That is pretty great.

Kind of this. I just use the top bar to browse the site so I never get confused or lost, and I just refresh the "forums" page to see what new threads pop up. Granted there are some things I miss from the old site which people here have covered quite a bit, but overall it seems fine.

A grief beard is facial hair that appears on a character after something tragic happens to him in a storyline. The amount of tragedy and how the man is handling it can often be seen in the beard itself.

Misogyny.

In not as active on the forums as I used to be. The forums are are just a chore to navigate. Hope it gets better soon.

Every single forum in the history of the internet has, on a six monthly basis, someone pop up and say 'I miss the good old days'. Not saying they're always wrong, but I've seen it on every single forum I've hung out on in the last 10-15 years, so it's kind of funny to me to see one within a few weeks of deciding to become more active on the GB forum.

Of course, that means I wasn't around for the particular good old days in question, so what do I know? I hear this place used to be great.

Yeah, I try my best to take in as many opinions on the sites as I can, but there's just so many avenues for feedback to come in that it's pretty tough to deal with all of it sometimes. Threads like this are pretty handy in that sense.

Yeah, we had an issue with people getting email notifications without having them turned on, and I think when the fix for that went out a lot of site notifications were turned off for users as well by accident. Tough to get in touch with everyone on the forums to make that clear, unfortunately.

Hey, feel free to ping me or reply to me in this thread with suggestions as to how the forums could be constructed better to foster discussion. I'd like to hear your ideas, especially w/r/t features that you feel the site redesign might have made the forums more difficult to use for you.

@punkxblaze said:

Wow... well you helped one person here today. Just flipped that on.

I would like this, not from a platform preference perspective as much as just a customization one. It did help users stick out to me in my mind. I always had a green name just because I liked my green name!

The website is more well known these days and there's new consoles coming out. Gotta pick sides, right?

Or ignore all of that and just treat anyone who attempts to discuss which console is "best" as the retarded children/man babies they are.

I don't think it could be better. I am not much into forums, but I was for a few days on IGN and GameSpot and they don't even have professional moderators. Lots of trolling, hideous sense of humor, bad quality posts, a scary majority of people with huge gaps of common knowledge. I find this forum very clean, simple, peaceful and it has some good threads from where you could learn something, or have a decent conversation. It is also balanced between maturity and playfulness.

MB walking away from helicopter crash without looking back PHOTOSHOP NOW.

@rorie: Thanks for responding to the concerns in this thread. We all just want this to be a better place, and it's good to know people are listening.

@rorie: Sup Rorie. I fear (valid) criticisms like these will continue to be a thing as long as the site is still half-broken. We lost so many bloggers after the redesign because the tools are so limited now, and it's difficult beyond ZP's sterling work with the Spotlight to get anything out there or to be reliably alerted to feedback or any number of problems that are still present.

Once the engineering team comes back from the GameSpot redesign and starts addressing the huge stack of reports you've probably been leaving in their inbox after listening to us whine for months, these sorts of thread will hopefully be less commonplace. I don't imagine the audience has gone away - I'm sure it can be verified that an equivalent number of visitors still tune in for all the video features each week - so it's simply a matter of fixing this place up a little to get the throngs back on the forums complaining about something besides the site.

I would like to say that I am new to these forums and am disappointed with the content within them considering how thoughtful and well articulated the sites main content is... I thought it'd attract a more appealing audience of gamers as opposed to the likes of IGN and to a lesser extent Gametrailers.... but I can't say I'm not somewhat disappointed. I have no previous point of reference but no matter what gaming community I join I can't seem to escape the 'entitled brigade','fanboys' and 'trolls' and it's such a shame. I don't consider myself overly intelligent but I would like somewhat intelligent discussions about my hobby without a tidal wave of rage and ignorance.

It's like, the site got more popular? Madness. The slobbering masses came, and they brought the internet with them.

GB doesn't have "professional moderators" either. We all do this in our spare time, and honestly, have you seen Sweep? There isn't a professional bone in his body.

Face it, the community died when Levio91 was banned.

Nah I kid. But the golden days of this website this happened when it was still small enough for them. It was the online Cheers bar of video-games!

One of my biggest problems is knowing when someone responded to a post. The notifications used to help a lot, but now I usually never go back and check for replies.

@littleg: You know...You're right. Every site goes through changes in audience. I just had hoped Giant Bomb's users would stay grown up a little longer. Maybe that's just me and I've happened upon more bad than good. As long as the cool people keep being cool then everything's awesome.

And yeah to all the people saying their notifications stopped popping... go into your settings. You need to recheck the boxes.

I didn't meant moderators with a degree in IT. I saw some moderators taking everything too personally, they are not fully impartial in their actions.

