LogFAQs > #979954641

pinky0926 posted...

or really even communities forming at all

Counter-intuitive if their goal is really to increase the userbase and increase activity here.
With topicality enforced on game boards, most of them are a desert. The only ones with a lot of activity are evergreens like Smash/COD, etc. Any other board is dead until it comes out, active for a month or so, and then dead again. Save for, of course, the social boards. Twilight Princess Social Board was, for example, much more active than the game board at any given time, but whenever anything related to the game dropped everyone rushed over there to talk about it. Then when the news got stale, it was back to the social board.

Building relationships with other users has a direct correlation to site activity. Being able to discuss the goings-on of our lives, get to know one another. Socialization is key to building a strong userbase. It's why reddit and Discord are so active while GameFAQs flounders, in addition to the simple reality that your modern gamer who comes here for the first time is going to expect a few basics that are absent - emojis (they can be posted but there's no easy UI for it, it's not even immediately obvious they can be used at all), reactions, live chats, more profile customization, etc.

I've said this already, and I probably won't talk about it anymore since it doesn't matter and I'd hate to become a broken record (and likely it's only a matter of time until speaking out against it becomes moddable), but the reason I'm so uncomfortable with these changes is because what the powers that be are saying and what they are doing just don't align. They talked about wanting to see 10,000 concurrent users, but they aren't doing anything to make that happen so it just rings false to me. Their actions, at least right now, really do align more with the notion that they want to squash activity here and eventually shut these boards down.