A Funny Thing Happened...

Since I really have nothing to say today or rather, if I'm going to be strictly accurate, plenty to say but no energy left to say it, I thought I'd bounce off a couple of Blaugust posts that amused me with their (Apparently unintended.) oppositional stances.

The first was one by Axxuy called I Miss Forums in which, among other things, Axxuy says "what I miss is the sense of a dedicated space for some community", while observing that, although reddit and Discord have their place, "it’s not the same". 

A lot of people seem to feel that way. It's a sentiment I see quite often and apparently I'm not the only one to have noticed. A few days later, over at The Virtual Moose, there was another post entitled Forums Are Still Great. 

As the Moose (Aka mpklamerus) says "Once in a while I’ll see a post on social media lamenting that the Internet isn’t as good as it used to be and pine for certain things like forums..." Only once in a while...?

The Moose, though, has some practical suggestions on how to deal with the sense of loss, listing a number of ways many of the features of the old internet, including forums, persist and thrive and can still be enjoyed, a one point suggesting, perhaps a little snippily, "Go do it if you miss it that much" before finishing up with a more collegiate "Anyway, this stuff all still exists and it’s fun!"

There's no indication one post is any way a response to the other. I just found it a pleasant synchronicity to come across the pair of them in fairly quick succession.

Personally, I wouldn't say I missed any of the old web features enough to want to make much of an effort to recreate them but I definitely do prefer forums as a means of asynchronous online communication in general and especially for things like video game news. It used to be so much easier when there was just one, central point of contact, somewhere you could go to read the latest update notes, ask a question or just hang out and take the temperature of the game. 

Much better than than having to drag around several platforms, gathering bits and pieces from all of them, trying to put together a coherent picture from YouTube videos, tweets, Discord convos and subreddits.

It's not even as though the companies show any kind of consistency. They make a big song and dance about abandoning the "Offcial Forums" in favor of posting either on reddit or Discord, but then they often keep the forums going anyway and seem to forget where they said were going to post, as Wilhelm found recently. 

Commenting on the late arrival of the monthly economic report for Eve Online, he complained that "After some considerable delay, we got the Monthly Economic Report for July last week.  We were actually warned about the delay, though in a typical CCP muddle, they opted to only put that warning in the official forums and not on their Discord or other channels they maintain."

I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining it when I remember Daybreak making a statement a few years ago about future information about the EverQuest games moving primarily to Discord. For all I know, that may have worked for EQ, whose players seem oddly more au fait with the modern world than their counterparts in the junior game, but as far as EverQuest II is concerned, everything still seems to come through the forums.

EQII does have the most reactionary playerbase I've ever encountered, highly resistant to all kinds of change, so any attempt to bring the game into line with current genre practice was always going to be a big ask. Good luck getting those guys to play nicely with some new-fangled fad like Discord. 

Darkpaw did give it a go for a while. I remember reading many complaints on the forums about questions only getting a reply if they were asked in a Discord channel. Angry, outraged and disgusted complaints, mostly. Helpful players used to cross-post Discord threads to the forums so no-one else had to get their fingers dirty tabbing over.

These days community managers over at Darkpaw seem to have given up trying to swim against the tide. All the links to news items on the log-in screen go straight to threads on the official forum just like they used to. Like today's annnouncement that the Tears of Veeshan expansion will no longer be the last update the Varsoon server will receive. 

"Once again, you all have rallied and let us know how you felt about the continuation of the server, and we heard you loud and clear! So, after much discussion within the team, we have once again decided to allow Varsoon to continue their path!" the OP begins, with what seems to me to be a resigned shrug of the shoulders suggesting "Well, what can you do? That's just what they're like..."

Like Varsoon, forums, as the Moose suggests, are a lot harder to kill than you might have imagined. Long may it continue.

And in emulation of another of Axxuy's posts I have bookmarked to bounce off, that's all I'm going to say on the matter.  

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

Just the one, embedded image, produced by HiDream I1 Fast at NightCafe on default settings from the prompt "the Roman forum but populated by fantasy creatures like dwarves, elves, trolls and so on video game style image, color". It's pretty much what I asked for except the AI has chosen to use just dwarves as far as I can see, further evidence for my working theory that if you give an AI a list of options or suggestions it will tend to take the first and ignore the rest.