Welcome to The Hairy Bear: The Witcher Off-Topic [Archived]

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To add to the above, I logged in today to reply to a PM, but decided to check out Community. There's been one post here in the last 24 hours.

One post.

Two years after TW2, the Community section was alive, with regulars posting all the time. And yet, despite the huge fan base, nobody is here.
 
dragonbird;n7814020 said:
To add to the above, I logged in today to reply to a PM, but decided to check out Community. There's been one post here in the last 24 hours.
One post.
Two years after TW2, the Community section was alive, with regulars posting all the time. And yet, despite the huge fan base, nobody is here.

Certain changes in CDPR started happening around and after TW3 release.The state of the forum is a reflection of those changes. Major communication failures in regards to those changes contributed to that.
 
Sardukhar;n7795830 said:
Witcher forums were busy for years, despite only two games coming out across the 9 years since I joined. Devs weren't flocking to the boards then either. [...] I don't need lots of traffic, I'm hoping more for engaged, quality posting.
They were certainly around, though. Things were happening. Patches for years, some adding new content. REDkit for W2 came out in 2013, there was the Xbox port that came with a contest that had a ton of people flocking here (and whoring themselves out, but it's happier to forget that part in favor of the engagement). That's not to belabor the point since this is clearly something you're not willing to entertain and that's fine, but we'd have to vacate reality to claim that the way they approached these boards then and now are similar in any way. And if you use "strength" as a euphemism for "people not complaining," you should probably just define it right off the bat so that we can avoid pointless detours like that in the first place.

For what you want, fragmentation's probably the biggest problem right now. We don't need separate subforums for every single act of the first two Witchers, much less four separate forums where virtually nothing is happening. And I'm not a fan of the fluff like the big banners that push the actual forum content further down the page, nor the achievements that double the size of a short post. Then again, I blocked all that stuff and others might be totally fine with it. On a side note, I can't wait for your engaged, quality posting to be hit by a tsunami of internet riffraff once actual 2077 news comes out. It shall be glorious.

dragonbird;n7814020 said:
Two years after TW2, the Community section was alive, with regulars posting all the time. And yet, despite the huge fan base, nobody is here.
Maybe the huge fan base is part of the reason, though? I mean, the first two games were/are kind of niche, so a large chunk of the community that liked the games fell into this place as a central hub for like-minded people. Seems pretty common with niche stuff. Now that the games (or game, I guess) hit it big, though, there are a million viable places to talk about it. And the people who buy whatever's popular at the moment seem pretty flaky to begin with and not exactly the types who'd stick around once newer, shinier games hit their radar.

Or maybe without a Kayran to frustrate W3 players, frustration can't drive people to seek out kind souls willing to kill it on their behalf. I wonder how many people came here for that, only to get caught in our web of sparkly gifs and find themselves unable to leave?
 
I haven't been on these forums for as long as some of the others who've posted have been so do correct me, but I could point out that as the company became more popular, people started discussing their products on other social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and so on - and thus CDPR moved to cater to those social media sites. Now we have updates about any and all CDPR products simultaneously on each of these now official platforms - why would anyone visit the forums? I'm already on Twitter or Facebook, I could just click a button and follow all their updates as they happen, why would I take the extra step and log into the forums? As far as strengths would go, hitting up the forums would be for complaints about bugs, maybe the discussion of mods (moderators, not modifications, ofc ) and, rarely, for a chance encounter with a developer who might participate in the community for their own pleasure.

There's a reason why console exclusives exist - to provide a genuine incentive to purchase the console. Unless it's also available on PC ;)

What has this forum got that the other platforms don't have? The old forum system was - well, old - but it was reliable, it was easy on the eyes, it had all the functionality a forumite could ask for and could compete with the familiarity many people have with Reddit's layout and overall UX. The Reddit is well organised and it has the advantage of a preexisting userbase that can just join in a discussion without having to log in or make a new account just to talk about this company's products. Then all this platform really has left is the rare interaction with developers, which no one has seen or heard from for centuries, so no one either expects it or talks about it and therefore that potential attraction turns to dust. I'm not saying that developers should make effort to be present on the forums in order to give incentive for users to be here, I'm saying that's the only thing that this forum had that the other platforms don't. Contrary to Sard's claim - but perhaps supporting Sard's claim - if CDPR want a flourishing forum, then they need to put effort into it. Why would I use their forum when it's less convenient and has no outstanding benefits? On the other hand, if we as a community have died down and dissipated enough to say - well, there's nothing here for me and it's not my responsibility to hold a community together regardless of the platform's sullen existence - then perhaps, quoting my favourite banned forumite, we should just Let The Witcher Forums Die With Dignity.

