How Gamespot degenerated over the years

I'm not sure what the fact that GS was more popular has to do with what I said but ok. I did intend that as partly opinion.

I said she got what was coming to her for her poor professionalism, and unlike what you said, the reckoning that hit her had absolutely nothing to do with her gender or sex. At least not her gender by itself, but rather how she kept shoving her obnoxious gender and sex related agenda in every article she wrote. I remember not being able to finish reading a single column written by her without facepalming and feeling uneasy when wondering if that was really where the state of gaming journalism was at. Hence, the guys that did eventually snap didn't do so out of the blue, they did have their reasons. If that was the answer you wanted, yes, I do excuse them. The tone in which criticism is expressed is by itself part of the criticism and any person mature enough to surf the internet should both know it and how to interpret it.

So someone deserve death threats for writing a review you disagree with? Seriously?!

^A prime example of what it means to read something and not understand a word of it.

Well what did you mean? BranKetra points out the horrible comments Carolyn received and you say "she had it coming"

It seems you're the one who reads something but doesn't understand it.

She did have it coming. She had a political agenda that had nothing to do with video games. I don't think death threats were warranted and people that gave them need mental help. She was toxic to this site though, and i'm glad they canned her ass.

So whats the "it" you speak of? I assume you mean losing her job, well that isn't what's being discussed.

Why would a person deserve any kind of hate at all for writing a review you disagree with? You do realise that reviews aren't supposed to be objective. they're just opinions. You are hating a person for having an opinion.

Actually, it did. The former GameSpot writer we are discussing was subject to ridicule in part because of gender and sex. No one deserves such unjust treatment and because of a game review of all things. If gamers wish to be regarded as a group worthy of integration into mainstream culture rather than remaining associated with a niche medium, some changes in behavior need to be made and while I did not agree with everything Carolyn Petit wrote, entitlement of opinion is something that is limited, but what was said about that individual was going far beyond what was tolerable. To say anyone has such treatment coming is wrong.

@dave123321:

Very true. I haven't been here in years and not much has changed but didn't really expect it to. Tried IGN but that site makes the fall of GS look like the Renaissance or the Golden Ages; I really can't think of any good gaming sites anymore at all though?

Noone targeted her for hate simply because she is a transgender. The "was subject to ridicule" you're speaking of is akin to children being mean to gingers or other kids wearing brackets - it's part of how the "hate" is expressed, not the reason for the hate itself. If people hated her simply because of that they wouldn't have bothered waiting for a written review to come out - she was a member of GS since before last gen even started. The flak she got over her review was because she wrote wrong things for wrong reasons in the wrong manners to the wrong audience. And that's not really up for debate.

"If gamers wish to be regarded as a group worthy of integration" Please keep your high school freshman rants out of this. Similar episodes happen in the movie industry aswell. If anything it's this kind of existentialist whining about being accepted that's something that needs to be ironed out.

No, she did have it coming. That's not really up for debate either. You don't get to push an outlandish agenda that aims to portrait as evil every developer who follows his own creative sense rather than some unjustified, nonsensical desire to keep the portrayal of both sexes as "equals" and every gamer that doesn't protest at this, then use your position as a professionial to give more exposure to said agenda while forgetting this little thing called professionalism even exists, and then get away with it. Noone should have stood for it - not the gamers, not the developers, not the other journalists.
If what you didn't like is the tone that was used in criticizing her I suggest you switch hobbies with something that doesn't give anyone enough exposure to end up on the internet, because such episodes happened long before this and will keep happening for a long time.

@N30F3N1X: The thing is that Carolyn Petit received hate about gender and sex unrelated to Grand Theft Auto V as a response to the review which Carolyn made for it. That is not debatable. It occurred. I read the posts. Many others did, too. You apparently did not.

At no point did I rant or speak as a current beginner high school student.

What occurred then to that individual will not repeat itself here with anyone else. That era is over, sorry.

