77
"The launcher sucks, let's call it what it is," Epic Game Store boss [Steven Allison] says, promising a year of big improvements to speed, new "forum-type" social features, more (archive.is)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
46 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 12 points 9 months ago (7 children)

They took a look at Steam and decided the forums were the big thing missing? The community reviews of games are on some occasion useful, and the steam workshop is great, but the actual forum is just about the most useless feature of Steam I can think of. There are so many places on the Internet to talk about games, chat with people while playing games, post about games, etc.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    To be honest, I think the forums in Steam are a good addition, and worth having it. And in my opinion every game store should have such a community feature builtin.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    My experience has been far less valuable. The steam forums are typically very poorly moderated, and bigotry runs wild in basically all of them.

    It's not inherent to Steam or forums as a concept, but unless the people running it take care to invest in resources for proper moderation, forums will just naturally trend towards toxic behaviour because it's easier to be an asshole and harass good people out than it is to do the opposite.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    So basically like any other forum. At least there is not much over moderation compared to Reddit or worse, Discord in example. I am reporting posts and comments all the time, and get messages from time to time that action has been done. I can see the accounts being banned (public info) and comments or posts being removed. But usually I am only active in forums with lot of activity, so not sure how this compares to less active communities. There is a screenshot of a confirmation reporting a discussion post:

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    The more active forums are where most of the problems are. It's easy to moderate slower smaller discussions, but where Steam really lacks is in those more active forums where basically any game that has any real hype around it will turn into an absolute shitshow, especially if topics like lgbt people or women come up, or if the game happens to attract a really horny incel fandom.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    It's not useless for things like walkthroughs and fixing common issues.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    The walkthroughs are great for niche games that don't have many players, true. But at the same time, it's not like Steam's walkthroughs are the only ones or best ones on the Internet. Any game that has enough interest for people to make walkthroughs for are big enough to have a fanbase that maintains a wiki, or a subreddit, or a discord, or some other place where you can exchange the same info. Hell, you could even stay logged into your Steam account in the browser and just look at guides that way, while playing the game itself in another window.

    They're not useless, but if I were to think of the things that keep me using Steam as opposed to using a new launcher (or alternatively, the one thing a new launcher needs to get me to hop over from steam), walkthroughs aren't really high priority imo.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent