Judgement Poll - The Final RPG vs cRPG Forum Discussion

Well, you had it changed from goldbox classics | everything else into PC RPGs | Console RPGs | Weaboo shit. At most you're looking at a non weaboo | weaboo split since a majority seems to want to keep the japcrap forum seperate.

But at any rate it's not my decision and I'm pretty content with the current split

Many people make the mistake of thinking polls should tell you what to do. Polls are really only an indication as to how many people are yet to be won over - or how many people care and how much they care about it. When we first polled on this issue, over 70% of people wanted to keep the single forum. With the new proposal, that dropped 12%. But you'll also note that the first half of this thread is still people complaining about "what defines Classic".

So we learned that "Classic" vs "non-Classic" was not the way to go.

However, we can also see that about half as many people voted for Console vs PC split as voted to keep everything in one forum. Of course it's not a majority, but it shows the idea had a fair amount of support - and was much better defined than "Classic" vs "non-Classic". We also had a small number of people who wanted to keep some sort of a split, around 80 votes for a split vs 110 for a single forum.

So we learned that the idea of a split has a reasonable level of popular support.

We can also see that most people ignored the jRPG option. While a majority voted in favour to keep it, most really don't care. So we learned that most people don't care about the jRPG forum, but if pushed, some would rather keep it around. And if the rest don't really care, then they're mostly indifferent to whatever happens.

The discussion in this thread also virtually stopped dead the minute I made the actual change to "Console vs PC" (ignoring of course, those who still continued to raise "Classic" as an issue). From that, we can infer that most, while they care, aren't so up in arms that they immediately revolted. From the discussion in this thread we can also see that most people raise legitimate concerns around how a split would work, whether it would be confusing and what game goes where - that most complaints against the split are of the "it wouldn't work" nature, rather than being "it's just a bad idea". That, coupled with the support, warrants a trial. That way we can see whether those concerns are born out, or whether - after some initial teething issues - things settle down.

Now - it's still early days - but since I posted yesterday saying we'd keep the current layout, the replies have been "cRPG is now readable", "Not too bad", balanced with a handful of complaints and some mostly irrelevant comments. IE: It didn't start World War III, nor spawn a myriad of "merge the forums back!" topics.

If we read the forums themselves, we can see that the jRPG forum is getting some activity - despite complaints it would be dead. And we have people who genuinely seem happy to have the forum - both those who wish to discuss the games they like, and others who want to avoid them. We can also see that the cRPG and Console forums are also working reasonably well. Again, it's still early days but it's failed to create an overwhelming protest movement. With most either accepting inevitability or learning to adjust.

At this stage, I'm happy to let things sit. And I'm confident that if I ran a poll in a month or so's time asking whether to merge or keep the split, that the results would be a lot closer to 50/50 - possibly with a higher number of people not caring and even a slight victory for the split. The "Classic" voters and "some other split" would likely merge in favour of "cRPG vs console", some of those who voted "keep it as one" may have been won over (because they voted back when the forums were still split "Classic vs non-Classic") and more people would be indifferent because after seeing it in action, it doesn't really matter to them now. IE: I doubt there's going to be an increase in the number of people who want to re-merge everything.

... unless of course, we have some major fuck-up, with ongoing confusion about what goes where.

Your mistake is to assume the poll is a valid representation of all those who read and post in the forums in question, and whether or not that aligns with the values the staff see and the direction they'd like to see the site take. We have 800 active members visiting every day, and around 3,000 - 13,000 guests - depending on how you run the numbers. And the poll is self-selecting (you have to care about it enough and think to visit Site Feedback to comment on it).

In other words: The poll isn't the be all and end all of everyone's opinion. Not saying it shouldn't be taken into consideration mind you, just saying it would be wrong to simply go "well the poll says that, so that's what we'll do". Someone is also always going to be upset, no matter what decision is made. If I took the 58% for example and merged everything, I'd have 42% of the forum disagreeing with that decision. A number that is close enough to be able to say "half the forum".

No, I'm saying 110 people voted to merge everything and then didn't bother voting specifically for the "ditch the jRPG forum" option - which was the whole point the poll was multiple choice. Might've been better if I'd just added more options that allowed that vote to be expressed, but I thought I'd try this multi-vote thing.

All of which I addressed with the comment "most complaints against the split are of the 'it wouldn't work' nature".

Re: what made said about "maybe people just can't be arsed to continue arguing about it because it's obvious you're going to ignore them and do whatever you want anyway?", I covered with my comments about how much people cared. Think of it this way: I have someone who really, really, really wants a donut. And I have someone who's fighting against that person getting a donut. I say "I'm thinking of giving him a donut". The person who's against this, at that point, gives up and goes home. Question: How much did they really care?

Seriously, the biggest complaint is "I have to browse two forums now". Coming from people who already have many thousands of posts across multiple forums.

There's a difference between @Turjan's point as to what this split is trying to accomplish, vs "people will get confused". Turjan raises a valid point (the answer to which is: to encourage discussion about specific types of games and have those discussions in their own forums, so they can be easily located by people who are particularly interested in them - without having to go to page 2 or try and find it in walls of new topics), where-as "it won't work" is purely speculative.

What happens if it does work? That argument completely disappears.

Taking your "browsing multiple forums is bad!" schtick to the nth degree - I could simply merge all threads into a single forum. But that would suck, wouldn't it? Why? Because you would have to skip over all that politics bullshit you don't want to read, the forum would move too fast and the topics you want to read would be buried underneath the avalanche of all the inane shit.

So I have a choice: I have people who want to completely ignore that content and skip over it - and others who want to read all of it. Well, guess what? With a forum split, the people who want to read all of it can still read all of it. They are virtually unaffected by this split, other than the mild inconvenience of clicking open another tab (Like, no really. Are you seriously complaining about the effort required to click another tab? How on earth do you people tolerate reading the news forum? Do you want news to just be posted into a single merged RPG forum in the future?) - and that's assuming they don't use the "What's New" and the "Watched Forums" feature - both of which combine multiple forums into one easily readable list and achieve almost precisely what you want.

... And now, people who just want cRPG's can get just those. Again, I have two user groups. One of which has multiple features at their disposal to overcome their major complaint ("I have to open another forum!"), while another user group had no such option. They now have that option, without any major inconvenience to the other group. Now, this is a bad thing because...?

These two paragraphs seem to contradict each other.

I meant their major complaint that "it won't work" was incorrect - and that it does seem to actually be working.

See above.