Does anyone else think that generals make the board a bit boring?
Real talk, lots of threads that come through here are stupid and baity, because everyone asks their questions in the generals.
These questions would be answered several times in a real thread, that might derail into something great, as opposed to being answered once or twice in a general.
What do you guys think?
That you're a myopic summerfag idiot with no idea of how things work in the real world.
Almost everything outside the generals is shitposts and super low quality discussion, this isn't even a product of how Veeky Forums is moderated, we did this to ourselves
That's how Veeky Forums used to work and it was more fun, but there's no going back now.
...
No without generals any interesting threads would be buried because you'd just have endless threads on D&D ,40K and MTG.
I don't think there's really a better solution to generals considering how big and diverse the traditional gaming market is.
Back in the early days of Veeky Forums you pretty much had 40k, Magic, and 3.5 D&D dominating things. With those points in common everyone had a similar level of experience and knowledge. If someone said wizards were busted you knew exactly that 3.5 bitching was on the table. Sure other games got talked about, but the big 3 reigned.
Now we have a glut of successful rpgs, several successful wargames, and Magic which has grown large enough that it's forked into formats with very different audiences. While this is great for the industry and as a player, we've lost that communal experience. The generals more or less exist to allow these groups to talk with people that have relatively similar levels of knowledge and similar interests, but they still can fall into corruption without constant new content and some level of moderation.
What is describing generally exists for people who don't actually play or understand traditional games and would rather shitpost, lewdpost, or bait /pol/ vs anti/pol/ arguments.
They always existed, and they've always been fine. 'General' may be a relatively recent word, but there was always big threads discussing the most popular games. What's the harm in focusing the discussion in one place?
This.
Quality of discussion doesn't get better because you ban discussion in certain types of thread.
I kind of feel as though generals tend towards circlejerking
At least if it isn't marked general, the rest of us have and excuse to come in a mock you
Yes, I wish we had less discussion.
user, you're fresh off the 1d4chan/Reddit boat, we can all tell you. Let me explain how it works:
You can't ban Generals, because Generals are so pointed and direct that removing them would be pointless, we'd just make them again by another name, UNLESS you created a separate board for them, Traditional Games General-/tgg/.
Now a few people advocate for this, BUT the majority are against it because we've seen what happens when that occurs, namely /v/ and Veeky Forums. Both communities are full of assholes and /v/ is more retarded than ever.
So, we deal with Generals as they are, and what we have to do to improve the board is not eliminate Generals, but change how Generals are used, and fix the non-general community... namely it's blind hatred of X, where X is anything you like.
TLDR: post good Shit outside of a General and give people reasons to post outside of a General. Blah blah blah be the change you want to see in the board.
>generals tend towards circlejerking
a bit, yes
but generals are inevitable to some extent, especially on a slow-ish board. you could forbid putting "- General" in the thread title, but there'd still be a regularly-bumped 5e discussion thread, a boardgame discussion thread, a worldbuilding thread, etc.
having the board be exclusively general threads would be stifling, yes, but having no general threads (on top of being essentially impossible) would leave no obvious repository for links and information on a given topic, and would mean a less focused location for advice on a specific system.
anyway, I don't see any logic connecting "there are general threads" to "other threads are often bait." that would happen anyway
I've been a tg dude for a while now, and for a while now it's been bugging me.
It seems as though 70% of people in the board are concentrated in the generals, to the point at which I believe that some of them only post in their general.
I feel as though if I posted the best system ever, I'd only get like 4 people that say good for you and then have the thread slowly fade into obscurity.
Meanwhile the generals either get hundreds of posters, or bump one thread enough to keep it afloat.
We can understand that it's bugging you, but you've yet to provide any reasons why it's a problem.
Your "only 4 people would respond to the best system ever" thing is complete nonsense by the way. Look at the catalog, most things that get ignored are things that've been posted a dozen times before or are obvious shitposts. I hardly think increasing the rate at which threads are created (and therefore killed) would improve that either. If people wanted to stay in The MtG Lore Thread (for example), they would whether it was labelled a general or not.
Right, but any official moderation would only make things worse. The problem, as will all things on this board, isn't the way the site is run, it's the people's behavior.
Mods don't give a fuck. They'll just delete this thread when it gets reported for being too meta, they'll never respond to anything anyone says here, in feedback, or on IRC. Mods can't and won't do Shit to fix this problem, and assuming they will is just post-Reddit thinking. The only time they ever do anything is to mitigate complaints, and apparently it takes a lot of complaining for them to notice.