If there's an interesting thread, people will come. People don't stop coming into other threads, because of other less interesting and immature threads. It's called variety anyways.

DONE

THREAD CLOSED

im not even joking when i say the community died when HitmanAgent47 was banned.

@rorie: Thanks so much for even listening! I'd say priority #1 is to just get the recent feed on the home page stable so it's always there. For users new and old alike, its disappearance makes it easy to forget the forums even exist. Let alone the nature of new (potentially interesting) threads just getting buried because no one saw it in time to comment before it got scrolled down and out of view.

(also, don't worry about writing new content. I know a pretty good blog that you could just crib some shit from.)

Can someone answer me this, is the site being worked on for an update to fix the broken aspects of it like the awful video player and add back old features like achievements and quests? I mean this feels like a beta that has lasted too long at this point, and it plays a large part in why I have not yet resubscribed, instead showing my support by buying shirts.

classic

The development staff is currently focused on the GameSpot redesign. Fixing Giant Bomb's bugs is their next task, but the vast majority of the bugs are on hold until the new GameSpot is launched in a few weeks.

O SHIT HES HERE! QUE MISSION IMPOSSIBLE MUSIC!

Moving legitimate criticism to a dead concept page board is a bitch move mods. Seriously...

.... wow. Yeah no mods and Rorie himself didn't jump in. And it hasn't been getting solid posts all day.

Relax and get a grip dude.

Indeed. I loved visiting the forums here pre-redesign (as my post count indicates), but I don't feel compelled to much anymore. Activity has dropped down significantly and it seems like a lot of the interesting discussion that took place here previously has been replaced by... other stuff. Not to mention that things are busted.

I also am starting to question the moderation more than I did before, but I might just be remembering some previous, specific instances that occurred a while back and not recently.

@fluxwavez: You don't need to go into specifics about past things you feel we may have messed up, but if there's anything you think us mods could be doing better, please let us know.

@fattony12000 said:

Well now I'm super depressed and miss the good ol' days.

I don't know about anyone else, but all the social justice crusaders killed any interest I have in posting here. Enjoy the content and go about your day, OP.

To be fair, it's pretty easy to identify and avoid those threads.

I think you guys do a good job, for the most part, but there are areas where I think you could do better. If I can find the words to really express my concerns, I'll send the lot of you and Rorie a message.

The forums are constantly broken, and this is the first new gen in a long time. In fact, this may be the first new console cycle for a lot of people on this site, so they are getting even more into the hype and controversy than they probably would otherwise.

It's hard to say why exactly this has happened, probably a lot of factors contributed.

I really do think it's a bit sad that blogging community here has really been decimated. That's where the best gaming discussions happened for me anyway. We've got some great prolific bloggers who are still active like@mento, @arbitrarywater, @majormitch, @grantheaslip and some guy who call himself @video_game_king all who don't get the readership they deserve.

I think mainly comes down to the forum discussions being less about actual games and gaming and more about off-topic/business/News or social issues however/why-ever that happened. All of us here like games, we all probably have really different polarizing views on things like social issues.

This is the best answer I've seen so far and something I personally ought to redouble my own personal efforts to do.

Yeah, it's kind of funny when you look at it that way. For a lot of us, the hype of a new console cycle is old news. I mean, I'm looking forward to the PS4, but I'm not so anxious to play it that I'll throw my PS3 out the door the moment it arrives. I probably won't even hook it up until after I play Lightning Returns next year. But for those that are so young that the PS4 or Xbox One will be perhaps their second console ever, this is a mind-blowing transition.

Which is why I think a debate forum that people could filter out would be the solution to this problem. It's easy enough to avoid those threads, but I'm sure that some people don't even want to see the titles.

@spaceinsomniac: I think if there was a separate place for debates it will just turn into nothing but flame bait threads, but I guess that all debate threads are to being with.

GameSpot has a forum called System Wars where they allow all of their worst fanboys to just have at it. (Or at least, that was the case when I last visited the site years ago.) It's as bad as you think, and I can't imagine a forum dedicated to debate topics being any better.

That's exactly what I was thinking of. Or the off-topic section of GS is just the WORST!

The problem with that solution is that tons of people visit the forums by simply hitting that Forums tab up on the upper right. With a dedicated flame bait board, these people will still be seeing the most recent topics made regardless of where its from.

It's not supposed to actually make anything better. Everything will be the same, but you could filter it out if you wanted to, and the standard forums link wouldn't show any posts that have anything to do with these "social justice crusaders," as someone else put it.

Not if the forum filters actually were fixed and worked the way that they're supposed to. That's the point. If you don't want to see topics like that, you shouldn't have to.

Hi Friend,

My name is AlexGlass and I'd like to talk with you about the virtues of the Xbox One.