RPG Superstar 2010 Top 16, 2011 Top 32
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Y'know, I don't post a lot online. I mostly cruise, lurk, occasionally posting, but one place I always used to feel at home was ENWorld. It used to be welcoming, friendly, inviting and open to new ideas and discussion.
I say used to be. Ever since 4e was announced it's gotten less and less friendly to the point of outright hostility. I love the Mods there, they're great, but they're overwhelmed. The hate has risen and is plague like.
What went wrong? Now every time I log on it's another thread about how terrible 3.x is, how terrible 4e is, how terrible I am if I don't agree with the poster's opinion, and most of all, how terrible so and so is if they don't parrot my opinion exactly.
So I've given up. After six years posting I collapsed the message boards preview on the front page and stopped checking. I'll devote my time to Paizo now. Even if I'm not agreed with, I can always seem to count on good humor, polite conversation and general geniality.
I'll miss you, ENWorld. You used to be a great place.
Cheers.
Try again in a few weeks. My recommendation, is just use the site, without getting invested in it. Just find what you want, and ignore the chaff and dross.
There are people on Enworld who say the same thing about Paizo. It is easy to see the negatives of a place, but trolls only survive while fed, and hungry times are coming for them.
I would say it's the mirror image of what's happened here. 4E is a divisive issue, and like the (idiotic) video game wars, the loudest people have divided themselves into camps and have spent a lot of energy denigrating the choice (or even mere preferences) of those in the "enemy" camp.
The situation at ENWorld was made worse by the well-meaning decision to move 4E discussion into its own forum, which allowed the two camps to have a hothouse environment where they tended to only hear from people they agreed with. And now, they've been dumped back into the same forum together, and, not surprisingly, everyone is acting like a bunch of cats in a sack, clawing and biting at each other.
ENWorld has gone through cycles like this before, and it gets over it. Part of the issue is that there's a LOT of people who are either not regular posters or are new posters, neither of whom are socialized to the normally very aggressive standard of moderation, and the resulting chaos has meant a lot of scrambling for the mods.
To be fair, though, the situation is worse at WotC's boards and there aren't a lot of 4E-friendly or even 4E-agnostic threads here at Paizo.
Singling out ENWorld on this matter seems off-base to me: What's going on there is just indicative of how online fandom in general is reacting to 4E -- with slap fights.