Separate forum for Spiderweb

Because, whether people admit it to themselves or not, Vogel game(s) are a very niche product.

HiddenX said:

I am a Spiderweb fan. I played all of his games and enjoyed most of them.

But we don't need an extra forum for these games.

Click to expand...

I'm inclined to agree with this position. There's really no need for bullshit, the plain fact of the matter is that the site can't really provide sub-forums for every developer.

To take this further, I'd argue that most of those subforums are kinda silly in the first place. I took some stats … :

Developer sub-forums with zero new threads in the past year:

Drakensang
Expedition

Developer sub-forums with 1-5 new threads in the past year:

Dragon Age (1 thread)
Fallout (4 threads)
Cyberpunk (5 threads)

Developer sub-forums with 6-10 new threads in the past year:

Elder Scrolls (6 threads)
Witcher (6 threads)
Pillars of Eternity (7 threads)
Divinity & BG3 (8 threads)
Pathfinder (9 threads)
Piranha Bites (9 threads)

And, funnily enough, the most active sub-forum is the one that's only about one recent game, Pathfinder.

The general purpose of these sub-forums is to reduce thread creation in the GRPG forum. However, the quantity of new threads is only relevant in this regard if the game is relatively new. I don't think the GRPG forum would have been flooded by one solitary thread about Dragon Age (and Origins at that) this past year.

Further, as a result of removing anything topical from GRPG, GRPG has become an extremely stale forum that people barely visit and is more often than not headed by repeater threads that a user constantly bumps for their own sense of blogging rather than a desire for forum chatting or game discussion.

So the real issue here is how to find a way to contain the constantly bumped threads, or, long-term and high use threads (that appear in both GRPG and the gaming sub-forums), rather than a matter of categorising every game into it's own sub-forum IMO.

My suggestion: Have the sub-forums just for recent high activity games rather than series or developers & when people stop posting much to that game merge it back into GRPG. Also, the subforum for these high activity games would be a subforum to GRPG instead of it's own forum, as is the case with the current NWN2 anomaly.

lackblogger said:

Ah right, my least favourite series of games by him, completely different to his other stuff.

Why is it sadly that the same series of games are all similar? As in direct sequels of a specific title. I'm curious to know what series of games that are direct sequels are not all very similar but also didn't collapse into farce well before their fifth iteration? Isn't the whole point of sequels that people are buying more of the very similar?

Click to expand...

Wow, double-talk and drivvel. Moving on ...

Vecna said:

Wow, double-talk and drivvel. Moving on …

Click to expand...

Are you referring to me or the person I was talking to? This site doesn't stack quotes. If you were talking to me, what are you on about?

I’m all for a forum structure that actually works. We had a discussion once that ended because the server crashed (no relation) and lost that information. A restart of the discussion did not bring us much further: https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34206

One of the advantages of having stuff together about the same game in a sub forum is finding information back. The disadvantage is ending up with too many forums and spreading the discussions over too many forums. Then again a high activity in threads means threads will faster move to the second page.
Having games as a sub forum of CRPG is not practical as they show up above the CRPG posts and with a long list that means these posts are near the bottom of the screen. Making the CRPG posts a sub forum and place it at the top of the other sub forums is also an option.

Anyway there are several opinions about this, but there is no perfect solution. It is however still not clear to me what the solution is with the least amount of cons.
Currently new forums are created by request.

Way back when, I was actually surprised that the 'Watch didn't have a Spiderweb sub-forum, given the love shown here for some janky, niche, indie products. (not a criticism, I tend to like janky niche games more than most of the dull streamlined stuff released by the majors)
But given the apathy (and sometimes antipathy!) shown towards Vogel's games here by a significant number of members, I guess it's not suprising.
I'd use it occasionally if there was one; especially given that I'm currently playing Avadon 2 and have bought The Queen's Wish. I'm not liking what I'm hearing about certain aspects of that - but what better place to contain any critical discussion?

tldr version: I'd be happy with a Spiderweb forum but I can understand why there isn't.

Myrthos said:

I’m all for a forum structure that actually works. We had a discussion once that ended because the server crashed (no relation) and lost that information. A restart of the discussion did not bring us much further: https://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34206

One of the advantages of having stuff together about the same game in a sub forum is finding information back. The disadvantage is ending up with too many forums and spreading the discussions over too many forums. Then again a high activity in threads means threads will faster move to the second page.
Having games as a sub forum of CRPG is not practical as they show up above the CRPG posts and with a long list that means these posts are near the bottom of the screen. Making the CRPG posts a sub forum and place it at the top of the other sub forums is also an option.

Anyway there are several opinions about this, but there is no perfect solution. It is however still not clear to me what the solution is with the least amount of cons.
Currently new forums are created by request.