So... we have to deal with the people, not the site, and fix things on that end... if that's even possible.
No, that feeling of boredom is caused by the lack of quest threads on Veeky Forums.
As soon as they're allowed outside of the graveyard that is /qst/, this board will improve in quality because the regulars here will have something to occupy their time besides making and bumping shitposts.
generals keep repetitive questions from being asked and a billion threads from being made about any one particular topic.
If there is no 40k general, there will be a billion 40k threads. Same for anything else. I assume you've never been to /v/ or Veeky Forums, which is a good example of how generals work.
And if you got rid of the generals, those people would... stick to the two or three totally-not-general threads about the same game that they're currently in the general of. Nobody is interested in literally every Veeky Forums topic.
>most things that get ignored are things that've been posted a dozen times before or are obvious shitposts.
Or really really obscure systems without enough of a fanbase to keep a thread up.
That's not a speculation, it's a fucking fact. People who disagree with you might call you a newfag, but it's because they themselves are newfags who don't remember a time before Veeky Forums when generals were a rarity and not the norm.
You can test this hypothesis out RIGHT FUCKING NOW. If you make a good thread and get lucky, you will get 300+ replies. Take that same thread and post it in a general and get maybe 2 replies, 5-10 if you're lucky.
The very nature of generals means you won't be able to dominate that entire thread with your topic, because the general contains so many dozens to hundreds of little discussions.
Chances are high that your 300+ posts deviate strongly from the OP, sometimes within less than 10 posts.
Start with Romans, end with the migratory pattern of geese in the Americas.
Generals are a natural reaction to Veeky Forums being drowned in dumb phoneposters and newfags, just as boards themselves were a response to /a/ and /b/ being overpopulated, just as Veeky Forums itself was a response to the internet being increasingly popular and thus shit, and so on and so forth
Once communities get too big, they splinter and branch off because it's a lot easier to find a small band of people you enjoy being around than it is to tolerate literally thousands of people you fucking hate for the sake of that one-in-a-million post you actually like
Are you saying our large modern societies will eventually devolve into scattered, roving kill-bands of tribal marauders?
the amount of replies equates in no way to the quality of discussion nor quality of the board. If you make a question and it's answered in 2 3 replies maybe it didn't diserve a 300+ thread of bait counter bait and retardedness. You can pose a question out of general if it's a wide topic, but if everyone asks their little doubts on a new thread the board is drowned. Also discussion of smaller games becomes nigh impossible without generals, the only people who don't want generals are those who play more common games.
You know, I remember when some guy who ran quests stated we'd be flooded by mostly generals when they were gone. I laugh, and I laugh he was right.
that's retarded, generals were already there, you might mean the only activity is in generals, how can the absence of quests spawn more generals?
The better solution is to get rid of the generals.
"General" is the problem. Instead of the board being filled with discussion and a few megathreads that are kind of focal points. Now it's just 4-5 threads about topics and a bunch of shit threads that never die. Not out of popularity, but because people have 0 reason to make a new thread.
The gap they left got filled. And since generals were already the largest thing on the board, it got mostly filled by more generals. It wasn't a particularly large gap, though.
>maybe it didn't diserve a 300+ thread
That's retarded and you know it. There are plenty of topics that will get buried or go unnoticed due to the way generals work.
Concentrating topics into one thread leaves more space for other threads.
You can use the catalogue filtering to display only threads that are not generals, which helps topics that do not fall into generals.
Last but not least, it helps the overall site management. Topics which are constantly discussed to the point of having multiple general threads could be migrated to new dedicated boards.
You could compare it with city-development.
Generals killed pretty much any board they infected.
Veeky Forums went from being the best board of Veeky Forums constantly creating new stuff, to being completely miserable.
I blame the redditors invasion and their inability to exist without shallow circlejerks.
I blame the heavy hand of the mod banning quest threads and every other type of Veeky Forums content that he personally didn't like.
Quest threads were shit and shared most problems of generals.
If they were one-shot kind of deal they'd be fine, instead of being Anime-Ero Quest! XXVIII let's jerk each other!!!
i said maybe and you also know that without generals there are a lot of rthreads that go unnoticed, that's normal.
>all quest threads are /a/nime quests
Your complaint is with the shitty visual novel quests that moot moved from /a/ to Veeky Forums.
reminder that if you filter generals there are still a lot of threads and they suck, it's not like gnerals magically suck good intentions out of people, peopel just like to shitpost.
