Thought I'd poke my head in here to see how things are going. It's been a while. Unfortunately it does seem like forum communities are becoming a thing of the past (not just this one, but the handful of other forums I have frequented throughout the years). My sense of community is now built on reddit, FB, and recently Discord (the guild I'm in on WoW moved there entirely recently, ditching vent and skype for it), my wife's community comes from Tumblr, FB, and in-game WoW channels. There are even cracks in the public dominance of Steam thanks to years of Origin and GOG that I'm seeing. Fast, quick, chat messaging styles seem to be becoming the dominant feature of the new generation, and it seems the older generation like me are simply playing catch-up.
So very true. But I can't help but keep loving forums for asynchronous communication. It's what I know and it's what works best for this season of my life.
I keep intending to post more on my gaming Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I barely keep up with my personal accounts.
The Puzzle & Dragons Forums community keeps a set of Discord channels and I've tried it out. I like it, but my old school tendencies lead to an inherent distrust of free services. I once heard it said, "If you're not the customer, then you're the product." TeamSpeak allows us to run our own server. I haven't invested the time to research Discord, but it seems users are at the whim of a free service provider--which is fine until the venture capital runs out.
From a user perspective, Discord great. From an administrator perspective, it's hard to invest in a service when you don't know exactly how they'll make money (and thus keep the service active). It's like the difference between TF2 (where you can rent a server and modify it to your heart's content) or an EA game (where the servers will likely be shut down 18-24 months after the game launches).
But maybe we should take the Discord discussion to a new thread so we--or rather, I--don't de-rail this thread? ^^;;
Other than that, playing a lot of WoW, and Overwatch. Getting ready for a trip back to AK later this year.
What do you think of Overwatch so far?
I'm definitely interested, but the price point turned me away and I haven't played much on the PC beyond TF2 in months. Blizzard games almost never go on sale (I think I still have a
camelcamelcamel price watch set for StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void) and it's hard to justify spending so much on any one game these days.
Maybe after my younger daughter starts sleeping through the night, I'll get back to PC gaming.