RyanJW

Very good post Nardak. That is exactly how I feel: ads aren't a bad thing, but when it utterly ruins the experience of using the site then that's going to do far more damage long-term.

YouTube skippable ads are good because you're respected enough to make the choice regarding whether you watch it or not. Often I do end up watching it anyway because it's caught my interest, but when an unskippable one comes up I get an immediate feeling of resentment against that product. Not good.

I personally don't use things like AdBlock, I just stop visiting the site. I love Giant Bomb and I've been here virtually since its inception, which is why I don't want it becoming so riddled with ads that people stop joining and people already here start leaving. It can and does have an effect on visitors — I've watched visitor numbers and time spent on the site fall almost in real time as a direct result of implementing intrusive ads on some of my web projects.

Maybe this is a good time to remember that it was being driven by advertising and marketing concerns that caused the original downfall of GameSpot and Jeff being expelled from the company. This is something that should concern people, and pointing towards membership options — which GameSpot also had — isn't a solution. This is a road to ruin if it's not kept in check.

We're living in an age where the 'you don't pay for it so be quiet' excuse is laughably weak. I said quite clearly in my original post that I'm fine with ads, as somebody who's run more than a few websites I'm aware of the need for them. There's a point where it starts being extremely detrimental to the user experience though, and a huge video that pushes the content way off screen is definitely treading there.

I'm not upset, I'm just giving some feedback and providing others with the opportunity to agree (or not). If nobody were able to voice opinions about things that're free then it'd be a pretty shitty internet.

I'd imagine that Giant Bomb didn't build these community features for the sheer hell of it, they presumably want people to actually use them. A great way of doing that is to not saturate them with ads. I want to use them, I just don't want the experience to be so poor for people I want to share my articles with. It's not about withholding anything.

Is it just me or are the ads on Giant Bomb starting to get a bit obscenely big now? Here's what I'm seeing today (this is my full browser pane):

Granted, it's not as bad as the full-page ads that kicked up a storm, but it's pretty damn annoying that the ad is so huge I can't even see any content without scrolling way down.

Sure I could probably subscribe and lose the ads, and I might. But I was considering posting more on my Giant Bomb blog rather than guest writing elsewhere, and I don't really want my audience having to wade through that. So it just puts me off getting more serious about the user content stuff, really.

I don't mind ads, but not to the point where it trashes the design. I've always been delighted by Giant Bomb's great design(s) and it's unfortunate that like too many sites the user experience is becoming ruined by ads.

That's a fair concern, although it could be remedied by making it so that if an article is removed the forum thread remains intact and just becomes a regular forum thread. Then, if the author really wants to get rid of any traces of his content he can edit the original forum post — any replies will be out of bounds though, so no worries about people losing their contributions

Blog authors should definitely be able to remove their own articles, and that should get rid of associated comments. But if the author made it a forum thread too, then it's fair game that they should remain. I guess the site would need a new function that converts a removed blog post into a regular forum thread with replies though, so maybe this is just wishful thinking. ;)

How do you do even that? I couldn't find anything in the blog post view or the edit page.

Yep, the title thing seems like a clear bug. I posted a blog post to the forums but had put in a placeholder title. I immediately changed it but it wasn't reflected in the forums.

Unless I'm missing something there's no longer an ability to delete one's blog posts?

I've decided that I want to use my Giant Bomb blog as a platform for my gaming thoughts, rather than maintaining my own WordPress. But not being able to delete posts is a real pain, for example the other day I accidentally posted a half-finished version of my post and had to frantically finish it off. Also, I have some old posts I wrote more as a test than anything a few years ago and I can't get rid of them.

Being able to delete and preview posts before posting them are pretty standard blogging features, glaringly absent due to the fact that everything else works so well!

Not with games you don't. I'm personally not disputing that there's a big difference between SD and 720p, I presume @sins_of_mosin was talking to someone else. But there's a very distinguishable difference between 720p and 1080p when gaming even on my 42-inch TV.

The reason for this is down to the nature of the visuals. Games render perfectly sharp computer-generated graphics for your TV to display, and not only that but many games skip anti-aliasing so they can enjoy better performance. It's largely these jagged edges that make the difference between 720p and 1080p so obvious.

It's a completely different story with films and TV shows. In many cases the original footage isn't pin sharp like computer-generated imagery anyway. Even when it is, real-life imagery tends to lend itself quite well to upscaling due to an absence of jagged edges, mip-mapping, and various other effects that are unique to games.

This is one of those things that is likely to go over the head of the average gamer, though. Not that they won't benefit from and enjoy the increased sharpness, but they'll probably just put down to 'that next-gen sheen' rather than a simple resolution upgrade.

I'm the other way round to some of you guys. If I had to choose, I'd take a drop to 30 FPS if it meant maintaining 1080p — but only if it were a consistent, vsync-enabled 30 FPS. The biggest issue with a lot of current-gen games is the fact that many drop to 10–25 FPS frequently, which is very jarring. A smooth 30 FPS isn't so bad. Not as good as 60 FPS of course.

RollingZeppelin is right though, next-gen consoles should be capable of outputting 1080p. The difference in performance between lower and higher resolutions is much lower with current GPUs compared to the ones used in the 360 and PS3. Unless developers get downright lazy and can't be bothered to optimise, performance should never get so bad that 1080p can't be maintained.

I'd love to see the console manufacturers make it an outright rule that 1080p must be maintained, removing the wriggle room developers have entirely. After all, back in the standard definition days developers had no choice but to optimise, there was no room for lowering resolutions unless they resorted to sub-SD (which some did).

That's what I'm doing. Getting old fast. When I'm on my laptop I don't even have one.