I've been meaning to post for a qhile and haven't becauseI have other things to do and feel I end up wasting hours of my life on an epic rant, but the above post by Andy has prompted me to at least say something now rather than procrastinating further.
A bit of history, I arrived at B3D looking for technical talk about the consoles, particularly what PS2 could and couldn't do with its design and whether its programmability resulted in good advantages over XB in some cases. I had been across several gaming forums populated by dicks who'd never have a rational discussion and just line up on either side of the XB or PS battlelines to be stupid against each other. I chanced across B3D and could actually talk about the tech, and found a place where people weren't here just to champion their prefered CE device. That's why I'm here, and IMO why this place exists.
I also look as this place offering something on an academic level as it were. As Andy says, an open forum where there's talking with business rivals in a free arena where it's all about ideas, not affiliations. Things like the Raytracing debate are constructive and useful. Threads may not answer questions, but they can inspire new ways of thinking or new avenues of exploration. this has to be encouraged.
Sadly this cannot exist in an environment where the layman can mess up discussions, and that's all too often what happens. The very environment of the Console boards is antagonistic. There's an underlying philosophy (common to the internet) that you have to prove someone wrong which leads to dead end, pointless debates, but it's worsened in the console space by "wrongness" being a subjective appreciation for the enemy hardware. This then colours every debate. I want to talk about programmable graphics hardware, and the interpretation turns to whether Cell was a good business choice for PS3, or if Cell+RSX is better than Xenos. Even proper posters like Joker are automatically steered onto these same, tired ways discussions because that's the base level of interpretation embued by a base level of behaviour of posters. So we get sitatuations like this :
Also let me note that I'm sorta scared of the console forums, or more-so the people and... uhh... "tone" of the discussions there
I'd love to chat about stuff like how tech between PC/360/PS3 compares for rendering in various situations, but it's hard to keep that separate from the unabashed platform fanboy-ism. If it's not possible to keep those two separate, then please leave the forums separate too.
Which is exactly the opposite of what we want. This means the board doesn't belong to the engineers and intellectuals with the layman free to peruse, but it belongs to the layman with the academics wanting to fit in every now and then, but unable to.
I have long held the view that the board should be open, and we have on rare ocassions accepted in someone with a...lively attitude, who has learnt to be more objective and discuss things with less platform interest. There have also been times where a somewhat silly idea has lead to useful remarks from industry insiders. But in all honesty those situations are rare, and when a new voice starts posting there's a trepidation that they'll be making a lot of noise leading to a lot of nonsense. There's also a sad reality, though the likes of MfA feel otherwise, that without the constant pruning and moderation it'd collapse into the sort of mess of everywhere else. And the cost of maintaining the boards erks me, because it means it's a false community that doesn't sustain itself. See the KZ3 thread, where plenty of sane posters lost it and started posting utter crap of the worst kind. People will get dragged down to a lower standard if the higher standards aren't maintained, and they can only be maintained in a public forum by serious moderation.
I don't think you can mix the professionals with the layman. I think what's needed, somehow, is perhaps a subforum where it is professionals and professionally minded people only. I would keep the existing forums, but from there, whether by invitation or application, posters can gain a voice in the professional discussions. These professional fora won't need much moderation, and we can lose the subjectivity and keep moderation pretty objective, with a minimum number of absolute rules leading promptly to exile from these private forums. That would ensure everyone there posting is objective and not contributing to crap, which in turn should help attract more professional contributions, which would create more useful info to report back to the public forums and hopefully attract more technically minded, interested industry-outsiders to join and add a healthy public curiousity into the private forum.
That's an idea anyhow. Dunno how it could be maintained, or implemented. All I can say with confidence is that as long as the console discussion is open completely to the public, it will never improve beyond its current standard of discourse. Which is still better than the rest of the internet, but far short of what I feel B3D should be aiming for.
