- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Well, as one of the few people who come here only for the group forum and content, I have to say I am very pleased that they are back up, even if there are no new groundbreaking features. The purpose of the original chapters used to be gathering people for LAN-parties I assume, but as you said that went away with Halo 2. With these new groups the purpose (of each group) seems individually focused on rather the people running it, instead of a common goal (there's exceptions, I know that). Because of this I believe the groups have had a downfall in activity because those groups doesn't seem to be contributing with exciting content.
You say that they have no purpose, which I agree. The few groups that actually have a purpose doesn't seem to be the most active either. As far as I've understood they are either gathering grounds for like minded or places for spesific purposes (like the Myth Jumpers that organize Myth matches). As I said, it seems to be that individuals use the groups for their own place to have their friends (or fans) seeing the stories or other contributions from this user. Sometimes there's more then one person, but I hope you understand my point. Examples of this is the famous Marty's Army, or the other fan groups of the various moderators/employees of Bungie.net. It may be a while ago since I actively joined and participated in groups, I'm only in a handfull now, but I believe that was the case back then and still is. Now, this may seem like a negative and useless way to have a group, but this is how I believe you can make groups useful again.
Marty's Army has a lot of members and quite some activity even though it's simply Martys own personal space for rants, stories and similar. The news system is used to post stories or news about and from Marty, which the members there enjoy. The whole group is based around Marty, and no one has a problem with that. This is what I suggest you could do with the groups, turn them into personal spaces for the user.
I'm not suggesting Bungie.net should be the new Myspace, as there's no way image uploads or personal information should be allowed on the site. However, if you switch around and some some parts that are already built into Bungie.net you could still make it very personal. What I'm suggesting would require a bit of work, but would only use information that's already here on B.net (to some degree, I'm after all not a web designer and doesn't have the technical knowledge to say exactly how to pull this off). The main page could be made personal with having the group name and info being replace by the persons forum name and gamertag. Avatar, and/or gamecard/Halo MP info could be on the main display along with the basic information that we have in our profiles (location, homepage, email, etc). Perhaps game stats for the user could be displayed, as number of games played and such. In addition there would also be the usual group content (forum, FAQ, articles, etc).
I realize my suggestion is simply mixing the groups and public profile, with the Myspace/Wordpress Blog twist, but if you make it excluded from the groups so there's no limit in how many you can join (or make it so guests can posts as an optional choice) it would have a lot more use. Maybe it's too difficult or time consuming to do, but it's something I believe would make it more used. It's only suggestion though, only a suggestion.
*Simen retreats back to his grouphole now.
Posted by: Achronos
The problem with groups is that they have no purpose. They used to have a purpose, but that purpose went away when Halo 2 went online. Now, they just are a way to have your own forums.
It is extremely hard to justify significant development time on them when as of this morning, only 5.68% of all active users here actually are even a member of a group (no, that isn't a made up number). We have only two web devs here, and quite frankly, we have way more features to work on that we have time to do them. And Halo 3 features are way more "bang for your buck" than groups.