Generals like /hwg/ fairly consistently have good content, content creation and are a good community resource; as well as allowing for the discussion of obscure games that would generally only survive a handful of posts before falling off the board.
Bump
They do, 100% (look at the pathfinder general), but Veeky Forums is a board that I feel is unique in that generals are handy rather than stifling, if only because of links to pfds and the like
I mean I didn't even mind quests, cause I filtered them, but they were. And even neat one like doppelganger quest died because they didn't have waifus
Generals are the necessary evil. I agree with everything you've said OP, but games have pdfs, pastebin guides, and website links.
Pre-generals, I got so much knowledge of gaming just from osmosis, now because everything is so concentrated and compartmentalized that I only know about 2-3 games I play.
Creating a containment board for quests was one of the only times heavy moderation had a net positive effect on a board.
I think generals are ok, but there are way too many of them. There are like 3 different mtg threads right now + a custom card thread + a general card game thread. Put all that shit in one thread.
Put all the D&D/Pathfinder shit in one thread.
Warhammer lore, 40k, fantasy, sigmar, wargaming, rpg, deathwatch, etc... should all be in one thread.
>I wonder if the generals make it so that everything outside them is shit
>everything outside the generals are shit
Thanks for your contribution.
The problem is that people have some weird desire to separate """serious discussion""" from shitposting. In my experience trying to draw strict lines between "good" and "bad" posts actually decreases the average quality of posts.
Used to be, most people operated at constant but low to mild levels of shitposting. These types of posts would be frowned upon on your typical forum, but if most posts are like this it doesn't matter. How I always viewed it, it forced people to accept a certain amount of humility, i.e "yeah I know this entire website and everyone on it including me is shit but hear me out".
Tragically, trying to police and raise post quality has the opposite effect. hardcore shitposting by itself already has a certain allure to it, but that's increased by an order of magnitude if the person you're doing it at is acting like they're above you because of how sophisticated their post on a Peruvian model airplane imageboard is.
>d&d and pathfinder in the same thread
OK buddy
>Does anyone else think that generals make the board a bit boring?
No, and stop making this thread. How many times to you need practically everyone to disagree with you?
If you don't like generals you can make your own thread, there's plenty of space its not like your high value independent thread is getting pushed off.
Don't try to pretend generals aren't incredibly helpful for board health and focused discussion on topics that have very high traffic on Veeky Forums (DND, 40k, MTG, etc.).
Yes, technically "questions would be answered several times in a real thread, that might derail into something great, as opposed to being answered once or twice in a general" but how many times do you need a new rule in 40k clarified for you, on the off-chance one of those threads might devolve into a particularly inspired fan-made chapter creation?
Every single time. The stupid OP repeatedly posts this stupid topic complaining nonsensically about generals, and the questfags creep in to complain.
I'm beginning to suspect that this topic is just a glorified bait and switch for complaining about quest removal so the questfags don't get caught and banned for complaining about moderation directly.
Removal of quests was the best thing that happened to Veeky Forums in a long time. And if they withered up and died because most of the content creators boycotted /qst/ like little angry children, well, that'd be just sublime irony. Or perhaps you'd like to trot out the common argument that quests couldn't work unless they were parasitically attached to a more interesting board?
But, those things are not true anyways. I know questfags would like it to be true, because their goal is to bring back quests to Veeky Forums but the truth is that /qst/ and people who seriously run quests of even middling quality on /qst/ do just fine.
First of all, I have never made this thread before. Has this really happened a bunch?
And I'm not a quest dude, if anything I thought they cluttered everything up.
I'm just complaining that a lot of good threads, that would have gotten a bunch of replies, didn't because everyone's stuck in their generals
The more likely idea is that a lot of regular Veeky Forums posters liked having quest threads on this board and hope for their return to Veeky Forums.
Yeah it started up about a month or so ago and every thread seems to go that way. It got so obnoxious at least one thread I know was deported to /qa/. That could be because the questfags are simply obnoxious and shill in any meta-thread but it was clearly planned for at least a little while.
I apologize, however, if you were not a part of that.
Although, I can't really understand the "stuck in generals" thing though. As far as browsing threads goes, we're not usually that fast moving a board. I usually have like 5 or 6 threads open at a time, sometimes more, responding in one then browsing the others until someone responds to me. Is that not what others do?
Well they have a home board now, so complaining about it all the time and trying to usurp threads on other topics is getting old.