Click to expand...

From my stat dive, I think the first thing that can be done is to simply de-sub-forum all the main game-specific forums. None of them need sub-forums to sub-divide the game series. Just have a forum that is for PB games and let people say what game they're talking about in the title of their thread.

Because, here's a list of sub-forums with zero new posts in the last year (not even threads, just no posts at all):

Drakensang 2
Dragon Age 2
Dragon Age 3
Witcher 2
Divinity OS 1
Divinity 2
Div others
Expedition 1
Expedition 2
All the PB spoilers sub-sub-forums

And here's the sub-forums with zero new threads and barely any posts in the past year:

Drakensang (2 posts)
Risen 1 (7 posts)

And here's the sub-forums with new threads but still very few new posts in the last year (the new posts might not even be in the new thread which may have zero posts in it):

Dragon Age 1 (1 thread and 2 posts)
Elder Scrolls 1-4 (3 threads and 17 post)
Witcher 1 (1 thread and 7 posts)
Witcher 3 (5 threads and 12 posts)
Fallout 1-3 (2 threads and 3 posts)
Risen 3 (1 thread and 3 posts)
Risen 2 (1 thread and 11 posts)
Gothic 3 (3 threads and 9 posts)
Gothic 1-2 (2 threads and 11 posts)

In a way it's kind of easier to just list the more active sub-forums. For all the space and clutter that has grown in that area of the forum, there's only 8 currently active sub-forums, and they all relate to recently released (or to-be released) games:

Elder Scrolls Skyrim (3 threads and 72 posts)
Pillars of Eternity (7 threads and 107 posts)
Fallout 4 (2 threads and 145 posts* ) *130 of those are in a Fallout 76 thread, not Fallout 4.
BG3 (5 threads and 170 posts)
Div OS 2 (3 threads and 88 posts)
Elex (2 threads and 62 posts)
Kingmaker (9 threads and 1471 posts)
Cyberpunk (5 threads 323 posts)

Perhaps this thread should be renamed.
--
I can see for some very popular games/publisher subforms work (such as larian) but the problem is they don't age well and just make a mess. There (imho) needs to be a way to remove sub forums once the game popularity dies. For example D:OS - maybe all its threads should be merged into general forum (so content is not lost) or a retired subforum and then removed. Cyberpunk will be another good example. It will likely be very popular esp once the game is release but 2 or 5 or 10 or 30 or 100 years from now it will be stone dead. A stone dead forum isn't a big deal but if a new forum is created once a year or once a week or once a .... it doesn't scale well.
-
In this case rpgwatch has been fairly conservative but still having a way to auto expire these and move them into a single location (to reduce clutter but maintain history) is good. This is probably less of an issue with publishers forums as with specific game forums (i.e, ds is under larian and eventually all old larian games will die) but cyberpunk is under cyberpunk.... (game specific). Anyway maybe in the end it doesn't matter and maybe i wrote too much that was contradictory but wahtever.

@you;: I assume that what you're saying is that we could, for instance have a "RPG outdated group messages" subforum? Seems like a very good idea.

pibbur who BTW observes that 100 years from now we will all be stone dead.

Frankly speaking I don’t quite see the problem with the layout/grouping.
If someone does not like having to glance over the various (sub)forums to see whether there has been some recent activity, I suggest the following path:
Anywhere in the Forums > tab Forums: pick ‘New Posts’.
But maybe I am missing a point...

We can archive forums. They are then locked and placed in an archived location. So no new posts or threads can be made. If you want to post something about a game in such an archived forum, you need to do that in an other location, like general RPG. It is still possible to search the archived forums and they are still visible.

Today I don't think it is an issue and one could argue given the age of rpgwatch it never will be an issue; then again one could also argue that as more games are created and more forums are created it eventually won't scale. I wasn't really suggesting that these forums be locked (@myrthos comment on lock and archive) but rather a method to compress the garbage into a more limited bucket (assuming that scalability becomes an issue). As for spiderweb specifically no comment.

Eye said:

Frankly speaking I don’t quite see the problem with the layout/grouping.
If someone does not like having to glance over the various (sub)forums to see whether there has been some recent activity, I suggest the following path:
Anywhere in the Forums > tab Forums: pick ‘New Posts’.
But maybe I am missing a point…

Click to expand...

Quite possible - but one never knows for sure.....

pibbur who said:

@ pibbur who BTW observes that 100 years from now we will all be stone dead.[/QUOTE];

Click to expand...

I never check sub forums per dev or per series, it's like banned stuff for me. And I have no doubts it's true for many because it's a boredom to check many sub forums.

So no, Spiderweb games don't need be banned, no way.