I thought I would drop a quick discussion thread in here to get everyone's feelings for what we should do with the forums once the VBAM3 project is ready to be released?
Do we keep the forums exactly as-is, or prune back to basically do a soft reset of everything, moving the old content into an archive of sorts?
At this point I think the reset would not be a bad idea overall, but I'd appreciate any and all input.
I know things have been pretty dead here the last 10 years ( ) and I could see it being easier to start over with fresh forum structure to have more of a blank slate for future discussion.
To add to this, be sure to post what you would LIKE to see on the forums or Discord in the future, so we can brainstorm what we should do once the new rules are actually finished and ready to go.
To start, I am still fairly certain that I will keep playing VBAM 1stEd, simply because of VBAMSX. It allows me to really visualise how a particular VBAM ship looks like when I know, for example, it has four missile launchers, four heavy anti-ship turrets and some light guns, whereas I wouldn't know from just the knowledge it has an AS stat of 8 and an AF stat of 1. I know I wouldn't let that vessel go along without some fighter escort, though...
The above is a long-winded way of saying that I can envision a (semi-)active VBAM 1stEd community that would still require an active forum rather than an archive. Whether a combined forum for 1st, 2nd and 3rd Edition, or separate 1st/2nd/3rd Edition sub-forums, better serves each community's needs, I don't know. I do know, from my SX/SAE/SNE days, though, that I'm not entirely happy with the move of all pre-NE and UE material to the archives, especially as I am still a fairly active user of SX (if only for VBAMSX) and AE (which might be better for a particular concept than NE/UE--for example, if I want a definite anti-ship weapon, I can do that in AE, but there's no way to absolutely say 'no, you can't fire this 15in-analogue weapon at that fighter-analogue' in SUE, and you don't even know in NE whether a battery is one BFG or thirty mini guns in a single battery. OTOH, for micro-settings like my Micratan Cluster, NE is best as that same feature means it can be left to the player's imagination as to what a particular battery represents)
Okay, that was a tangent and a half...
Basically, I can see merits and demerits (that was the suggested word, and it seems to work) for the 'leave it as-is' or the 'separate sub-forums' options, but definitely not the 'archive all pre-3rdEd' option.
I wasn't aware that MJ12 had done a similar purge on their forums. Looking now, it does appear they have more or less memory-holed the old Starmada discussions to archived sub forums.
If there is value to keeping separate forums specifically for VBAM 1E and 2E, then that would be easy enough to add and then try to migrate content to the appropriate locations, and then keep a more general set of discussion topics that would cover everything.
The discussions are still early, but there is a possibility that 1E and 2E will be officially retired when 3E is released, but we are still trying to get a feel for the future of most of those products, and most everything is going to be overhauled prior to any new release so that we can have everything ready to go and deal with issues that come up with the new rules prior to releasing the core rules (which is what caused problems with 2E).
One thing I think would be good for general discussion would the Campaign Diaries / After Action Reports, as I think EVERYONE would be interested in those regardless of which version of the rules. But for specific rules discussions, I could see those being moved to topics by game version.
I've started with a little bit of reworking of the forums here, but will probably be doing some more judicious pruning as I try to go in and move topics to logical locations and figure out what we might need for long term discussion.
Basically any forum that didn't have enough posts to justify its existence will just get trashed, and its contents moved to a more appropriate location. Playtesting was an example of that.
Then we can consolidate our discussion down to a more directed set of options.
Also thinking about creating separate forums for each of the published settings.
We'll see what anyone else that checks in every few months has to say, and keep adjusting as needed here
Continuing my thread spam, I have started reorganizing some of the forums discussion topics and moving things into new positions.
Right now I think we're going to end up combining a single set of general VBAM discussion topics, then separate forums for each product or product family.
I also created a new Development section so that we can create forums for any major projects under development and move all of those topics there.
Once we decide on a "final" forums structure, I will go through all of the old threads and start moving them where they belong and clean everything up.
I know there's really no one out there right now since the game has been DOA for so long, but I do want to get some of this put back in place in anticipation of the public playtest release soon.
Continuing to do some moving around of things, and based off of some discussions with gstano what we may end up doing is moving all of the old content into Archives as a first step, and then I'll go through and move topics to appropriate forums from there (1E to 1E, 2E to 2E, etc.) to clear out the stale conversations from the main forums and get ready for the relaunch.
That way everything will still be accessible, but we can start relatively fresh with the final round of playtesting.
The one forum that I'm considering leaving more intact is the War Room, as I think those campaign diaries are pretty evergreen and interesting regardless of which version of the game you're playing.
) and I could see it being easier to start over with fresh forum structure to have more of a blank slate for future discussion.
