Well, this has gotten to be pretty sad. The community here had been slowly dying for about three years before the redesign but I always thought that things would just continue to go slowly downhill or that they would try to make things better eventually, I thought that was the plan when the redesign was announced, in the 12 years I've used the site I never thought they would go out of the way to kill their own community. This is surprising since anyone who really follows gaming news and cares about the industry knows that sites like this really no loner serve any kind of purpose, save for bringing people together in a community. I can find better shows on youtube, I can get news faster on twitter and smaller sites run by only a few people, I can find longer video reviews and gameplay clips from multiple youtube people, I can't use sites like this to find reviews on smaller indie titles. The only person making any kind of interesting content for the site is Danny or articles by Kevin. The rest is usually garbage or just kind of pointless I don't really see much use in watching a show with some guy making stupid comments on the stupid comments other videos and articles get, that just reminds me how little creativity we have here and how poor the community has gotten, if anything that show probably makes the site worse by encouraging people to make stupid comments to get featured and that's really the last thing we need.
I've seen comments from moderators saying they no longer visit the forums (and I don't even think I know who half the remaining ones are anymore), I've seen a poll advocating the death of those who made this site change up for over a day on the forums without being locked or removed. I think when you reach that point it's time to just consider the forums and community dead. Synthia's posts have been less then hopeful lately when it comes to those in charge making improvements, maybe some day they will but just about everyone I care about has moved on and content wise once you know who to follow and what to watch larger sites like this, IGN, etc don't serve much of a point anymore for anything but the people you can interact with their and the community features.
In the time since the redesign I have become a moderator on Angry Joe's new community forums which actually works betters than this site was even before the update. On the few days under a month since the community was started I have met multiple people to play games with on a lot of different systems, I have seen a lot of people gifting out game codes they won't need or just giving stuff to other community members, I've found multiple tabletop roleplaying groups, I won a signed copy of the script for the Kickstarter game The Mandate (signed by David Bradley), I was trusted to become a moderator for our forums and teamspeak (and I assume twitch streams in the future). Seems to be a great new community that is likely to keep growing and one where they plan to do a lot of tournaments, events, giveaways, form professional teams in a variety of games and genres, etc. NeonNinja (who has also completely stopped using this site) can also be found there. They have some work to do, community is only a month old and it's not something they have done before but I believe it can become something great.
It's been a great 12 years, more than half my life here. Was involved in some live streams, on a live show to demo Halo Wars, I lead and was an officer in quite a few very active unions. I've had a lot of great times here and I've met a lot of great people, almost all who either left a long time ago or have left after the redesign, and It's time for me to join them.
Some places I can be found Angry Joe's community I have the same name there as I do here, I can also be found on twitter under this name where I tend to just post my thoughts on recent games I've played and talk to old Gamespot members who have long since left, and on the website boardgamegeek.com (or rpggeek or videogamegeek) under the same name.
Also, Ys Memories of Celceta, buy it.
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