What would you like to see more of or change on SP/BoM?

As a very irregular poster these days I find the vast majority of the answers to questions I may have are found with the search function these days. Very little room to ask anything new at the moment when I pick up an IE game these days.

 

This may be a bit hypocritical - considering the asterisks in my sig, my profile and an occasional post from me - but I think the profanity standards here are a good thing. Not too puritanical, as it is obviously tolerated in a limited extent, but not the free-for-all, YouTube commenter level of juvenile verbal diarrhea. It keeps the intellectual bar up nice and high. This is one area that I don't believe needs fixing.

 

Sorcerer's Place is my favourite place on the Internet, but I have to admit I am somewhat at a loss to think of genuine ways to make it more relevant and interesting in 2011. I just want everyone else to keep playing the games here so that a community continues so that I can keep popping in and joining in on the other conversations that come up. That works for me, but is not really a logical way for a site to work.

 

I played a bit of World of Warcraft until recently. I mostly visited sites with boss tactics, sites with quest and item info, sites with class information, and my guild website for some out of game banter.

My old love for Alpha Centauri was also recently re-ignited and I looked up a tactics guide (I'm guessing most of SP's newcomers are like this, but then for BG, BG II, etc). I actually found it on a fansite, but I didn't linger; I just downloaded the guide and I was gone.

Absolutely true, but I don't think any recent changes (and I'm including the blogs in this, photo albums are a nice touch though) will affect the behaviour of the permanent residents.

Just checking, since I thought it was a good idea

Ok, I'll take your word for it, since I'm pretty much oblivious to what's going on in regards to gaming videos. However, searching for old games on YouTube (BG, BGII, PS:T), I found relatively little videos. Some videos of ingame movies and speedruns, but nothing really informative or with voice overs. But you'll be again catering to a pretty small niche, and if newer games do get more attention, any potential SP films might get lost between them unless they're really good.

 

don't know I made really not that entertaining video of an old game; Jedi Knight Academy and got 25k views and like 80comments, in next few months I might have more time so I could maybe do start sorcerers channel under supervision of some admin if you are interested. Not sure yet but maybe we can work something out.

 

I'm not sure that I can offer much additional insight into this, as most of my thoughts have already been noted. I will definitely be repeating some other people's points and, as it is getting late, will probably forget something that I meant to say. Ah well.

Firstly, I think Barmy hit the nail on the head when he said that the place needs new life. I don't spend much time on the game forums because I either know what I need to, or there isn't much activity in that forum. I don't even turn up in the Alleys very often, as I find arguments on the internet to be rather unsatisfying. When compared to discussions I get related to my course of study, I find the Alleys to be frustratingly unrigorous. This is no surprise as the BoM isn't a philosophy forum, but it does leave few sections of the site to really grab my attention.

While the accumulated knowledge about some of the older games is very high, so few people actually need that knowledge now. There's very few people picking up Baldur's Gate for the first time these days, and the veterans already know pretty much all they need to about the game. I would hazard a guess that at this point, there's only a few hardcore fans still playing them and all of them keep an eye on the modding community. Unfortunately, BoM is a bit limited to even these people: while there are quite a few mods hosted here, there is very little development compared to, just for example, Spellhold Studios. To be honest, if I were to reinstall BG tomorrow and mod it up for another play-through, I would be reading the forums of modding sites for more details on which mods I want. I can't see this situation really changing.

SP, therefore, must expand somewhere. Moving into other categories of games (eg RTS) doesn't seem likely to work, as we'd be competing with much better established communities. Plus it is hard to say how much of the current membership would even be interested in such a switch. MMOs would be an obvious transition, due to the smaller differences between them and the current games (and the more stable player base). The problem is, as you've noted, other sites are already there doing coverage more prominently. If SP were to focus on an MMO, it would have to pick one quite early on and already be somewhat known when the game is still young.

So if SP were not to change genres, it would have to have increased coverage of RPGs. The challenge then is to get people interested when the official forums get pushed so hard. Adding more forums to the BoM is obvious, but actually attracting people is more difficult. Being one of the top results when someone googles a game would help, though it would require effort from the community members to produce enough useful content in these forums to get people to stay around. My initial thought is that we need to have more places linked to or promoting this site. How else are people going to realise the BoM exists?

