Go check out the Unreal World forum. Lack of toxicity is stifling.
True enough. If I interpret what I saw there correctly, being so nice and supportive that it prevents one from saying things straight is the problem you refer to. But I'm pretty sure it's not an issue in our case.
Still, I'm not sure I'd say it was lack of toxicity alone. Toxicity is about being confrontational in a hostile, unconstructive way, wouldn't you agree?
We can have conflict of opinions without toxicity, if members of the community trust each other not to dismiss the other person's opinion out of hand, and thus have no need for backing their words with emotional appeal and hostility.
Just compare a political thread in Bay 12's General Discussions, and an argument somewhere on 4chan's /pol/.
Observe the prevalence of "I think" and questions on Bay 12, the way most things stated directly are things that the post's author is sure he can back up if questioned. Note the way attempts to be confrontational are met calmly and often disarmed.
Observe the abundance of declarative statements, unnecessary expletives, and emotionally charged sentences on 4chan. In particular, note how many people respond to others with an openly dismissive attitude - not even trying to think how to disprove the other person's opinion, but simply
stating that it is laughable, usually with an image macro instead of words.
Threads in both communities have their share of canned thoughts - I have yet to see a political discussion without such things - but the
language of those discussions is rather telling.
I'm not surprised that a lot of people didn't like the dashing of any hopes for any more Fallout RPG's when the license was taken by the Oblivion with Guns FPS (and no, I've never been to that forum).
It's a Russian forum, so I'm pretty sure no one here happened to visit it, let alone in its heyday. I wish I could use English forums as an example, but NMA was pretty low-quality by comparison, so it didn't change much when Bethesda's games came out.
And I'm pretty sure simple disillusionment with the third game wasn't the reason they left. It was a lively forum, pretty big by Russian standards. Subforums related to the first two Fallouts, other Avellone-made games, and general discussions were quite active at the time, and stayed active after F3 came out; it's just that their overall
atmosphere changed.
Before, it was a few dozen people calmly discussing their stuff in a constructive manner, many, though not all, posts showing real brainwork behind them.
Then new members started jumping in on topics, derailing threads with clueless comments, and other new members answered them with equal cluelessness.
Open trolling was absent, as outright hostility was heavily discouraged by the moderators, but not veiled insults or superficiality: banning people for being passive-aggressive or for stupidity alone would be too elitist even for them.
At first, it seemed like things were going on pretty well, but over time, superficial posts got more and more frequent, and newcomers stopped even noticing they could have put more work into stating their opinions.
The old atmosphere used to make people notice their inadequacy, make them
want to grow above what they were, to match the best that community could offer - and that atmosphere of perfectionism was gone. Why think your words through if people answering you will not even notice you putting in the effort?
It wasn't all bad, of course, and there were a lot of impressive people among the newcomers, but topics were still flooded with superficial or asinine posts. It clashed with the calm, civilized way things used to be.
Add the obligatory nostalgia, to which few are immune, and within a year you get many people feeling disgusted and losing interest in the forums.
All things taken together, I believe that disappointment was not with that abomination by Bethesda - they'd have left immediately had that been the case - but with what has become of the community.
Now that I look at the case I brought up more closely, I have to admit I'm probably being overly pessimistic in trying to apply it to this forum.
The Fallout forum I mentioned was a bit of an extreme example: what you get when a small insular community dedicated to very old, somewhat intellectual games gets drowned in fans of an AAA shooter. There will most likely be no such whiplash when Dwarf Fortress gets uploaded on Steam: it's still the same game, with the same genre and learning curve.
So... yeah. Disregard the grim prophecies above, I wasn't looking at the whole picture.
