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Posted by: Shai Hulud
Should I, and those on the same boat as me (few though they may be) keep taking stones throne at us in stride? Or should we throw back? I am not one for the blood for blood mentality, but honestly, my patience wanes.RED ALERT: CONFUSING-METAPHOR OVERLOAD!!
Just kidding Shai. Seriously, though (and I'm not trying to be mean here), longing for the "good old days" is as pointless on an internet forum as it is in real life. I'm sure Recon is longing for the days of his youth, when cave paintings were en vogue, those delicious mammoths were not extinct yet, and you could find a wife by clubbing her over the head. But those days are gone. And just like Recon, who has forgotten how there was no such thing as running water or computers or wheels when he was a child, the people who long for the good old days here are nostalgic because they remember only the good things.
I'm convinced that a lot of this is connected to other pleasant memories not really related to Bungie. I used to love those days when I'd come home from elementary school and turn on my NES and play Super Mario Bros. until dinnertime without a care in the world. Or when I'd log onto a dial-up BBS and use their forums before the internet even existed. But that doesn't mean that things were better back then.
Let's face it: this Community is absolutely not getting "dumber" or "more immature." This place has never exactly been a cocktail party for snooty Harvard professors. It's filled with a wide variety of people who enjoy Bungie's video games from the entire range of the very wide spectrum that comprises video gamers in general. The variety of intelligence, maturity, and demographics has always been astounding here. If anything, there are more intelligent and mature posters here than there used to be -- both new fans and veteran fans who have grown up during their time on these forums.
Now, I am not talking about anybody in this thread specifically, but I have noticed that the people who complain about "stupidity" or "immaturity" on these forums are rarely brilliant or ultra-mature themselves. They have merely been around longer. Indeed, just earlier today there was a post in this forum complaining about how bad this Community has gotten because several users were punished for making malicious "jokes" about another user.
At the end of the day, what we end up with is a forum filled with BNet veterans, many of whom complain about the loss of the "good old days" but for completely opposite reasons. One group of people thinks that they should be allowed to joke around and make silly posts with more latitude, while the other group bemoans the spam and alleged immaturity of the forums. The only thing consistent about these positions is that it "used to be better back in the good old days."
The grass is always greener on the other side of the meadow, my friends. People complained about the community "dying" in 2006, and in 2005, and in 2004. These posts have always been around. And, astonishingly, the Community is still here. Bungie.net remains the only so-called "community" that I have ever seen in which people so often complain about it "dying" or "going downhill" even in the face of massive community growth.
What can you glean from that? Well the most obvious conclusion is that things really haven't changed, and what you are remembering is not really connected to the quality of the forums but rather the very human experience that we all share of remembering days gone by as being better than they actually were. Unless you don't like the sheer volume of traffic here, no matter what your complaint about the state of the forums today may be (spam, flaming, trolling, general immaturity, or whatever), I am pretty sure that I can find examples of it going back to the forums' earliest posts that we can still see.
Since when was Bungie a bastion of sanity, intelligent discourse, and mature wit? At what point in BNet history did everybody read and moreover abide by the rules and stickies? These things can certainly be found here, and lots of members display all of these qualities; but it has never been the way that these forums define themselves.
As to the heavy traffic and new members, well that's to be expected when a video game company finds success and nurtures its community. If Bungie didn't do this, it would be doing a disservice to itself and to you, not a favor. Are they supposed to try to keep people out of the forums merely because they weren't here 3, 4, 5, or more years ago? Of course not -- that's ridiculous -- and I don't think that anybody here is arguing that this should be the case. But it is, in my mind, undeniable that all problems that these forums are experiencing for the first time are arising from heavier site traffic rather than an actual decline in the quality of users' postings here. These problems, having arisen, should be dealt with on a proactive basis that realizes the nature of change and success, rather than wishing for Bungie to go back to being a relatively unknown game developer whose employees struggle to make a living but whose fanbase is more tight-knit and intimate.
A very simple visualization may help: imagine that this place is a real-life community. As such, it started out as a small village where everybody knew each other and things were cozier. There was the town drunk, and the occasional drifter who would rob the jewelry store, the guy who beat his wife every night, and the two brothers who used to spray graffiti on the fountain in main square. But there was not a lot of crime in terms of pure numbers. At the same time, people had to scrape out a living, raise their own chickens, and did not have the amenities and luxuries of a modern city. But as the Bungie village's reputation spread, the community grew and attracted new people. Eventually, the town attracted talented artists, intellectual thinkers, educated doctors, great teachers, and wealthy businessmen. It grew into the bustling city that you see now. And yes, there is a lot more crime, simply because there are a lot more people. Some of these new people are bad, but some unusually good, and most just in the middle. This new city has its good (better amenities and services, more wealth, more arts and entertainment) and its bad (more crime, more overcrowding). And yes, perhaps it now needs more street-sweepers, more cops, and more government than it used to. But it is neither better nor worse objectively than the village it used to be. Whether you prefer it the new way or the old is simply a matter of personal opinion.
Things change, and the success that allows Bungie to make bigger and better games (and also continue to provide this site to its users for free, with no advertisements or any other kind of revenue solely from the site) has also caused necessary changes to the populace and feel of the forums. It's no longer a sleepy village but now a bustling city.
Please try not to be the old men sitting on the porch lamenting about the good old days and drinking your whiskey, waiting to die. It's depressing. Just do things the way you have always done them -- find or create interesting topics and say what you have to say. Adapt to change and make suggestions that will allow you to participate as meaningfully as possible. You might be amazed to find how often you can have a decent interaction with people here if you have the right attitude about things.
[Edited on 02.19.2008 6:44 PM PST]