The other option is video. If a series of videos on youtube became popular enough and was clearly supporting SP, then perhaps more people would click on a link to see what the place is like. Again, this would require somewhat large effort from the community. Especially in the case of newer games, this plan would be reliant on having members who are good at said game, have sufficient free time to play it a lot and are willing to create videos of themselves playing. I'm unconvinced that a video series about older games would have the same impact. It would be better than not doing anything, but would reach out to a much smaller audience. I definitely don't mean to put Voy's offer down, but if videos become the focus, it would have to be much more than just that. Are there any other popular sites, like Facebook, that SP could become more integrated with?

The basic idea behind my thoughts is that is you want SP to increase in activity again, small changes won't be enough. Additions like featured photo albums and such are nice, but are geared towards existing members. They won't help new people find the site or convince them to sign up on their own. Hence the change must be more dramatic (at small risk of alienating current members). None of the options I've thought about this night seem to be particularly attractive. Of course, the alternative is to do very little; the community will probably stay much like it has been for a while now, slowly decreasing in number of active posters. Fine for those that are happy right now, but a bit of a death-sentence for the place.

 

the main page is a mess btw, the one that you get directed from facebook,
anyway first time I encountred sp/bom i didn't have an idea it's a forum;
on the left toolbar right above or right below the news/main should be "Forums"
and whole front page needs a re-vamp imo

 

I'm going to come right out and admit that I almost never look at the front page. I am bookmarked straight into the forum page. I wish I could bookmark the New Posts link but I don't seem to be able to.

 

Right click on the New Posts link and select 'Bookmark this link'

You're probably trying to bookmark a specific search which only remains valid for a specific amount of time.

If you want to add the bookmark manually then type in/copy: "http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/search.php?do=getnew"

I have the SP front page as my homepage, I usually end up reading what's on it then reading it again when I come onto the forum but I am a strange creature of habit

 

Woah! That's awesome, 8people. I learn something here every day! That will save me one or two mouseclicks per day.

 

About the recent forum changes. I would have kept the less discussed game series as a single forum for each series (or a single forum for the series developer) and only branch out dedicated forums for a specific game if they get enough discussion. Several empty forums do not accomplish anything and only creating them will not generate more visitors. Also sub-forums are generally a bad idea if they are going to be used for active discussion as they are "hidden" and therefore not used as much. The new Mass Effect forums would be a good example for all of the above.

As for the front page. The layout is quite outdated and it can be very confusing to navigate around. It really needs a redesign. There are too many links and linked items so you are not really sure what is what or where you should look. Like it is too fragmented. Also the news coverage has been quite bad for a long time now. The RPGWatch news have somewhat changed the situation but even they are updated irregularly. A proper news coverage for the featured games would be ideal but I suspect this would require a lot of work and voulunteers so it probably is not an easy task to accomplish. But I think a good front page is essential as this is what any newcomer will see first.

 

As you can see from my profile, I've been around for a while but haven't posted a lot. In that regard, I think I represent the "NWN generation" pretty well.

During the heyday of the Infinity Engine games, I wasn't really big on the whole Internet thing (being quite young back then and all). As I recall, I originally registered here following NWN's release because, as a Baldur's Gate fan, I was disappointed by NWN. Icewind Dale 2 was about to launch and there was still a decent amount of activity around IE games.

But as NWN matured, it became much better. Mostly because of community-made modules and multiplayer persistant worlds. In retrospective, I think I can say that in the end I enjoyed NWN as much as Baldur's Gate. I'm deviating a bit here, but some of those player-made modules put many retail games to shame. Case in point, the community grew elsewhere. BioWare herded the community on their own forums, and there's also the fact that the focus on modding meant that module-hosting websites like the Vault got a big slice of the cake.

As for post-NWN RPGs... well there isn't a true community anymore. Dragon Age and Mass Effect are the sort of games you play a few times then move on to the mandatory sequel the next year. Elder Scrolls seem to have a longer lifespan, but once again mod sites and official forums are where it's at.

