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

Gaf is very similar, even after they revamped.

I remembered a few years ago that a user on this forum said that the reason that there are less Nintendo fanboys in System Wars today is the outrage they expressed when GameSpot scored The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess a 8.8 score instead of 10 in 2006. Their outrage caused so much trolling and flaming that many of them either left the GameSpot forums and went elsewhere or were banned.

Since I did not start frequenting the GameSpot forums until late 2007 (at the beginning of "Gertsmanngate" which drawed me to System Wars in the first place), I do not know if this is the actual reason a large number of "sheep" left the GameSpot forums.

The old point system with all the achievements was pretty neat back in the day. I do miss the old forum style and how "inventive" threads could get barring any HTML errors. This forum was crazy-active during the Wii-360-PS3 days.

• I miss the hype and flop threads of old.
• A lot of users left with the 2013 redesign that also locked me out of my account, but I wanted to change my name anyways. There were a lot of fun users here back before the redesign.
• Unions were a lot of fun.
• Every section had threads daily, now most of the sections outside of System Wars are pretty much dead with rare posts.

I miss the hay day of this place during the Xbox/GC/PS2 era and into the early 360/PS3/Wii days

Sadly forums are a dying breed. Everyone has moved on to social media and having their discussions there. I prefer forums, so I will stick with these.

There is much less trolling here than about 1-2 years ago. It seems like fanboys have started discussing SW topics in a more civilised manner. A couple of the blatant posters were banned (no names mentioned), which has also helped.

I miss the days when ownage was passed out. Seems most have forgotten their roots, so I must do my best to remind everyone that TLHBO.

What keeps me coming back? I been a member here since I was like 14 or so. It's my duty.

This place is dead compared to 10 years ago.

This place has become a desert compared to ten years ago. There's not many users active here, or at least nowhere close to ResetEra or GameFAQs. Many of the users active here are old-timers who've stuck around.

I've been here for almost two decades, so I don't see myself permanently leaving at this point. There isn't anything to talk about these days though, so I'm not posting as much.

The biggest change is that the system wars don't resemble an iota of what they used to. Direct platforms competing against eachother with unique platform specific games demonstrating performance advantages and creative approaches to gameplay and visuals....

Today's system wars is a farce. All the games look the same on every platform, the gameplay approaches remain largely unevolved in meaningful ways and all the publishers are starting to put games on multiple platforms... Less risk taking to develop new experiences and platform makers don't even measure success based on console sales.

You can very easily make the case in today's world that the system wars as we've known them don't exist any longer...

This is very true. Now you have folks arguing over minor framerate and resolution differences in desperation.

Yes exactly... The days of having things to discuss and argue about that were measurable and significant advantages and disadvantages are over.

And to be clear we all have the right to further argue about miniscule pieces of the hobby like framerates and resolution, but they are nothingburger discussions that add nothing to the system wars.

@TheEroica: It seems that the home console market has in some ways resemble the smart phone market. Has success and growth breed homogeneity and unoriginality?

It may, but more so I see originality and innovation has come at the expense of massive cinematic budgets that require a sizable return from consumers in order to sustain....

Big budget games can't stray too far from the fray, so you'll see third/first person games with guns and swords for years to come.

I never came to SW on previous accounts TBH. OT, PC boards were more my thing but lately those are dead.

It's alright here but feels kind of cliquey and hostile to newcomers and casual posters, so it's not about to grow or anything. Doesn't help much either that searching Google directly for the forums by name from my phone yields zero results.

It's like cup says - SW was likely created to keep gump-posting off the main boards; now it's become the last active refuge of the forums, everything feels a bit sad and tired, expecially since most adults (and kids) couldn't really give a shit about system warring. Sure it was great fun in its heyday though. As long as there's a handful of posters who are pretty cool, I'll keep scanning threads here but more out of habit than anything else.

Wouldn’t even know where to start. SW was a community within itself that enjoyed its own meta and vocabulary. It was especially fun during the days of GS unions and the introduction of MS and the XBOX. Cows and Lemmings and Sheep together in perfect discord.

I'm kind of mixed about current System Wars today and the past. Before 2013 when Gamespot changed their board designs, System Wars was more active but I also remember the rules there being very strict.

When I had my original Gamespot account from 2006-2012, I would always get strikes and harsh messages from the past mods that I was breaking the rules, and the thing is their rules were never clear to what was allowed and what wasn't. Don't get me wrong I will admit that some of them was my fault for not following the rules correctly but most of them never made any sense. I was always nervous to post something because I was worried that a mod would get mad over something silly.

When I abandoned my old original account in 2012 and come back to Gamespot by making this current account in 2013, I noticed that the rules here stopped being very harsh and I felt more comfortable posting here. Not once did I ever get a strike or a mod messaging me that I broke the rules since I started this current account to this day. So this is one thing that I do like about current System Wars.

