What do you like about Era?

  • The community

    Votes: 323 31.4%
  • The purple colour scheme

    Votes: 325 31.6%
  • The user oni-link

    Votes: 58 5.6%
  • Giftbot

    Votes: 78 7.6%
  • When the Era logo changes sometimes

    Votes: 206 20.0%
  • Voting for Thor 2: The Dark world, in polls

    Votes: 482 46.8%
  • Other (Leave a comment)

    Votes: 184 17.9%

  • Total voters
    1,030

oni-link

tag reference no one gets
Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,714
UK
There seems to be quite a lot of negativity around things of late, so I thought it might be fun to discuss the things we like about this place

For me, I just really like this community. There are so many posters with a ton of knowledge on so many gaming related subjects. I can make (and i do make) LTTP threads on games decades old and there will always be someone popping in with a huge post on how much they love the game and offering me tips and advice

The Retro Pi thread was a ton of help when I set up my Pi, and the Fire Emblem and FF community threads were a ton of help when I played a few of the older games in those series'

Both the Xbox and EU PSN threads are super helpful and full of some of my favourite posters, always willing to help and offer advice on good deals and hidden gems

We also have a ton of really fun and funny posters, and staff that try their best to keep the assholes and bigots at bay, and I really appreciate that

What do you all like about this place, and what keeps you posting here?

Edit: Added a poll for fun
 
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AshenOne

Banned
Feb 21, 2018
6,561
Pakistan
No matter what.. as long as the discourse quality remains as it is and doesn't go so much down like how the old site is as of right now.. i'll stay cause I only visit this place for its 24/7 gaming news! For communities for now iam on Discord.
 

AuthenticM

Son Altesse Sérénissime
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
32,806
it's the best news aggregator there is, and the discussion of video games in here, despite the occasional negativity and shitposting, is much better than anywhere else I've seen.
 
OP
OP
oni-link

oni-link

tag reference no one gets
Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,714
UK
making shitty first posts
you-you-de-niro.gif
 

Atom

Member
Jul 25, 2021
13,532
For me, I just really like this community. There are so many posters with a ton of knowledge on so many gaming related subjects. I can make (and i do make) LTTP threads on games decades old and there will always be someone popping in with a huge post on how much they love the game and offering me tips and advice

So much this. Also it's just a good collection of news and advice, and it's more inclusive than most other places. And by and large most people posting seem to have good intentions and not be active trolls.
 

Cenauru

Dragon Girl Supremacy
Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,178
It's a forum that's not a shitty rightwing hellhole with moderation that's too spineless to even keep nazis out. Instead ERA is a pretty inclusive place.

Kinda makes it great by default, plus there's some cool people here, actually makes it feel like a community.
 

AuthenticM

Son Altesse Sérénissime
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
32,806
like seriously, I was visiting reddit on my breaks at work before WFH, because era was blocked there, and jesus christ is the level of discourse there bottom of the barrel. Brain-dead shit and memes everywhere. And that's not even mentioning the casual bigotry.
 

UraMallas

Member
Nov 1, 2017
22,164
United States
I like how busy the gaming side is. Lots of replies and threads per hour/day. Always something new to see.

I like the Xbox community on here. It's my main reason I stuck around in the early days and our community has really grown. We can have a lot of good discussion with so many people from around the world showing up in there. Everything from acquisitions to favorite studios to problems with localization and what Xbox needs to get better. Always lively.

I like how there is space on this forum for people to be themselves more than in real life. I'm a 38 yo cis straight white male and I didn't see a lot of other perspectives in real life because I don't think people really open up to me irl that aren't also straight white people. I can lurk on here in the Off Topic but also even in Gaming and gain a lot of perspective about current events and my favorite hobby. The old site helped a lot with this as well until things went south but this site has continued to help me grow in that aspect.
 

fracas

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,027
It's not perfect by any means but this place offers the best combination of inclusion, size, and accessibility anywhere I've seen
 

Finale Fireworker

Love each other or die trying.
Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,325
United States
It is the only space on the entire internet that I regularly use that makes any attempt whatsoever to moderate its users.

