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

If this works, I will give you my firstborn.
No, wait. My second. I have too much invested in levelling my firstborn.

Insofar as this is looking like its being done with consultation and consensus from everyone on both "sides", I'm cautiously in favour of it.

That's a bit harsh. Derailing in the LP thread isn't just some asshole running in and going "I LIE PIE!" It's usually a natural flow of discussion that starts out being LP related and then just gets a little out of hand. If there were a solid rule -- say, "keep it to three posts in a row of derail" or "every post should say something about the game" -- and people just got warned and not banned until everyone got used to it, I think that would be fair.

Slight problem with the math - I am pretty sure that there can be awesome LPs from really crappy games. But carry on.

All of them. Lum is grooming you as his heir.

All this shall be yours, one day, and that day draws nearer and nearer.

One of the major differences I've noticed is that the LP-related threads tend to be much more stream-of-conscious driven. That's not to say that threads outside of the LP forum don't meander either, but not nearly to the same scale. For example, a dating sim for warriors includes pictures of swords, which become pictures of body armor, which become pictures of armored animals...

Not properly managed, this could just become a big general thread like Nebty said. We've had this occur before: everyone panicked over the Meido OOC thread because it surpassed 100 pages within a week. We might lose a bit of the stream of consciousness flow of LPs, but mostly we'll prevent threads from getting utterly derailed. Regardless of whether we have a Japanophile/dating sim/what-have-you subforum (which could be effective again only if we prevent derailing), we need to get everyone posting in a more organized manner.

Your new name is "Speaks With Otaku".

I like the stream of conciousness style that many LP threads adopt. But then, I'm on like, Tumblr, and I read Homestuck threads on there, for fun.

Speaking purely from a selfish perspective, getting the off topic social stuff out of the LP forum would certainly make it a million times more readable for me. I've been reading and occasionally posting in the LP forum for as long as it's existed, but in the past months, it's become essentially unreadable to me - and I suspect I'm not the only one. The problem is, even though there are still some wonderful people doing some amazing Let's Plays, there are also a sea - a damned ocean - of LP topics that are essentially nothing more than a fig leaf for people to go off topic and talk about whatever happens to pass through their minds, to the extent that there are sometimes three or more pages of off topic rambling for every one post of LP content. I cannot imagine how you follow that, if you're not part of the giggling kawaii desu ne crowd. And, to be clear, because this is coming off condescending - I don't have a problem with that crowd, I don't want them off the forum, or anything of the sort - they're an important part of the weird-ass melting pot we've got going here at BF - it's just that the social aspect of the LP forum is threatening to render the LP aspect of it - nominally the WHOLE POINT - utterly unreadable and defunct to all but the most die hard members of the community there. And I think that would be a damned shame.

I do too, and I don't think LP threads necessarily have to be strictly moderated (unless there's a complaint, of course). I do think that it'd be nice to talk to the LP people in other areas of the forum, though. I mean, some people are using groups for that. I was talking to Randissimo about cool books in DreadCop 's Feminist Teaparty group. There's no reason why that couldn't be discussed in Entertaining Diversions as well, but nobody from the LP forum goes there. Or they're all lurking, which amounts to the same thing.

Yeah. I think that could be fixed if people felt comfortable talking about things in other areas of the forum. Once an LP gets a bit too off-topic then perhaps a link could be posted to another thread where the discussion would fit better.

Incidentally, to all those who say they avoid the LP forum even though there might be threads for games in there they do like: the LP Consolidated thread is your friend. If anything I'd love the categorisation system used in that thread made part of the forum architecture somehow, perhaps via a neatening up of the existing tags system.

I don't think it should be a "Japanese things" forum. I think it should be:

The Bridge over the River Kawaii
Visual novels and dating sims, pigeon-related and otherwise

Alternatively, we LePers now claim ALL games made in Japan as our own, as a sacrifice to our dark souls.

But that's just it - forums are not tumblr, and they're not twitter, and I think it has served the LP forum poorly that so much of it has been treated as though it were. And it seems like the easy way to fix that is to allow the social aspect to happen in a different section, to preserve the community that has grown around the LP content, while also letting actual Let's Play threads happen without being buried in it, as is, let's be honest, clearly happening now. I know for a fact that I'm not the only LP fan who has been driven away by the current state of the forum, and now finds it essentially unreadable and unnavigable.

Hold on hold on hold on.

What if we just have another Broken Forum? Upside-down. And that can be LP Broken Forum, and the right-side-up one can be Grognard Broken Forum. And anyone who's beaten Elyscape can freely travel between them.

Getting the LP subforum to post on the other boards would be a good thing... If it works. I mean, a lot of people on the rest of the forum say they don't like our way of having feelings over games or talking about unrelated things (though I can see how that that last part can be annoying), and I don't really think the people (like me) who stay in the LP subforum would change our ways when we post in other subforums. The LP subforum is pretty much a community now, with its own in-jokes and friendships just like the rest of the forum, and I'm not sure it'd mix very well. Just look at how the word "dating sims" seem to be used pejoratively by almost the entire non-LP subforum crowd. Posting in threads where you'll be disliked for liking Japanese games/silly Let's Plays or having feels about games isn't that fun.

About making a subforum about Japanese things: It isn't a bad idea in general, and I say why the Hell not. But all of the tangents in the Let's Play threads aren't about Japanese stuff (for example, there's been numerous derails about musicals). Merely having a subforum about those things isn't going to stop the thread derails.

Speaking of the derails, are they really that bad? Most people on the LP subforum don't seem to mind. If I don't particularly care about a certain derail, I'll just skip the posts talking about it.

Ha! Technically, if this new subforum encompasses all Japanese stuff, the Dark Souls thread would have to be moved, wouldn't it?

The issue with leaving only a 'real games' LP subforum is that you're left with a subforum that's trying really hard to be Something Awful but it's just not possible to reach that level. Rather than split it, just put some extra LP specific rules for quality assurance, for issues like derailing and general spamming. Also please make some kind of rule in it about making tens of LP's and not even getting close to finishing a single one, that is the worst.

Dark Souls is also getting its own subforum, I believe.

So, I read it all from start to finish and I am so bloody darned tired as to be bordering on incoherency, so let me try to speak in this thing called English as much as possible.

I'm on the LP forum solely, in part as a time-management thing. I don't have the huge amounts of time I did when I first got into that forum via the usual pigeon route, and it's my firm principle never to post in a thread I haven't read from start to finish. I pick some select LPs, I follow them, and it's usually based on if I think I will like, either based on knowing the game or the general writing style of the author.
I'm also not hugely interested in Japan.

That said, and I might be getting all this horribly backwards, but I think it would be very killing for LP motivation in general if every thread was just you posting to yourself without anyone saying a word. Most of what is said in my DA2 thread is game related, but it's also usually "X just happened, I feel this way about X." from the posters which might not come up in a game discussion*. Is it stuff like that that is a huge problem (I am sorry, I am dumb and I have no idea what the What's New feature even was before I saw people mention it here), or is it only when the threads go on gigantic derails?

It's probably been said. My reading comprehension is terrible right now, and I'm sorry for probably asking very obvious questions.

*sigh*

Okay. Basically I'm in favour of whatever is easiest on the majority. I just like sitting in my corner and watch in horror when people get upset, so my input wouldn't be terribly helpful.

*And I respect different opinions on the game, it's by no means perfect, but I have made up my mind about what I thouht several playthroughs ago.

Can we come up with a better term than this, if we have to have one at all? It isn't as though the parts of the forum not concerned with Let's Plays are predominantly discussion about wargames.

But... but Elyscape is HARD!

Really, I think that as a person who reads visual novels, I'm so used to skipping tons of filler material to get to the plot that the chatter in these threads only marginally bugs me. In any case, I think it's entirely possible for one subforum to have a totally different posting culture without problems.

If I'm posing in D&D, I assume there needs to be more content to my posts than snide sarcasm. If I post in the Sanctum, I assume there needs to be no more content to my posts than snide sarcasm. We wear many masks on a forum, or "Personas," if you will. We summon these Personas by crushing cards and dating people and

its too late they got me save yourselves

(;-;)

I don't think this is as much of a concern as you think it is. I don't much care what kind of games you like and I'd suggest that most of the rest of the forum doesn't either. I don't read the Japanese Let's Plays so I would have no idea whether you were a frequent poster in there or not. I'm going to judge you by the posts you make in threads that I do read.