Well said. I miss the old hype game. Twilight Princess was the biggest flop I ever saw here. Man, the fallout was hilarious.

Oh yeah it was very insane of how so many people were pissed at the score. There were actual people who wanted Jeff Gerstmann fired for his review of the game lol.

@AcidTango: I remember it. And tormentos melt down over TLOU getting an 8/10 was epic as well

This was the second forum I ever joined, overall, back when video game websites just started to get their footing. The first being GameFAQs. This place was super active when I joined in 2003. The Xbox, PS2, and GameCube were the systems that started the online console fanboy wars.

Anyways, at least with me, you realize this place is trash and there are more productive things to do with your life then waste your life arguing online.

Most the thin skinned die hard Sony fanboys left for the NeoGAF safe space years ago because NeoGAF used to ban anybody who had anything critical to say about Sony before the whole shake-up a few years back where their senior mods were caught up in some pedo porn scandal, and everyone else who got their rocks off watching Sony fanboys dribble hot shit left when the show was over, more often than not account suicide with a disgustingly racist post but once in a while with NSFW imagery. For a while all the threads here were "today on NeoGAF someone said"... to be fair gaming websites own articles and gaming YouTube channels also did the same thing.

I think when we were young we thought the system war was actually a real thing. Now that (most) of us got the memo that the "war" is not even really a thing at all, the fun is also not really a thing.

The annual circle jerk of "ye old days".

Very excite.

If we were pre 2013, i would literally report you for bashing Elden Ring.

Moderator wise this is one of the best forums been on TBH. People do get moderated but it's only if you're an absolute dipshit of dipshits.

System Wars still has a rep of being toxic, but really, very few people here would qualify as assholes with real ill intent.

Something like Resetera, the progressive paradise, is basically the opening of Halflife 2 if the combine wore pink. Yea, a million times more active, but cut me bollocks off before browse that shithole.

Who cares if you got modded more. I got suspended like 21 times, it was awesome lol.

Way more goofy threads back then and more trolling.

@cainetao11:

Yeah back in the past, when a very overhyped game got an 8 here, it was considered a flop back then and it caused so many hilarious melt downs.

Once, before Halo 3 and Crysis were a few months from launching I said "Halo 3 will smash Crysis" and just for that I was given a 3 day suspension. :o

Some real BS bias from a few mods back in the bad old dayzz. lol :P

True. Current System Wars may not be as fun as it was in the past but you're right about how it's still better than many other gaming forums.

And yeah Resetera sucks. I have never seen so many triggered people on that site in my entire life. I remember when so many of the mods and users there got really angry at people for not liking certain games such as The Last of Us Part 2. It was very pathetic, I can never take that website seriously.

Twitter and Youtube would disagree. The war is being fought at a much bigger scale than ever before. There are podcasts and YouTube channels devoted to the System Warrior crowd. The death of message boards and the moderation on boards vs other social media platforms are the reasons things have shifted.

I agree that what is being fought about is trivial compared to the 16 bit - 32/64 bit eras. Those consoles were vastly different. Their libraries varied wildly. Today's consoles are damn near identical spec-wise and they share 97% of the same games. But that hasn't stopped the fighting in the least.

I wasn't much of a forum frequenter back in the mid 2000s as I am now, but what I miss more are the genuine critical reviewers Gamespot used to have. As others have mentioned, Gerstmann was great and so when he created Giant Bomb, that became a big hit for me even up to now when everyone is gone except him and some new faces. There are still some nice discussions going on in that podcast every now and then, though it has gone down in quality since Ryan Davis passed away.

But I really enjoyed coming to Gamespot for the Kevin Van Ord reviews. That man saved me a lot of money and got me to open my eyes and be more critical about video games.

Now all the reviewers are so hit or miss it kinda just sucks. I take my business to Youtube and find people like ACG or SkillUp and go from there. I have always enjoyed listening to reviewers be critical about video games.

Yeah the good old days when it was very easy to get suspended lol.

Yeah same. I once got in trouble for saying that I was getting sick and tired of WW2 fps. This is back during the very late 2000s when WW2 shooters used to be over saturated before modern military shooters took over and some people got really angry at me by sending me nasty comments.

I responded back by telling them to get over it and that it's my opinion. Right away I got a message from the mods threaten to suspend me next time if I make another disruptive post even though I was the one getting attacked. Seriously it was such a joke that I actually find it funny now.

I miss the sigs that people had. The rebrand of the forums killed the community. Troll fanyboys like ispeakfact had fun and creative threads unlike the robot fanboys today that spit the same ol rhetoric.

So much “jelly” lol…