The internet is a hellscape whose environment is actively detrimental to conversation and human wellness. The same is true for this forum. However at least I don't have to contend with phrenologists and TERFs with Pepe avatars calling me a f*ggot. I'll take it.
 

Izanagi89

"This guy are sick" and Corrupted by Vengeance
Member
Oct 27, 2017
16,739
It's always very active and probably one of the best places to get gaming news from
 

touchfuzzy

Banned
Jul 27, 2019
1,706
Mostly just for news, I find the actual discussion secondary as threads move too fast and there's too many people for any meaningful relationships or discourse
 

Euler007

Member
Jan 10, 2018
5,098
OT threads are great for discussing games you are into, especially in launch weeks, that's the best the site has to offer. The console specific threads are great when they are on topic and not taking shots at other consoles. Also breaking news and insider info but tbh it's not as great at it as the old place was five years ago before the sundering. Not too keen on the energy some people have to do extensive write-ups trying to prove some games you love suck (like HZD and FF7R for instance), and some crowds are way too loud (like the Smash crowd).
 

kamineko

Linked the Fire
Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,890
Accardi-by-the-Sea
strict moderation, news aggregation

i've probably gotten less than 100 replies over 5.1K posts, so it isn't engagement

love some of y'all anyways
 

--R

Being sued right now, please help me find a lawyer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,855
I'm just here to post the news, tbh. My interaction with communities is mostly focused on Discord nowadays.
 

Deleted member 17210

User-requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
11,569
It's great for quick news on modern games. For other stuff... this isn't the thread for negativity so I will refrain.
 

Kadzork

Has got mad skills!!
Member
Oct 27, 2017
20,643
News & a wide variety of opinions and impressions that help influence my own purchases.
 

erikNORML

Member
Oct 30, 2017
1,786
It's the only gaming forum I've ever found that doesn't just feel like some comment thread on Parler.
 
OP
OP
oni-link

oni-link

tag reference no one gets
Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,714
UK
strict moderation, news aggregation

i've probably gotten less than 100 replies over 5.1K posts, so it isn't engagement

love some of y'all anyways

Have 101, on me

I make a lot of threads (no idea how many, but I'm guessing it must be in the 100s) so I tend to get a lot of replies just from being the OP

That said, I've also made some bad threads in my time and that's when the alert counter becomes a menace heh
 

Veelk

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,062
Sometimes, very occasionally, the community lives up to the compassion part of its values.
 

Mudo

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,132
Tennessee
It's not perfect by any means but this place offers the best combination of inclusion, size, and accessibility anywhere I've seen

This. While issues have cropped up here over the years, there simply isn't another community even close to this size, that has all of this. I really hope the recent negativity and issues get sorted because I don't think my heart can take another event like what bore ERA 4 years ago.
 

Musubi

Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth
Member
Oct 25, 2017
25,519
Its one of the few gaming focused communities that aren't just riddled with absolute assholes and helps serve as a fairly decent feed for gaming related news.
 

The Albatross

Member
Oct 25, 2017
40,783
I really like having well thought out, informed discussions about videogames that don't devolve into instant pedantry. Sure, some threads do, particularly around sales success of one company or another, or performance related threads, but for the most part, the discussions can be good and I think most people treat each other in good faith when discussing something earnestly.

Occasionally you get really well thought out, informed discussions about aspects of videogames that, IMO, you just can't get in other places. Twitter and Discord just aren't hospitable to discussions around videogames, everything is an argument that has to be won or lost, to prove your meddle, or just fill up a chat room with irreverent shit, quick reactions, no thought and back and forth.

