The VGC 3.0 Complaint/Suggestion Thread

[ameratsu]

makingmusic476 said:

• Removal of Hot Topics.  Hot Topics made it incredibly easy to jump around between active threads in all forums.  Having to manually check each forum makes things more complicated, and one of the reasons I love it here is because it's so much easier to find relevant information than on other forums.  Splitting up the forums even further (which if I recall is being planned) will only make finding interesting topics even more troublesome.
  
  I still stand behind the idea of condensing our forums into only five categories: Sales, Gaming, Online, Website, and Off Topic, with a sixth Hot Topics section that combines them all for those so inclined.  I think this would both improve discussion and decrease the group mentality that arises when you split games and gamers into specific sections.  I honestly don't think we'd have silly threads like "Join the Sony Army!" springing up if we didn't have a dedicated Sony section, nor would we have trolls/fanboys joining up specifically to join those groups (which does happen).

Alright MM has a lot of good points here, but this is the most important one.

Dividing users into categories (sony,nintendo,microsoft,pc) makes the problem of trolling worse. People should be invited to participate on all forums in a way they see fit. Hot topics allowed people to do this, and individually accessing each forum is cumbersome and unnecessary. Remember, you want more than just supposed "Wii fans" posting about Nintendo issues. Compartmentalizing the forumbase even further by adding more forums (or so I've heard) will make the site even harder to navigate and inhibit meaningful discussion. Less forums makes more sense than more forums. 

My last point is that the social networking rubbish implemented in this version highlights what I said in February about VGChartz "becoming more and more of a generic, dime a dozen gaming site". The site is growing, I respect that, but in the process it has become a site that keeps going in a direction I don't agree with. I don't want to "connect" with gamers, I just want to post and read about video games with fellow enthusiasts. 

A low-bandwidth/mobile version of the site would also be a very good addition. Some of us with older PCs/mobile phones find it hard to navigate pages with video ads and poor site design.