I know that I'd like to see more people participating in the book threads, I'm always looking for new suggestions on books.

NO. MINE!

I really don't mind derails, if they don't go on too long; if I'm not interested I can just ignore the thread until the next update.

However, I'd prefer if discussion about the game outside of the context of the LP could go in its own thread, because discussing games in LP threads is inherently awkward, since there's an unwritten rule that anything that hasn't happened in the LP yet is a spoiler. There was a thread I can recall that went on for more than a page of people just talking in spoiler tags because they wanted to talk about the endings but the LPer had just started the game.

Also, I agree with the people who would just want this new sub forum to be for discussion of visual novels and dating sims, because while I'd estimate about 90% of us are interested in those things, I don't think enough of us are into the general category of "Japanese stuff" that we'd have to worry about, say, the Entertaining Diversions board getting swamped in manga. And it seems like a much more reasonable split than Japanese/Not Japanese.

It works for everyone who tries it and doesn't just post about Let's Plays in other forums.

Who says this? I have never heard of anybody saying this.

Please. Not liking a genre of game that you like doesn't mean people don't like you, and I think you'll find there are plenty of genres that are spoken of in the Games forum pejoratively by people who don't like them right alongside people who do like them and talk about the earnestly. Nobody cares what kind of games you like. If you post in any thread about anything, guaranteed nobody will give you shit about your game preferences if you don't also bring them up out of nowhere and use words like "everybirdie" as the poster who made the thread that kicked this off did.

It's not just the derails in themselves. While yes, they clog up the LP forum something fierce, the main problem is that they are about the same things that we are talking about outside those threads, but without engaging us at any point. It's not even that we ran them outta town. For most people there, they never bothered to try. The people that have - Umazes, Bladida, MulMizu, soli-chan, loads of others - are still around, they didn't exactly run away screaming. As quat said, forums work in a different way than tumblr or twitter, and you guys need to try and match that structure. Hell, that Love Revo thread I looked at, that I mentioned in my last post, had *nothing* in the chit-chattiest parts of it that wouldn't be perfectly at home in the other threads around. Except, for some unknown reason, the participants.

Discrimination 101: if you haven't heard of it, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

The off-hand snide remarks ("They escaped again!") sure make for a warm and friendly reception, don't they?

(It's better now that the community is calling people out for those comments, but it's sure as hell not over. What prompted Lum to make these threads in the first place?)

And can we please be real: there is a vein of anti-"LPer" sentiment rattling around, sometimes very overt, more often just coded into snide commentary about "weeaboos" and "rape games". Yes, rape games exist; yes, some (very few, though) people's love of everything Japanese borders on the psychotic. But for the most part these jokes are serving to set a tone which is far from welcoming.

You may say people should just grow thicker skin, and this is just banter and this is the internet and all, but then one of the things I like about the LP community as that it isn't as sarcastic, cynical and disaffected (and to a large extent less male) as is the normal tone on most gamer forums. Part of that is having a thinner skin. The term "chilling effect" gets short shrift from many, I'm sure, but this kind of commentary sets a tone, and not being made to feel welcome is a real thing.

Is this a non sequitur?

No.

This may be over a relatively trivial identifier, but what's going on is classic discrimination.

First off, looking for a warm reception from Adree is folly no matter who you are. Second, what's the answer to my specific question?

This.

I hope it strikes people that we have two concurrent threads in Drama Llama regarding the "thicker skin" issue.

I'm pretty sure the reason is that people want to talk about things like pie, and games, and whatever the hell they talk about in the Love Revo thread with their friends, who are already active in the thread. It's a vicious cycle: If one single person goes "Hey, I could talk about pie in the baking thread!", and they go and do so, they'll be met by a group of perfect strangers with maybe one or two exceptions, so they just post in the unrelated thread where they know all their friends will reply, so no one ever moves. Sometimes you wanna post where everyone knows your name.

Except that I didn't say "because I have not seen this it does not happen," I said that I haven't seen it, and I asked who does it.