Great to see, because about 6 months ago it wasn't as lively as it is now it seems. What changed?
I can't speak for everyone, but for me, it was all of the discourse surrounding the George Floyd protests that resulted in me spending less time on there and lurking over here again. Just a lot of toxicity being spewed on there that I don't condone, and the worst of it was coming from some of the Administrators. Everyone on there is praising the shit they're saying, and I'm thinking "wait...what?" And on the gaming side,
everything became about how much virtue signaling you could do. It was hard to find any real reason to post on there anymore. Nobody really seemed to care about anybody else's thoughts about video games, it was what game/company can we be mad at the most today. The threads which weren't outrage-driven were a lot of the same milquetoast topics over and over (i.e. "The main character from the last game you played is now your dog") and there's almost no user engagement because everyone is afraid of upsetting someone.
Yes, Era has had these problems for a while now, but it really became ever-present this spring/summer. It was unavoidable. Sony would virtue signal on Twitter, and you'd get hundreds of "Thank you Sony!" posts followed by hundreds of posts complaining that Nintendo hadn't virtue signaled yet. Like, what the fuck are we even doing? The number of people I put on ignore skyrocketed, and it turns out there -is- a limit! At a certain point, the shit just couldn't be contained anymore. I was seeing people getting severe bans for things I didn't think should be even remotely bannable, while other people posting some of the most vile shit got a free pass because they have the "right" views. The time I was spending on there was not discussing games, but instead just shaking my head.
The last straw, as it were, was that most-recent Playstation event where Hogwarts was showcased. I have no interest in Harry Potter, never saw any of the movies or read any of the books, but I thought the game they showed looked surprisingly up-my-alley. I open the thread on Era, and to my bemusement it's hundreds of "Fuck this game" over and over. Honestly, the Rowling connection never even crossed my mind as I was watching that show (And it clearly never crossed Sony's mind either, but because they're "liked" by ResetEra that never gets brought up!). A lot of that same vitriol has carried over to CDPR and that's brought us to where we are now.
I can't understand wanting to keep coming back to a place that miserable, day after day. Especially as someone that the forum clearly doesn't want posting on there (i.e. white male who wants to talk about games on the gaming forum). Enough was enough.
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