But I digress...

I think a fansite needs a niche today to really thrive. And as much as I like SP, I don't think it has one. Despite Beren's excellent walkthroughs, SP isn't a guide powerhouse like Gamebanshee. And despite hosting a few mods, the offering is extremely modest compared to the likes of the Vault and Nexus. I'm not sure there's really a "market" left purely for forums and I don't see how covering more games/genres at this point would really improve things.

I think there's potential behind the blogs, but I don't think they were given enough coverage. As it is, they're really buried deep into the website; the front page only has a little link to them. Perhaps giving them more space would make things better. For example, have two columns on the main page: one for news, one for latest blog posts. Or at the very least add a "latest active blogs" box below the forum one.

Finally, I noticed on the RPG Codex's main page that there's a little banner saying "hosted by Sorcerer's Place" which redirects here. I can't help but notice that the Codex's forums seem to be more active than SP's. I don't know what sort of arrangement is behind this, but... dare I suggest a merge? Perhaps I sound totally mad (in which case I apologise), I'm just throwing some ideas around. I'm not a regular over there myself, but it seems like the subjects they cover overlap quite a bit with those of SP. Of course they seem to have a lot of "modern RPGs hating crazies", but that's another story.

 

I don't come around much any more - the BoM has been stagnant for years. There's not much point in coming here for me when only the Alleys are active and I can guess what everyone's position is going to be before they post.

I'm not sure that anything can be done about it - I think at this point it's such a tight community that newcomers would feel weird trying to break in.

I think throwing more game-related forums at the problem is a wrong step. The current community doesn't seem to care much, and anyone coming here is going to see fairly dead forums and so not have much to say on the matter. As said, there are already lots of active places where these things can be better discussed.

Does the current community even care about games? I know we all care about the IE games, but this doesn't feel like a community of hardcore gamers any more except when it comes to that extremely narrow band of games. Games have felt like the least important part of this place for a long time - it was only when the other forums started drying up that there was a major problem though.

Sooooo - if I were you, I'd probably be looking to trim down rather than expand. Consolidate the stuff that's active and merge the inactive stuff into general forums. I'd probably throw out the non-D&D games section and merge it all back to the Playground. Prune off the BG3 and KotOR forums, and merge the NWN mods forum somewhere.

I realise that this is pretty much the opposite of your current strategy, but ... yeah. I don't think this is going anywhere. The community is too introverted. Expansion was great when it happened because there were so many threads bubbling up about the topic in Whatnots or the like, but now expansion just dilutes.

As I see it, the only unifying thing of this site is that we all have interest in IE-style CRPGs, and there's nothing left to be said on the topic.

If The Broken Hourglass had been released and successful, I think there might have been a boost in activity. I think the core members of the community could have gotten excited by it ... but there isn't much else. I don't think you can get new people coming in without having the core community excited.

In general I'm pessimistic about this place. I think it can survive a long time because the community that's here is fairly strongly attached, but I just can't see it ever being vibrant again. There's not even enough dissatisfaction with the current state of RPGs to get any discussion going or to inspire the community to build one - feels like everyone has moved on. Compare and contrast to the Codex where everyone still has strong feelings about the old games and there are several development projects and such born out of dissatisfaction...

So, yeah - I'm probably not being much help - but unless a game comes along that the people who came here to talk about Baldur's Gate are passionate about, I don't think you can expect a revitalisation of the gaming side of the forum. I don't think we're going to see one any time soon. You'd probably have more luck reinventing the place as a social/political debate site but, y'know - **** that.

Anyway, I'll stop rambling. I'd like this place to stop its slow slide into decay, but I think it's too late and a pretty tough call anyway given how things have changed since its heyday.


Smaller in scope: I think you should remove the word filter, because it's pointless, silly, and annoying. But I probably posted this same thing five years ago to no avail so I'm not expecting much.


(Merging RPG Codex and the BoM is a hilarious idea, but something you really wouldn't want to have happen. That said, if I want to talk about any RPG or get any RPG news that isn't related to the IE games, I'd go there instead of here)