As has mostly been said, part of it is simply cyclical. Even if we had ever single one of the old regulars back, forum activity would still be down because the generation itself has stagnated. Part of it, of course, is that we've become too accustomed to peaceful coexistence to even really get going with the whole 3DS vs Vita thing (having been mentioned before that many Vita fans simply stay in the Vita thread), while another part is structural to the site. This latter part will, of course, only worsen so long as administration keeps neglecting gamrConnect in lieu of the increasingly tbd new site...

Even off topic isn't what it used To be.. We had great off topic only members and now only galaki lives there... But not in the weekend.. They left when off topic was temporaly banned from the hot topics and it never recovered from that blow..

Agreed. Especially with two new handhelds out, I really wish I could see a 3DS and Vita platform breakdown for each region.

I think ioi ultimately underestimated how much these extra features meant to us, and wanted VgchartzPro to have enough value to draw in clients. 

I'm kind of tired of the constant discussion of how much better things used to be though, it's everywhere now. Seems like if things don't change these people will slowly leave again. I'd like to see how this site redesign/split works out, and what features we are left with. 

When I was lurking I remembered it being much better than it is now and when I joined. I don't need to see France or Germany, Europe is good enough for me. The graphs were the things that I'm sad they took away. There was always a graph for each software title and I think there was one for each hardware platform. You couldn't customize them as much as you said but you could do launch aligned. It was way more helpful due to you being able to see it graphically rather than in a boring table. I just wish they would bring that back.

Unfortunately the future doesn't look too bright either. Many of us do not like the complete split of the sites and many think it's annoying that we can't comment on gamrReview with our gamrConnect profiles. People like the tab thing that we've got now, really all there needs to be is VGChartz, gamrReview, and gamrConnect. Get rid of gamrTV and keep the tabs like we have now. It's annoying seeing people talk about the past, I know, but the future is bleak too.

Lets see if I can get this right... if someone has a better memory than me for things please correct me.

 - 2006 and early 2007 the site was still 'Beta'... sales wise we had weekly Japan charts, and monthly Americas charts, there were some older graphing features for hardware that let you have 5 platforms at once I think, and it listed weekly sales in a huge table below them, but without weekly American data or any PAL data the site wasn't gonna be very popular.

 - mid 2007 when the domain name changed from vgcharts.org to vgchartz.com was when the nice blue and white VGC 1.0 came and it was about then (perhaps a few weeks before) when we started getting weekly American charts, I think weekly hardware for the others/PAL region as a whole may have started around now too, so there was actually a global weekly that wasn't just due to the bar graph on the homepage. VGC 1.0 saw some new graphing tools, which were more flexible overall (the only downside over the old ones being limited to 3 platforms as once) Also there was a table creation feature that let you set a start and end date, and it would give you the total sales of any consoles of your choosing in any of the regions for that period (useful to use instead of having to find the weeks you want and do your own subtraction)

 - late 2007 we started getting weekly PAL software charts, I think this was also when we got a breakdown of PAL hardware too (ie able to get weekly data for the regions I listed in my above post).

 - early 2008 PAL hardware data for 6th gen was added, so this was when the hardware portion of sales data on VGC reached it's peak.

 - sometime in mid 2008 the weekly software charts got more functional (being able to sort by publisher/platform), through most of 2008 old software data for PAL regions 7th gen was added, as well as 6th gen software for America.

 - I think it was late 2008 we had a graphing tool for software added, so this was probably the peak for good software data.

 - Then VGC 2.0 happened in mid 2009, pretty much all the graphing tools were taken down for some reason, most of the complaints about the change were about various missing forum features though... admitedly many of those at least were addressed within a month or two. In addition to the graphs I think some of the chart functions dissapeared, such as organising by publisher/platform, we may have been limited to top 100 or top 50 games weekly too, instead of the old top 200.

 - late 2009 a new graph feature was added to game pages, which were kinda slick looking but ultimately far less useful. I don't think they even let you compare different games, instead they just showed sales from launch in each of the 3 major regions. (Americas/Japan and Others)

 - mid 2010 and VGC 3.0 arrive, I think we may have lost the table creator at this point, tbh I had stopped checking most of the stuff by now, but sometime between the end of VGC 2.0 and November 2011 we lost the table creator, the others region hardware breakdown and the graph feature (the less useful one) on game pages was taken out.

 - Then November 2011 saw some more changes, now we only get the top 30 game sales by region (but rankings down to top 100), though we do have the addition of UK/FR/GE software sales... USA charts have replaced Americas, which is both a good and bad thing, ther was call to split up the Americas region back in 2007 so we could more easily compare with NPD charts, but that was meant to be a region split more akin to what we had for PAL regions (so main software for Americas, but aldo hardware breakdown for USA/Canada/Latin America or something like that)

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In total then, from the sales info heyday we have gained:
 - USA software and hardware, UK software, France software, Germany software.
 - Tie ratio chart

Everything else I mentioned we have lost.

That is also because vgchartz can't get the numbers right. It was fine in 2008 because it looked like Vgchartz was making progression but after so many threads (like NPD/official shipments/Japan preview W_W.) were Vgchartz ended up totally wrong it is just no fun anymore to discuss sales. Making a thread about sales to point something out and then adjustments happen and your thread makes you like an idiot also scared some away..

The software graph you mentioned may be the one I mentioned in my above post... it was on a game page in the database and showed the game's cumulative sales from launch, it had a zoom feature which was quite useful, and a compare feature which let you drag a dotted line version of a graph section to compare it with another section... the compare feature was useless though because the graphs could only show cumulative sales.

I am pretty sure there hasn't been a graph tool for hardware (apart from the main bar chart on the front page) since VGC 1.0, so if you have seen one you must have visited the site back in early 2009.

I think someone said something similar in another thread a few weeks back: I want the charts and sales tools from VGC 1.0, the game database functionality from VGC 2.0 and the forum functionality/social networking features from VGC 3.0.

Put me in the "two lazy to do a statistical term paper for a forum post" group.

I mean even if someone provides the data for two or three similar games, I can't look for other similar games that might have had different outcomes.