OH GOD THEY BROKE OUT OF THE WARSAW GHETTO ALERT THE PANZERS

Why am I even talking to you.

Excellent analysis Astromarine. The lets pay forum I used to find right in my wheelhouse for the type of games I was interested in, but it is very different now.

Hard to say what to do though, because as Lum says a community has formed. You cant just banish them all, even if they did make an IWD2 thread with ninja in it.

We've had this conversation before. It didn't go well. The conclusion was that people with your opinion were old weirdos yelling at kids to get off their lawn because the future is people texting eachother with shit like 'x2bq?roflol ⁂gTF!.!.!xdqfp' to indicate that there's a sale on Hello Kitty iPhone cases at Silo so get used to it, MAAAANNNN.

I'm with you on this one. I come to Brokenforum because of the contingent of well written, cogent, sometimes insightful, often witty posts that somehow manage to insult me and all that I hold dear. Yet I come anyway, because at the very least, I can steal those insults and use it on unsuspecting people elsewhere who won't realize what a failure of originality I am that I must appropriate cunning snark from anonymous internet assholes. If I had to read something banal, inane and pointless, I might as well get off the internet and talk to real people, or some such.

Technically, they're samurai, not ninja. They are all entirely too loud to be ninja.

Eek!

Other than the occasional peek (I had to find out what all the "Hatoful" stuff was about when I first got here) I know nothing whatsoever about LPs or Japanophilia (I'm sure there's a better term for this) or grognard-style games other than being married to a quasi-grognard, so I personally would put them all in the "Stuff Mrs. Widget Doesn't Read" category, which probably wouldn't be too helpful for anyone else.

That said, the occasional bit of pop culture or Japanophilia that I pick up here makes me feel happy that I am getting some info outside my usual interest zone :)

"What do you mean, this game is 'cool'? It's a series of electronic impulses, it has no measurable temperature!"

Fact seems to be, if in a review or AAR for a game, it contains any of the following:
- men with discernible cheekbones
- two men in a cutscene with parts of their chests visible
- anyone hugs
- someone is kidnapped

Then you are likely to get a ton of people following the thread and Liking every post while replying with the fervor (and grammar) of someone named BieberFan420xXx4Life on Youtube. That's just the nature of the beast.

EDIT: you know, I think that list of qualifiers also describes Contra. Quick, someone do a Let's Play Contra AAR and see who starts going all "THE FEEEEEELS!" and shipping Player 1 and Player 2.

Bagsy, this one for a new subforum title.

You know that's probably already happened, but I'm not going to venture into the google and find out.

Good plan. I'll start:
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start

Someone else feel free to take it from here.

uhhh they have names you know




(Bill and Lance)

Birru and Lance-chan, you mean.

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEE

I believe you mean KAWWAAAIIIIII!!!!!!!~~

Is this where the orgy is happening? I need to know.

So I can avoid it.

And on topic: I don't venture into the Let's Play forum because most of the things I want to read get buried under pages of dating sims. Which, if you want to play those, whatever. That's fine. But it means I don't bother going in to read anything else that might be in there and I'm never actually going to do my run through of the Black Cauldron because I'd hate to have to hunt for my own damn thread all the time.

I wander around the Games forum when I'm playing something and I want to see what other people thought of it or I want to see what games are getting talked about right now. I'd really hate to see that kind of stuff get buried under pages of talk about more dating sims. I'm just not interested in that kind of thing and if part of a forum gets taken over by it? I don't read it. Same reason I never click on the Sports one, except by accident. And then I get confused.

I find it relevant that despite the discussion centering around a potential new subforum for LPers, only a bare handful of LPers have made their way into this thread.

re: Contra - このディッスカッションはこわいですね。

also, I probably mangled that sentence structure

It isn't. I mean, there's a whole thread about Gus and he hasn't made his way into that thread yet!

In the initial stages of the forum design, I was opposed to the division of the P&R category into moderated and less moderated groups. I kept making threads in the unmoderated and focusing primarily on that because I felt it was stupid to subject everyone to stricter rules when it was clearly a few bad actors that kept shitting everything up. It wasn't until bans and temp-bans were enforced by subforum that I really saw the advantages of the split, at which point I stopped looking at the restrictions on conduct/content by subforum as limiting relative to the individual but rather as liberating relative to the community.

If this sounds a bit Orwellian, let me explain. The forum has technological limitations and advantages that require different filtering for different situations. That's why it's great that I can block individual users because I regard them as a net waste of my time; that's why I wish I could block threads without blocking individual users in order to simply cut out static or things that I am never going to want to access. I don't want them to go away, I just prefer to have them away from me. That's why it's great that I can start a D&D post and assume that it's going to go one way and I can start a Sanctum post and assume it's going to go another, and both have their place even if I end up using the former a lot more.I'm not sure whether Tapatalk's inability to respect my preferences here is a bug or a feature; sometimes I feel like I'm looking at an entirely different BF when it opens into Latest and I guess that's a good reality check.

What's different about this is that the LP community and Qt3 leftovers and everyone else distinctions are not as easy to categorize into within reason and toxic groups, and indeed I doubt that would be useful although I definitely found a lot I appreciated and could use in Dan's summary. Grammar choices are as much a matter of taste and code language as anything else we do here, and I don't think it's really helpful to start looking for straightjackets on LP expression just because the leftovers are better at fitting bullying, shaming, and shit talking within the broadly accepted modes of expression in the forum.