As for Discord - well I hear in the era before I joined the forums, a group of regular forumites used Skype for IM about topics and they used IRC before that. I think Discord being a vastly superior IM service that's specifically dedicated to gaming - both to catering to the needs of gamers in particular and for the community that's already familiar and drawn to it - overtaking use of these previous IM services is a no brainer. Skype is the worst program most of humanity has ever been cursed with and other gaming IM services have been either costly for no reason or just shit in general. Discord is just good quality service that's catering to a pre-existing IM requirement from our community and happens to also be supporting the community during this time of poor performance on the forum's behalf. I don't think there's really much of a reason why Discord is so good other than what others have already meantioned - it's easy to use, it's got a pretty good friendlist, the developers of the program are loud and proud about their bug fixes and future plans for feature - something perhaps the web development team might want to consider, you can use it for a few different gaming communities with the same account AND use a nickname in each of those communities to be relevant to that franchise or whatever - as I said before, the rise of Discord is a no brainer.

I'd be all about getting this place back to the former glory that it once was, but alas, it's not the only place to go for Witcher related discussions anymore - and, fact is, not even for Gwent or Cyberpunk. So we're in a new era and this should have been anticipated with the famed release of the Witcher 3 and subsequent announcements regarding Gwent and CP. We're on the cusp of The End and if this platform is really valuable for CDPR to get feedback then they'd better invest some sort of energy into it. Otherwise, perhaps simplify the threads for reduced traffic, improve the features that are apparently unfinished and maybe think about what the purpose of the forums will be when CP takes off - will people discuss on Reddit or make new accounts/log into the ones they used to use on these forums? What incentive do GOG users have for coming here and is it worth integrating all three subforums into GOG's forums?
 
GOG forums are in a very sad state functionally. They don't even support image embedding or many other basic forum functions, and GOG are in no rush to upgrade / fix them.
 
Gilrond-i-Virdan;n7820070 said:
GOG forums are in a very sad state functionally. They don't even support image embedding or many other basic forum functions, and GOG are in no rush to upgrade / fix them.

Then maybe it's worth integrating them in here :^)
 
mecha_fish;n7824390 said:
Then maybe it's worth integrating them in here :^)

May be, but GOG is really huge, way larger than scope of CDPR games, so it's probably not the best idea to bring it here. However upgrading forums there to good modern engine is a must.
 
mecha_fish;n7818160 said:
and, fact is, not even for Gwent or Cyberpunk.
Wait. Where else can you go for quality Cyberpunk talk? Especially Cyberpunk gaming? Because I've found other forums and Reddit severely lacking compared to ours - not to mention Reddit's thread mechanism is barely organized at all, with very confusing or vague headers. I also have to log into Reddit, although that's pretty irrelevant in the era of auto-logging. And then there's the ads, which I either block and screw the site owners or leave up and bleah.

Facebook and Twitter are corporate updates only - stuff like news articles might or might not show up there. We have those in the Cpunk FAQ!

Plus our titles and subject discussions are -way- cooler: Interactive living open world (Aka. not movie set open world)
Add diversity in mission/quest design
Martial Arts in 2077.
Will bullet resistance be a thing for melee characters? What do you guys think?
Cyberpunk Soundtrack


Oh and we have a -very- cool Fan Art section. Such goodness.

As for CDPR wanting a flourishing forum, they want a satisfactory forum. They have many, many media platforms.

-I- want a flourishing forum!
 
Hey there, veterans and members of the Bear! We're extremely pleased to announce that the Community forum has at last assumed its proper place among the other sections in the drop-down menu at the top of the page! Hopefully, this will make navigating our Forums just a bit more convenient! Cheers!
 
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Returning back to more casual subjects, like weather. This winter hasn't been fun at all. Weather jumps back and forth between +5 degrees/raining and -15 or -20 degrees. At the moment everything looks like this:


If they can't clean the streets tomorrow, there is going to be pretty bumpy ride to work on Tuesday, when the weather freezes again :D Also I think that these roads flooding with salt water have finally killed my old rusty and trusty car :( When the summer comes, I may have only engine and the seats left :p I should probably start looking for my next car. *snif*
 
Ah, the smell of freshly cut grass... I miss that already :) We still have like 3 months to go before that season starts.
 
This was quite funny picture. That bird had been sitting on top of the tree, and at the same time this picture was taken (not by me), the bird launched to the air and resulted a tennis ball picture :D

 
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