the banter with Ty and Hype, where they kicked out Solidty for no good reason, other than he's a fucking cow lol, or when aljosa got upset that Wingman Sherlock Holmes'd his ass. OR any time we remember what a grade pussy ass bitch Pablo is. That fucking two faced rat.

sports channel used to be lit too. Miss bobbles telling Chutebox to get gaped for being a dickskins fan. Or when they dunked on that multi team having eagles fan. Or when you had overly nerdy cats like that goon Monkeytoes pretending Sammy Baugh was some great athlete for being a qb n punter for playing when dentists used to play in the NFL on the side.

@ermacness: I think your right. Just checked the score which was a 9. Maybe it was KZ 1 that flopped (was that the one branded as the Halo killer?).

There was some other Major event around KZ2 which caused some quite heated exchanges here. The reveal maybe?

There's just less compelling arguments.....

1. Sheep are basically not here anymore

2. All the Hardcore lemmings can do is talk about GamePass, the only xbox exclusives are Gears, Halo, Forza and it's been that way for like 3 console gens now....

3. Sony relies heavily on 3rd person action games that stick to a formula

4. PC, Xbox, and PS are so close in power now the arguments for which hardware is better is almost trivial now, there's no point

hahaha, yeah thats one big thing that changed alot. Actually I was a sheep when I was younger, and as I matured I went over to the xbox. There were a ton of sheep back then, and honestly it was an all out war with the 3 factions.

Geez, that was a real trip, I just barely remembered a few of the names you dropped haha. Pancakes vs waffles lol...what was that about again? I faintly remember da bomb, and yeah I was part of the sheep brigade too haha. The sheep and lemmings were really going at it back in the days. That was because xbox just released and nintendo was getting demolished with their kiddy looking console. There was so much butt hurt on the sheep side.

some guy made a joke post on system wars, about how pancakes had better graphics than waffles on system wars, and it turned into a whole thread of basically parodying every thread idea n talk. Aunt Jemima went Pancakes exclusive, french toast had flopped, waffles had better texture, waffles had superior syrup to dough ratio for dunking, it went on for a good while.

IT was on the fly, it was organic, you know obviously by the tail end of the thread we were basically just recycling the same joke that was already made, but it was a gem of a thread. They fucking moved the thread to the food union, which was stupid, its a fucking system wars thread, all the jokes are system wars related. The food is missing the point lol.

It’s the goofiest shit. Lems from back in the day are rolling over in their graves over the 2022 Lems.

Lems are in here trying to turn System Wars into Value wars. 🙄

Came here to say this.

Also, I think that they attempted to bring more people in by relaxing the rules so much that people don't even try to have rational discussions anymore.

And why did they get rid of the metagame? Hype threads? Because it hurt people's feelings when they lost?

@jg4xchamp: right...I remember that thread was up for a while haha. It was a joke thread to take a break from the crazy bashing happening all round in all directions. Well, at least that's what I thought ut was

@goldenelementxl: I completely forgot about user leveling. I noticed that some profiles have a trophy section with the user level and some don’t. It seems to correlate with how old your profile is as newer profiles don’t have that.

A lot of the posts on SW these days would have at one time been moved to their proper respective forums. With the site population what it is now, though, I can understand the leeway.

Bannings and suspensions used to happen a lot more often, and were often exciting and much talked about. Things were more vicious at times here back in the day.

People actually cared about their profiles here back when we could still get badges and rank up and stuff, and there were a lot more interesting blogs going on then.

To be honest I don't think I actually came to System Wars until relatively late in my tenure here at Gamespot.

Most of my time was spent in the then-active PC forums and then Games Discussion.

Honestly not much has really changed outside of what the owners of this website have changed (no more unions, did away with the voting/like/dislike, etc. The only significant thing that's changed has been the traffic that comes here, which seems to be the same 20-30 people for about 80% of the posts.

SW has always been toxic and terrible and kind of great at the same time. It's just a shame the various redesigns and in some cases politics of Gamespot has chased so many people away.

Any other good, popular website forums to go to these days? I'm not on Facebook anymore. Maybe I should just do Reddit I've been avoiding that.

So true. Make Games Discussion Great Again!

That is the kind of sections that will not survive in 2022. The "forums are dead" applies to it. Even if they reworked these forums for the better, the only two sections that i see being alive is SW and the cancerous Politcs section. If there's no argument, nobody will visit that section of the forum.

@SOedipus: "Don’t see that many Nintendo fanboys as before."

What happened?

@jg4xchamp:

The sports forums for a stretch used to be fun.

@mrbojangles25: I can relate 100%. I am only here because General Game Discussion died and many folks left.

I just stuck to General Games Discussion until it upped and died after the big change here with the forums happened so never really saw much of the goings on here before then.

When I first joined here in 2003, I was mostly an OT guy. At that time, OT had more posts than SW and it was a fun place. Back then, the forums were pretty lenient. From what I remember of SW at the time, it could be brutal. Not that long after, GS started to crackdown and became very strict. I remember the SW regulars were calling this place Nazispot and they decided to create their own forum (a website called System Wars lol). In general, people left or got banned. The site redesign in 2013 was terrible. GS was trying to catch up with the smart phone / social media era. But they gutted so many cool features, it was ridiculous. So that also turned people away too. Gamespot also lost good reviewers, either they moved on, or in the case of Kane & Lynch fiasco, fired. Over time, people just moved on. People leaving happens with any forum, but nowadays, gamers are using social media and other platforms for their gaming media consumption. So the exodus of people are not being replaced by enough newcomers, hence why SW is now mostly a group of loyal forumites still clinging on out of habit 😆

Yeah this...

