EVE General Discussion

Your horrible forum software deletes and loses posts, the layout is awful to read or use on any sort of mobile device, forums are cluttered up with legacy stickies pushing debate off the first page into oblivion, and it has way too many forums and subforums. Unsurprisingly, a great majority of players can't be bothered to fight against those issues to make a post. The fact that the third party fansites are more professional and competently designed than the official eve-o forum should be a source of deep embarrassment to CCP.

Fix those issues and you might see people actually want to use your forums.

Assuming that there is a problem of low forum activity in the first place (since I can't take OP's word for it for granted), there is a couple of possible reasons of why some players are distancing themselves from the forums. I'll list some of them in no particular order of importance or the amount of impact they have.

- Increasing number of purely bad character names. Take OP's character name for example. This is one of those rare times when I would even consider opening a thread that created a character with this kind of a name - and I did it only because the character name and the thread's subject have something in common. I don't even want to start talking about the quality of posts expected from characters named this way.

- The forums are almost overrun by NPC corp alts.

- Demographics and mentality of the general playerbase has changed considerably over the last couple of years. The game somehow became easier, but not in a good way. Take as an example that highsec ganking alliance/corp/whatever. That situation was discussed for months on all parts of the forum. You couldn't open any game relevant forum section without it being flooded by posts about "James 315": Market discussions, My Eve, General discussion, CAOD, Features & Ideas,... you name it.
Now, by observing that situation I can see how the game became easier and more accepted by the type of players that were not that prominent in the game earlier.
One side of that story is a demographics of players that willingly accept play style that is forced upon them by paying ISK for so called licenses. And we are not talking about renter alliances, we are talking about high security space. Those players are mostly passive and tend to post their frustrations about the situation on the forums instead of doing something about it the way it should be done - by in-game actions. For a more experienced player or a veteran, coming to forums to read a post about this is mind-numbingly boring - you know the content of the post, you know multiple solutions to the problem discussed, you know that those solutions has been mentioned in the threads countless number of times and you know that the players who are affected by it are simply not listening or not ready or willing to take any action besides arguing on the forums about it.
The other side is equally annoying and can also be described with the same word - "Entitlement".

So, the game has changed and got easier. Easier for helpless kind of almost passive players to enter the game and feel entitled to have protection. Easier for gankers to force their play style to much larger audience and feel entitled that CCP should nurse their play style. It wasn't like that before... well it was, but not in this magnitude.

- Another thing is negativity towards CCP - as a real opinion or as a troll. The game has improved significantly since Crucible. Almost every aspect of it. Yet somehow CCP bashing became mainstream on the forums for no apparent reason. The amount of players that are willing to provide constructive NEGATIVE feedback is at all times low. Pure negativity does not and will not attract more forum activity.

- The negativity is also present in numerous forum posts about Goonswarm. I mean, come on... it's a group of players that hold their own space and is open and vulnerable to anyone that wants to take a shot at them. You don't like them? Then get into a ship and go to their space to make some damage. Complaining on the forums won't get you far.

TL;DR: bad character names, bad posts, swarm of NPC corp alts, changed player demographics, repetitive posts, negativity towards CCP, negativity towards Goonswarm and negativity in general, lack of constructive negative criticism.

"Forums perfectly match the game it represents"

what a shocker...

I think ISD has a hictor point. Constructive criticism is lacking.
Stub your toe into the table leg and the reason you are angry and have pain is your brain's interpretation of the circumstances, not the table leg itself. If you had true control over your brain then you could choose whether an injury should make you feel pain or pleasure. "I tread on a lego, no reason to feel pain from such a trivial event, I should feel pleasure because I am privileged to have legs at all" - Does not happen.
When you tread on a Lego, do you feel in control? No. Our insanely strong instinct in such a circumstance is to jump up and down and shout curses. We have different but equally strong instincts when it comes to most threads. Some posts make us feel insanely happy, others make us feel insanely annoyed and superior. And when some poor fool make a post that make us feel insanely annoyed and superior, at no fault of the poor fool, then we get ourselves a warning for insulting someone. Because we mistakenly shout about the table-leg as the cause of our current pain.

Usually ideas are like rings that have been thrown on the ground. The goal is to hit an invisible pole that no one can see or locate. Which idea is nearest to the pole (which idea is best), is unknown. But the other person's idea is the lego under your foot, and your idea is the lego under the other person's foot. So there you are, wasting your lives shouting about your lego-pieces.

So just because something is old it means its insignificant and shouldn't ever be mentioned again, you must work in the legislative branch. Good to know you're part of the problem when it comes to history.

There are rules to being an ISD that make it so if you are doing bad things to people horrible things happen to you so it doesn't matter they literally cannot abuse their power but, do provide another point of view to moderation.

I am always confused about why billionaires buy up media outlets in order to churn out liberal bias?
surely they should be pilloried as class traitors and they should turn over their propaganda machines to people promoting right wing ideals like making it easy for the rich not to pay tax and to support the rich with tax money to fund stupidly expensive programs no one wants or needs.
wait isn't the concept of liberal media bias something put out by the media?
this is too confusing. i never did understand metagaming.

dats an ock seymoran

yeah i can see that where the only profession being left is some tupe of blob or numbers pvp and ganking pvp

My experience of GD is that whiney little ***** posts get mercilessly trolled as they should be. Ask a decent question in a non-whiney-little-***** way and you get plenty of insightful responses with only a minimal amount of trolling. Propose an idea that has already been proposed 57 times before (and do it in the wrong forum); mercilessly trolled. Propose a get together in a London pub, ISD LackOfFaith moves it to out of game events, and everyone plans how to meet up and get smashed before the bobbies show up or whatever it is that happens in UK when a bunch of nerds get drunk.

*Snip* Please refrain from discussing forum moderation. If you are perceiving a problem with ISD behaviour on the forum or are disagreeing with the way (your) posts are being moderated, please feel free to read the CCP policies and follow the procedure found under the header 'Complaints'. ISD Ezwal..

Instead of getting rid of General Discussion, rename it to "Anything Goes Discussion" and move it to the bottom of the forum list. Then let people have at it.

The problem now is that it's the first forum listed after New Citizen.