Direct me to the drama please

[J T]

Twitch? Podcasts? This is a retro site! We need more starry-tile backgrounds, spinning skull gifs, and 30 second Real Audio clips that take 10 minutes to load!

Get off my lawn!

[Stark]

oh gawd, Real Audio

[MrPopo]

They've still got office space just south of Safeco.

[darsparx]

Twitch? Podcasts? This is a retro site! We need more starry-tile backgrounds, spinning skull gifs, and 30 second Real Audio clips that take 10 minutes to load!

Get off my lawn!

Oh man.....it'd be sad if this didn't seem like the early 00's for me

[JoeAwesome]

I joined in 2013 after being a pretty common site reader for a few years. I knew JoeAwesome in person from the local community and he encouraged me to join. Rest is history! Thanks Joe.

I'm still around (online and off- you know how to find me), but I'm often on other forums as my primary gaming focus has changed and the off-topic stuff here isn't very engaging to me.

[Forlorn Drifter]

Twitch? Podcasts? This is a retro site! We need more starry-tile backgrounds, spinning skull gifs, and 30 second Real Audio clips that take 10 minutes to load!

Get off my lawn!

Can't we just put those things in the Twitch streams? If nothing else, I'd think the awkward early internet or a really cheesy dark 80's style ala Hotline Miami or Far Cry Blood Dragon could be amazing.

[Anapan]

Please clean that mess up.

Shit - Those many-strong grey-goose screwdrivers made me expose my shame/cat...
Ya, I already have all the stuff to compact it behind a black dropcloth (Hardware IR Repeaters, extra SCART distributors etc).
I've usually kept it exposed to try out every setup for maximum quality through multiple interfaces. Just now I realize that I should just have in front of my displays one extra auxilary input area for everything. Already I have a 4-port USB hub on the end of two extenders and two auxiliary ethernet (Those are for computer repairs) It's become very apparent that I need to have another matrix display repeater. I have always lacked a DVDO Edge (the earlier one that doesn't suck).

Wait - the solution is to make a website about my cat in Netscape Navigator with random animated gifs and all the original pictures are of screen captures off a composite capture card about my achievements in Nintendo, Genesis and Saturn games? I can do that!
I can even make .mpg video captures of the Duck Truemotion intro videos! I found this awesome program that makes KVCD files you can burn to a CD and play in your home entertainment center. If your Saturn is chipped they'll even play in it!

[BoringSupreez]

Stopped in out of nostalgia. I guess it's obvious this site is on the way out, huh?

There's multiple things that are killing this place, not just 1.

The first, and the one that none of us could possibly do anything about, is how the gaming community as a whole has evolved. In the mid to late 00s, when most of us discovered racketboy, there were hidden gems left to find. Good games with no reviews. Weird peripherals with no articles written about them. All that stuff is documented now. Anything we could possibly discuss, some Youtube personality has already made an entertaining video about it. Newbies are going to find those videos when they hit up google, not Racketboy. And it was Google's algorithm that gave this site life in the first place.

Cliquishness is another one. It's the same handful of people with thousands of posts in their history who discuss everything here, in threads that are older than most 1st graders. Not welcoming at all for new people. Interpersonal drama flares up too often, particularly in the politics thread (which I myself have argued in, I admit).

The decline of the forum model in general is hurting things pretty bad too. There are very few active forums left on the web - the only ones that come to mind are neogaf (which is a cancer's cancer) and boardgamegeek (which is full of grayhairs, understandable that it's still healthy). Even forums that used to be huge like Gamefaqs have slowed to a crawl. I loved the forum model but for some reason, today's gamers would rather congregate in Youtube and Twitch comment sections, Reddit, and 4chan's /v/.

Trigger-happy mods didn't do the site in by themselves, but they pushed on the gas pedal harder than natural events already were. You guys banned so many of the most entertaining people, because they were "disrupting the community" or "creating an unwelcome environment". Well guess what, you killed the content creators, the people who drew in lurkers who would later become active members. You did the forum more damage by banning popular longtime members than letting those members stay would have done, and by a big margin. No healthy forum has a mod crew that makes up a solid 10% of active posters. Seriously, look on the Random Thoughts thread and find a recent page that doesn't have at least 1 mod or admin post on it.

Ah well, this site is a cool time capsule anyway. It's a great snapshot of the era when videogaming became mature enough to start looking back on itself, instead of blindly pushing forward like fashion.

[Xeogred]

Nice one Boring.

Posted: Sat Apr 01, 2017 12:19 pm

[marurun]

Nostalgia-tinted glasses apply to more than just video games, huh?