But I do think Dating sims etc broadly are different enough in content and in approach to the discussion that they would benefit from having their own non-LP subforum. There will be some leakage across genres, but I think there's ample room for a Latest Bioware game thread in each that contains elements of both types of discussions without losing sight of the primary audience. It means people who stretch the rules of the forum to troll won't have a leg to stand on, and it means that people know exactly what they are getting when they go in there. It sounds like ghettoizing just like asking me to post in a differently moderated P&R forum once did, but in my opinion it's the best thing you can do to both sides without opting for draconian and fairly arbitrary moderator overreach that compromises the overall practice of moderation on the board.

So I don't know. I get the LP pride aspect of the whole thing, but I'm not sure it's going to work out well in the medium term relative to the big picture of what really happens when Lum has to start getting Solomonic on these things.

I don't think it's useful. It could reflect any number of causes, and silence is not assent to a view one way or another. I'm pretty sure rarely clicking on this section of the forum is a strong indicator of good mental health, or at least a step in the right direction.

While the Let's Play forum is mostly full of dating sim folks trying (and failing) to be the next Angie, there are occasionally some really useful and/or entertaining "real video game" LPs in there. That's why I wish that the thread tags there were not only mandatory but enforced for accuracy, so you could know what to skip if it wasn't your cup of bubble tea.

It's Lance and Bill, you newb.

I'm in favor of anything resulting in a sub-forum named "Bridge Over the River Kawaii".

Personally I read Lum's wonderfully inappropriate thread title as a tacit request for more wargame LPs.

Generally, I'm in favor of this idea. Subforum divisions can be nearly invisible if you want them to be, and alternatively are useful filters if you want them to be.

But how will I discuss mecha in this forum?

Doesn't everyone want to see my models?

I mean, though, that we need more input from what other LPers think.

Why? If the majority of LPers don't venture outside of the LP forum, what difference is it whether or not they get moved? They'll still just post in that forum, wherever it ends up. Why is this being discussed like it's anything other than an organizational issue? No one is saying the LPers all have the clap and need to be banned or pushed to a new site. Just like Sports People they'd have their own area to talk their little hearts out about dating sims without bothering all the other people who don't want to click through a million football threads in the fall or baseball threads in the spring.

I'd say "no we don't" - if people only visit one forum to the exclusion of all others, including this particular one where policy is discussed, then they forego the privilege of having a voice in said policy. That being said, BF isn't a democracy, it's a benevolent Lumtatorship - but if the plebians decide to stay in their own little hut and not show up at court to plead their case before Lum the Mad, then their concerns aren't relevant because they weren't voiced.

Personally, I'd like to see a little more structure to the LP forum. Tags to indicate what kind of game an LP is for would be useful (as would the ability to ignore or just not show threads with specific tags, but I don't know if that's a Xenforo option) - we have the ability to use the tags when creating a thread, perhaps Elyscape could mandate and standardize their usage.

I guess it depends on how much there can be a middle ground meeting between the two subgroups. I mean I just came from reading a lengthy, thoughtful post on a dating game (with grammar, paragraphs and all those nice things) in the regular game forum, right after I just smacked the particular thread around for not conforming to the qt3 exile style guide. If a significant proportion of the LP/otome identifying posters' posts were like that would there be any objections to them sitting proudly alongside a trademark Dungsroman beat down?

I'd be tempted to let the issue simmer for a bit longer and see how it plays out before taking a firm moderating hand to it, because while there are advantages to sub-grouping topics for discover-ability and increasing forum signal, I'm not sure that this particular split would appear to have the right motivations or origins. In other words I'd prefer the split to occur from an actual signal problem rather than what feels more like tribal bickering, at least right now.

With the 'New Threads' feature there is a long standing general personal signal problem in that users can't filter it for the type of sub-forums and threads they enjoy. That applies to everyone using the forum and isn't particular to this issue.

Discover-ability of non-dating LPs is a more interesting problem, I generally discover them when they are linked from their accompanying game thread in the general forum so I would encourage people to keep doing that.

The title does kind of sell it.

Because it is more than an organizational issue. These decisions have cultural weight in a mode of interaction where a few clicks mean everything.

I could have sworn there were two separate LP forums (one for essentially dating sims and one for more mainstream games) at one point. Did I dream that? Possibly.

I think that's stupid. I mean, did the Sports people freak out when they got their own place? P&R got split and while people might not have liked it initially, it's worked out.

Seriously. I don't remember. Did the Sports people freak out? Do they now feel like lepers that cannot post anywhere else? Do they appreciate that I snub their forum daily?

Because I do. I do.

You are probably thinking of when the 'multiplayer computer game/league organisation' sub-forum was broken out of the LP forum after the Blood Bowl threads were first moved into the LP forums and there was some protest from regular Blood Bowlers.

If that's the case, the subforum for "Dating Sim and Visual Novel discussion" should probably go under the Video Games forum rather than the Let's Play forum, I would think.

No, I remember that one. The picture in my memory is a forum listing with these entries (or ones like them):

Let's Play: Dating Sims
Let's Play: Strategy/RPG/Other

As I said, possibly/probably a dream.

Anyone who doesn't think there needs to be further organization, just go on and read that thread in Games. Now read 5 other threads in games, and tell me those all belong in the same forum. That's not a judgment, it's simply a matter of organization.

Segregation like this has been done by many other sites (SA, NeoGAF) and it has helped those respective communities, not harmed them.

Lastly, I am fairly certain many of the LP people harbor as intense a dislike for the other people as the regs do LPers, so I am not all that interested in this "LPers are being picked on!" angle.

Is there such a thing as one subforum being "under" another one, like as a subcategory of it? If so the main page does not indicate this to me. If you just mean in the order of the main listing though, I'd say the logical play would be either directly below or directly above the MMO one.