Now I remember why I haven't been here in months. In soviet Gamespot, cause follows effect, the Sun spins around the Earth, and logic can be skipped if it doesn't fit my argument snugly enough.

I damn well hope it won't happen with anyone else. Journalism in gaming is a joke as it is, I'd prefer if journalists either killed it without making the rest of the gaming world look like fools, or started being more efficient in eliminating the bad roots.

I do not understand what you are insinuating, but I can say that it is your choice if you wish to refrain from coming here.

Carolyn was not a great game reviewer, she had too much of a habit of trying to find something to be upset about and turning it into a political issue. The hate she received was was fair when it concerned the reviews but yes, many comments were going over the line

In all honesty though, do you expect anything less from the GTA fanbase? Easily the worst of the worst in terms of a community. The other many of many reviews where everybody "surprisingly" disagreed with her, the "hate" comments were nothing more than what any of the others would have gotten and were more on the lines of calling them what they were which is an awful review

Yeah. The Look of the site changed quite a bit and I think getting rid of the unions was a bad thing. I understand that the unions only accounted for about 1% of GS' traffic and many of the unions were pretty much dead any way, but I still liked the idea of unions. The unions could offer a platform for users to discuss things with people with similar interests, that they wouldn't be able to discuss on the main boards like OT and SW without a lot of people just insulting them.

This makes me legitimately sad. I remember how great OT was.

I wouldn't call OT great but it was certainly waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more active and more high quality than it is now... I mean there were still trolls and morons but people talked about more than politics, civil justice and how "awful" America is. Plus there were a lot more regulars... I actually made a friend or two from OT. Not great ones but people that I could chat with. Same with the unions and everything before the remodel.

@turtlethetaffer: I really enjoyed it. And I agree with you. The community was much more active, and the discussions were usually better as well. I even got involved with Roll Call and made some friends as well. It was great; the community just feels lacking these days.

@Bardock47: Well like I said in my original post, it used to be that if you post something and refresh the main topic page two seconds after there would be more new material (posts, topics etc.) Now you're lucky to get that every few minutes.

The staff do still interact with the community and defend their opinions, except now it happens in the comment sections of the pieces they post. This is probably a consequence of how media websites as a whole have developed over the years, that everything has to have a comment section to invite and encourage immediate discussion. I think the change in staff presence in the community you describe could be due in part to the prevalence of comment sections over the site. Staff will always be interested in interacting with their readers and seeing what people think of what they write, if nothing else it's a means of getting feedback and becoming better at their jobs. However, now the feedback is brought straight to them, whereas I imagine before they would have had to go to the forums and look for it, finding and posting in other threads that caught their interest on the way.

Although the forums here on gamespot are clearly not as active as they once were, the comment sections still seem to be full of activity. Frankly I think forums in general are dying out on websites like gamespot because comment sections take the discussion away. Before, when gamespot posted a piece of gaming news, people would make a thread in the forums to discuss it, now they'll just use the comments section on that piece instead. Gamespot staff have no reason whatsoever to look at the forums now, all the feedback they need is in the comments. Likewise most of the visitors to the site don't need to look at the forums for discussion. Even if gamespot attracts hundreds of new people to the site every day with its content, I can't think of much reason why those people would need or want to look at the forums. I wouldn't be surprised if the kind of decline in activity we're seeing on these forums were happening on many other similar sites too; for younger people who are newer to the internet, forums are not the primary means of discussion they're used to.

The other thing to consider is that big social networking sites like facebook, twitter and reddit mean that people who want to discuss gaming news don't need to do it on this site at all. If they're already using facebook, they'll just subscribe to gamespot's facebook page and post comments on the stories linked there, or post them on their own wall and have a discussion amongst their friends. Same with reddit or twitter, they are big websites and many people have accounts on them, so people who read an article on GS and want to discuss it can just put it on there and have a big old chin wag their rather than signing up to GameSpot. I think it wouldn't be out of the question, though would be very unlikely, for gamespot to streamline at some point in the future and get rid of its community features entirely to focus its resources on news and other content it produces, with more open-access discussion threads on those, as well as an increased focus on reaching out to users of social media sites (they're already using fb and twitter and experimented with reddit). The nature of social media and how people discuss things on the internet is changing, becoming centralised on the few dominant websites that nearly everyone uses. Discussion forums like this one are out of date and I think they will only decline further.

