You guys are just saying this based on darth's recent absence

Pretty much correct, this... aside from the 2.0 comment, 2.0 was the absolute zenith of this community IMO.

Nothing can be really done aside from letting it fix/break itself - you can't exactly nurture better threads (even if you can lock all the stupid shit like game x vs game y, metacritic discussions, any ThePS3News thread etc) - you can only hope for members making it more attractive. The design could be fixed and more streamlined, but it still wouldn't come close to solving your problem, since it truly is in the users.

That's one long post

The bolded resonates with me extremely. I also think the site is just way too complicated for its own good. The blue and white days everything was simplified and interesting...now it's kind of a chore to navigate, add in the fact that the data has become restricted to non-paying memebers and you have a problem

Yeah I've been really active in bursts on this site. I'll post like crazy for a couple months then lay low for a couple then start up again.

But now I'm really starting to lose interest. Mostly because I'm realizing more and more I hate the "Core" gamer community. Its filled with annoying, self-righteous, overly biased, cry baby nerds. I mean seriously I play games hours a day and sit on gameing forums and talk games but I still have a great personal life and have zero desire to nerd out and troll other games and consoles just because I have nothing better to do, but there's geeks all over the place who do that.

I'm tired of seeing exlcuisve "list wars", I'm tired of 360 and PS3 fanboys arguing a game on a console is superior because its pushes a TINY bit more pixels on screen or because it looks 1% better than a different game. I'm tired of seeing people trashing the Kinect and anything "casual" or not designed specifically for their basement dwelling lives. Its just weird, annoying, and gets in the way of any real conversation. The average gamer is nothing like what you see on the internet, trust me I know. I sell them consoles and games all day every day and many of them are pretty fun to be around but the internet is just filled with all these obsessive gamers who think everything should cater to them and anything that doesn't must be TEH SUCKZZZZ. There's still some on here who'se company I enjoy, but I'm really growing tired of a lot of this crap.

I agree with both posts. This is exactly why the forum is going downhill. I started to visit this forum cause of the sales charts and stayed because of the users. Both things are worse now. No charts, no controversy, no funny or even interesting posters, like Dmeister, Soriku and others. Now I visit just to peek at the few numbers left. Pity.

1. This site has been extremely sluggish, cluttered, and difficult to use since 3.0. There have been efforts to improve this, but for every step forward there are two steps back. It just isn't a nice site to browse. Badges? Points and ranking? Who cares about this stuff? Every other site that I visit on a regular basis has a cleaner design than VGC.

2. The site was fractured in 4.0. The forum, game database, and sales data used to be nicely and easily tied together. Now everything is buried in menus and links to other sub-sites.

3. I think VGC lost focus on what it wanted to be. It started as a site where sales data could be posted, analyzed, and stored for posterity. It was on track to becoming the premiere site for discussing the business of video games. When VGC started pushing to cover every aspect of gaming news, providing reviews, screenshots and trailers, the business and sales focus started to suffer.

One by one, the people who were interested in the business of video games just left. They'd been cut off from the interesting data, frustrated with the clumsy website, and alienated by a community that cared less and less about the business of games. Those were the people who made interesting posts on the VGC forums.

Never thought I'd see the day where Soriku wasn't apart of the VGC community

I'd post more if people paid more attention to me

I agree. VGChartz as a whole has gone downhill over the last Year and 1/2.

We lost a whole bunch of the sales data, which was pretty much the core of the site. We're no longer allowed to actually comment on the sales charts. This was a great thing to have. We don't have the prediction league anymore. Recently, sales data has been pretty poor in terms of accuracy.

3DS has lauched, and it's been a huge failure so far. Wii is failing, so a whole bunch of the Nintendo fans who were here basically aren't interested anymore. Wii U looks to be going the Gamecube route too, so there isn't really much excitement over that.

The site has way too many PlayStation fans when compared to Xbox fans. Xbox fans are outnumbered and the forums clearly show this. It's a hostile environment for any new members who join and they wont really want to stick around. This one's been this way since I joined though...

Thankfully, the mod team has been replaced. The old mod team, in fairness, was shit. Certain members were far too biased towards certain things and were out to get certain people. It's a turn off for newer members when they see constant complaints about it. Why would you want to join a community moderated by fanboys?

The forums as you said are too complicated. We don't need so many different boards. Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, Sales, PC/Mobile, Off topic. There. We need no more, IMO.

Gamrfeed is terrible. 99% of the news is beyond late and the editorials tend to be filled with crap. The sales articles we get are pretty good. Seece, trunkswd and Source all do a pretty good job.
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I've been close to leaving a couple of times really....
The quality of dicussion has greatly decreased.
Some of the best members on the site have left.
You can't have a negative opinion on something without 5 people jumping on you for it.
No videogames that get me really excited are close to releasing.

NeoGAF's forums make ours look pathetic to be honest.