Compared to a site like Reddit, Reddit suffers from a syndrome of being too specific or too general, and there's not a happy medium of generality and specificity which gaming communities like Era have and always have had. For instance, go to any sub reddit about a game, say, r/Madden, the entire community fucking hates Madden, the only posts that move up the ladder are shitposts dunking on the game. And, yes, Madden deserves to get dunked on more often than not, but it shouldn't exclusively be posts dunking on the game. It's like what a horrible way to go through life posting in a community about something that everybody exclusively hates. If there's a thread like, "What's your strategy with scouting?" or something, the posts that elevate up are the ones that say "None, the feature is broken and the game fucking sucks," or something. This is the case with almost every subreddit for a game, they virtually all fucking hate the game. r/RedDeadRedemption isn't like that and there's some good content on there sometimes, but most of the content that elevates up is memes and community inside jokes... "Lumbago!" or "Tahiti!" or "We just need more money!" posts. And those have levity from time to time, but are a bummer when you want to discuss something, and Reddit rewards the quick hitting, lowest common denominator of shit to move up the ladder. Reddit suffers for being too specific with posts like this, and you could never really have a nuanced discussion about a game in a subreddit for that game, especially if the discussion tries to broaden out to compare it to another game.

And then, Reddit is too general a lot of the time, and so more general forums like r/playstation or r/xbox are, seemingly, only console wars or only threads promoting one platform with the implied criticism of another. You can't actually go onto r/playstation and ask, "Hmm, should I get Deathloop for PS5 today or wait for the GamePass version in a year?" because there's just an obvious assumption by the community that you're trying to troll or shitpost. There are some subreddits where interesting game discussion can be had, like r/truegaming, but it's a very narrow window of things that you can discuss, and r/gaming is just shit.

So I really like that this community is a balance of gaming discussion. Sure, the community might favor one platform for a while, or have a zeitgeist or direction, or osmething, and I really miss that many games have no presence on this site at all (Madden or other sports games, though I think that's a reflection of the dire state of sim sports videogames), but I generally like that I can be exposed to a lot of games that I just wouldn't be exposed to at all because they'd never bump up my radar. I might not be into Cyberpunk or Street Fighter, or a bunch of series/genres that I don't follow, but I can tell when a new game is hot or a new game is shitty by the general reaction of the community to it, without having to go to a subreddit or do research on my own, or fall into some pit of self-selection bias (both positive and negative).

Outside of discussion/forum/chat platforms, videogame news websites are really in the worst state they've been in since the dawn of the internet. Everything is algorithmically driven news and it's all fucking horrible, not news, or hates videogames. The major publishers that I remember, sites like Kotaku or Polygon, seem to exclusively hate videogames, or the articles need to be written in a way to suggest that they hate videogames because that's how they'll score highly on Facebook's engagement algorithm, or that's how they bubble up on Google's news feed for videogames. WHich is then another problem with videogame news websites, the bulk of the ones that bubble up stories algorithmically are just, simply, lies. "New detail emerge from GTA6 leak... You won't believe who makes a cameo!" or something. And, one there's no new GTA6 leak, nobody is making a cameo in the link, it's a shit post from Reddit or GTAForums, and it's junk. "New GTA6 footage is jaw dropping," and it's a user mod video on YouTube of some crap. Or the classic GameRant article about RDR/RedDeadOnline that just scours the RDO subreddit and writes trash articles about some fan art that someone made, "Red Dead Fan Finds Evidence of Red Dead Character in GTA6" and it's like, some fan art of Arthur or something, buried in some algorithmic shit post. THere's no videogame news anymore, it's all dead, it's all horrible, and so sites like this tempure the bull shit that tries to pretend to be videogame news.

I'll miss the gaming forum format when this site and others like it are gone. The clock is ticking, it's a matter of time when everything will be discord, or reddit, or twitter, or whatever some other platform is, and I'll miss the old days of gaming forums. I already do miss the old days of gaming forums, to be honest. While I like the format of gaming forums, this is the last one I'll be a frequently posting member of. I've been on videogame forums/bbs going back to the 90s (shoutout to Prodigy "Classic" Videogames BBS), followed the growth of web forum software, the golden age in the early 2000s, and it's been in steady decline ever since. One day, this site will close up or be abandoned or become something else, just like every other site I've been a member of, and I'll be done with generalized videogame discussions.
 
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cyress8

"This guy are sick"
Avenger
Go to another website.
Say something positive about LGBT+, PoC, or women.
Watch the trash litter your topic without mods even attempting to clean up.

Even though we have so negative ass folks here. Would rather have them 1000% more than some bigot.