Actually, I agree with man-bear on one point, Tor. Beef up the mod team a user or two to compensate for Machina, but not just anyone. Seek older moderators that know the ropes.

Any of the current mod would be a good choice!

I think we currently have the best mod team this site has ever had.

I agree with some of the above. A couple more mods would do nicely. Assuming its an un-payed position, it shouldnt be too much trouble to find a couple of members willing.

You see, I'm in that difficult situation where I joined in-between where the site was 'awesome' and where all the 'new-users' are, so I'm sorta in the middle. And yes, the site HAS changed, and it's definitely changed for the worse when it comes to sales data and analysis (tracking MHTri in Japan every week, seeing it go from 14 to 11 to 13 units each week etc. :D), which is a shame (it's why I joined the site).

HOWEVER, the community is certainly bigger, and many new users have taken up the slack, like you, Spurg, NinPie etc.., so I wouldn't say the community is 'worse', as it were. Just...different.

But it is annoying with all the 'Top X of all time elimination threads!', as it were. It seems to be much less about gaming and sales, far more about TV and sport. 

I've looked at a lot of threads from 2007-2008 and honestly I don't think there much of a difference in quality. Besides, quality is subjective anyway.

It probably was more interesting then because the generation was fresh compared to now, but don't blame the users.

What I don't like about these threads though is that they don't favor discussion at all which is what a forum is all about. It's just people voting up their favorite and voting down the one they see as their biggest competition making the results of those thread laughable at best.

A thread about the best developpers of all-time would be very interesting with people debating on what grounds they are evaluating quality, what makes them respect certain developpers more than others, instead you get a fanboy war where devs like Naughty Dog and Nintendo are taken out first.

Exactly. And those rules are NOT concrete, I hope...

They don't encourage discussion. It's more spam than anything really, it would seem nowadays. I hope it's more of a fad than anything...time will tell.

Unfortunately, we can't snap our fingers and bring them back. All except rocketpig have been away from the site for years now, and rocketpig is far less active than before.

We've already had one minor miracle in the return of Montana, but I don't think we can expect that again. I wonder if there are any other ex-mods around and still active on the site

mm and Maxwell silly.