Well to be fair, it's what the vast majority of users wanted. A string of high profile OT users had been ban and people were upset and threatened to leave the site. Gamespot actually listened to us....... and look how that turned out. Should have never happened.

Well at the time people were more annoyed with how much power mods had and that arguing anything was wrong...I still remember getting modded for saying a company was in "damage control" not a user a company

But I think most users would still at the end of the day prefer that system to what would happen, I know I voted against the new TOU

The firing was justified and people being upset. You can hate people for opinions btw. Are you saying we shouldn't hate hitler because he thought the jews were demons?

You're either a troll or just really not in touch with reality. She made political agendas that had NOTHING to do with gaming. Game reviewers and the press represent us in the media. When people do shit like that, it makes us look stupid. Reviews are supposed based on an objective framework with taste peppered in. They're not meant for your political agenda or vendetta against the world.

Seriously, lets cut the bullshit and call it what it was. A complete joke. I'm glad they canned her ass, and I hope she stays out of the gaming industry. I play games to get away from politics, not to create it.

I haven't been around here much lately, what happened to Carolyn and when? Her profile still lists her as a being on the staff.

EDIT: Nevermind I found this. Damn that's awful :(

@EJ902: she was laid off about two weeks ago along with Tom Mcshea, ryan macdonald, justin calvert , maxwell McGee and

Are you seriously comparing someone sharing their opinions on a game to Hitler? Are you completely insane?

Damn, what a kick in the teeth, those are some of their biggest names. Poor guys, I wonder what they're going to do now. I looked at Carolyn's twitter and it seems she's a bit lost because working for gamespot was her big goal, she didn't contemplate what to do afterward. Still, all of them have a lot of experience and a major name in the industry on their CVs, there'll hopefully be more good opportunities for them.

Everything has been going downhill since 2006. I still remember when people decided to rage quit that year over Gerstmann's firing.

If you don't see the point of the analogy, i'm surprised you can make it out of the front door. It was meant to show that opinions can be wrong, and people can hate other people's opinions. Nowhere in any of the shit I said did I compare video game opinions to Hitler.

I'm pretty much chalking you up to be a troll, because nobody could be that stupid.

I remember joining up to N4G with a large number of other GSers and relocating there with the intention of it being for good. Most of us came crawling back after a week. Heh

The leniency on trolling was a big help to killing this site. A large portion of posters are here just to spew dumb shit and mess with people.

There needs to be IP bans.

There is some things I missed from the site before the big change, such as the unions (they have partially returned, but not like before) and the levels, and I preferred the overall design the site had before. Although, I do understand that they rewrote the site coding, due to how glitchy things were before.

I can tell you that it was most definitely the site redesign that killed a lot of the fun GS used to offer. It's slow, clunky and doesn't seem to be getting any better at all. I visit OT/SW just about once a week now, never posting anymore because of how slow everything is.

Getting rid of levels was a blessing and a curse as well. Those who were desperate for attention made constant posts in order to level up quicker (along with increasing their post count), which drove down a lot of quality threads or discussions.

The fiasco between the banned users and mods regarding the ToS was definitely a hand in lowering GS' forums quality, there were truly a lot of entertaining and smart individuals that left posts that I'd find myself always reading, in fact waiting for them to make a post.

They're gone now, and between the total bullshit that is most of Gamespot's articles, their clickbait, their "feedbackula" and various other "news" videos, GS is a shadow of what it used to be.

@drekula2: you forgot Tom McShea and Carolyn Petit