This place has been a shell of itself in more than those ways as well. It's pretty much Gamespot in name only these days.

Another point is also what is there really left to wage war over? Pc is so fare ahead in power it’s ridiculous, but the return of the power is a lot less obvious that it used to be… back in the days you could post a screenshot and say this is graphic king because x, y and z. Now the differences are hardly noticeable and comes down to basically preferences…

Also the 2 big consoles have basically 99% of all games shared between them and Nintendo is basically doing their own thing. So arguing who is winning is rather pointless, as the metric for winning isn’t just number of consoles sold anymore. It’s something unique for each company..

Also most of us aren’t 14 year old kids anymore, who only can afford one console… if you are a dedicated enough gamer to spend time here, chances are you will own whatever piece of tech that holds even a slight interest to you because you are an adult with money enough to buy most minor shit… and yeah feels slightly stupid to take the piss on x faction 30 minutes after you turned off that factions console!

No kidding. This place was a golden age until GS staff really screwed everything up. Like @vl4d_l3nin said, the 2013 redesign was the start of GS declining and we lost over 1,000 members because of the changes. GS will never be the same again, even SW is fighting for its life.

No Unions, No levelling, No achievements. Most of the fun stuff went away.

This place went from one extreme to another.

I remember after E3 2006, no cow showed their face around here for at least a week. They knew how laughable Sony's press conference was; 599 US dollars, the giant enemy crab, real-time weapon change, Riiiiidge Raaaceeer, etc.

It was hilarious. *sigh* what good times. 😂

Like many others, SW was an afterthought for me after checking the PlayStation, PC and Xbox forums. It was my comedic relief after my news hunt.

And the 2013 nonsense killed my whole routine. I would hop in the PS forum and scan through the first 5 pages (which were properly sized, so I didn't have to scroll) and then move to the next, until I ended my night with SW. Then one night I hop on, and it's like a nuke went off in my treehouse. It's never been the same.

There are different options now, but I absolutely loathe what the big social media outlets do to me. As an addict, I naturally fall into destructive behavior with these cesspools. I could blow hours on Reddit mindlessly hunting, or constantly checking on Twitter...it's poisonous to me. The old GS forums offered just enough information, discussion and goof for me to get in and out without hating myself. I really miss that.

It's worse, like the rest of GameSpot. People left the forum en masse when GS decided to make it suck.

What makes me come back? I like many people posting here, and I don't want to go to reddit, I guess.

As for the actual system war, I could not care less. It's pointless. PC wins everything all the time.

No. If you average how much the gamer population might have grown with how much fanboy bickering there still is, it's much less now. Because consoles aren't that popular anymore. Their sales have stagnated for years against the growth of the players. Also to "blame" is the fact that a lot of the games people play are now crossplatform. You can't have a proper Sonic vs. Mario-like argument if the game you're talking about is on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. And most exclusives really aren't the kind people truly love and come back to anymore. There's too much sameness and safeness from high production costs. Oh, nearly forgot to mention how much PlayStation is outselling Xbox these days, and Nintendo doing their own thing, not even trying to compete. How can you have a war if the numbers are so uneven and the userbases (in Nintendo's case) more isolated from each other? The idea of a fanboy console war is outdated. System Wars is simply a place of extremes, part of the reason everybody left, part of the reason I deleted my account with no intention of coming back.

I was here back in 2000-2010 when I was a teen. SW was extremely popular then. Once Reddit launched, most users migrated to it and SW began to die. There was also a time when GameSpot made the decision to get rid of its forum section altogether.

You can scroll through the pages back to the early 2000's when HL2, Doom 3, Halo 1 and 2, Socom, Stalker, RE4, etc were the highlights. The last page you're able to browse has KZ2 threads with bullshots arguing over whether the E3 trailer was legit or not. Blast from the past reading some of those threads.

Tons of drama as well with the frequent users. Samas being a dude, Charazard being banned. Tons of memories.

If you think lems are unwelcome now, well, back in the day they were hunted down and were the first to experience cancel culture first hand. ;o

The SP though outsmarted them at every turn crushing their evil agenda. lol :P

More people disrespecting movie games

1. Yeah, I think that KZ1 was branded “The Halo Killer” by cows of the ps2 generation, and flopped miserably.

2. You are right, KZ2 major event that caused heated exchanges was in fact the launch trailer of the ps3. That is where the “smoke n mirrors“ statements began with reveal trailers. In the end KZ2 didn’t necessarily live up to the overall visual masterpiece that the trailer showed off in the ps3 reveal, but it still was a visual marvel that exceeded most if not all of the competing console best looking exclusives at the time.

1. I liked the Unions, but they ended up getting too big for their britches and they had to end.
2. I miss the sheep presence, back in the XBox v PS2 v GameCube days, the consoles were all competing with each other on a tech front, so big 3rd party games were released on all three consoles. One of the greatest moments in the history of SW is when GameCube's "Hello Kitty" game outscored the first KillZone (which was hyped as the "Halo Killer").
3. I miss game spot scoring on the decimal. That made it fun when one groups game scored .1 more than another's.

SW isn't as good as it used to be "back in the day", but it's better now than it was in the XBone vs PS4 era. It is interesting to see how the same arguments are made now, 20 years later, that fanboys made back then - but sometimes the console s/he is defending is different.