Calin said:
I have a difficult time guessing if that`s a serious tone or not.

Now you finally arrived at the proper way of thinking!

The brainwash was indeed not meant seriously. I even tried to hint at that by start the next sentence with ‘seriously…’

XD

Calin said:
“sycophancy driven mind control” what are you talking about?

Sycophancy acts like a cozy velocity field.

Example: Game industry is close to creative bankrupt. But they can't whine in public, as this would just hurt their business for no reason. They discuss this internally, behind closed doors, i guess.

To the outer world, they pretend it's all fine. There is the Game Awards Show, where devs congratulate each other how awesome their games are.
Game journalists join the party, praising Elden Ring to be the best game of all time. Gaming culture is vivid, bigger than ever, and at it's peak.
They all congratulate each other to ride on the wave of success.

Then they go home, play Elden Ring, and realize: It's a fine game. Nothing to criticize. But it's not the best of all time, even quite boring to some, so they stop playing after some hours and don't come back.
But they keep silent about their personal impression. Elden Ring is a 10/10 game, so it must be good! And they keep writing one Elden Ring article each day, because everybody loves it.

That's sycophancy. Notice: The game companies do not pay the journalists to give the game a good rating and coverage. The journalists do it for free, by replacing their own mind against a larger average, formed by a leaderless group sharing interests.

It's the most dangerous form of hype. It can kill all jews, for example. The velocity field of the group can appear so strong that all people start to act against their personal but ignored convictions.

That just said to make a hypothetical example!
I liked Elden Ring, and i respect Epics progress in tech. And i don't try to say that any related marketing tries to scam us, or selling us snake oil.
So please, no quotes of my bullshit outside this thread! ; )

Calin said:
velocity field also sounds like something I`ve never heard before.

I could explain what a velocity field is, how we can use it to simulate particles, or to get flocking behavior for RTS units.

But probably you would just assume i use double language, causing confusion and telling complicated stories. ; )

Calin said:
say it straight if you have something to say

You asked what i mean with sycophancy, and i tried to explain with a random example. I can not make a simpler one.
But forget about it. It's not that important and just personal opinion anyway.

I used to make lots of contributions to these forums, but I've been absent for many moons now. My main reason for not visiting here anymore is that in one of the reimplementations of the forums things just wouldn't work. Loading times were ridiculously long for me, and quite frequently I would get server errors. Actually, I just came back to browse for a bit and I got 2 server errors in a few minutes.

Some of the old crew are still around, occasionally here but also on Discord. We may not post as much, but in many cases that's because we're no longer hobbyists but busy making games professionally, and not only have fewer questions to ask but are less able to talk about what we're working on. But that's a positive reflection on the quality of discussion that this site has hosted over the years.

It is hard these days to keep a forum going, because the internet likes to follow trends. So when social media came along we lost people to that, even though it's a much worse forum for long-running discussions. Same with Reddit - there are almost a million subscribers to r/gamedev but anything that requires more than 1 or 2 comments of discussion will eventually mean you're buried deep in a thread that nobody is reading, and the conversation is dead after a day. Same with YouTube - it's great for short visual guides on how to achieve a specific thing inside Unity or Unreal but for deep discussion it's worthless. But the majority of developers are beginners, and the majority of developers these days are using one of those engines, so an independent text-first forum is always going to seem empty compared to the attention grabbing sites where the same newbie questions can be answered daily and the same introductory videos can be posted with ever more slick production.

And obviously if you have a question regarding Unity or Unreal then there are specific places to ask those questions where you know the whole community uses the same tech as you, whereas here that's not guaranteed. We don't have much to offer the beginning UE or Unity developer and that's unlikely to change. This was always an engine-agnostic site, but now that only about 20% of released games are not made with an existing engine, that reduces our potential audience.

Issues regarding the site performance are known. The admin Khawk has done a lot of work to mitigate this, but the site does actually get a lot of traffic and making it faster is expensive in time and money. And we don't have VC cash like YouTube or Reddit to throw at the problem.

@fleabay - what do you mean by ‘the moderation failed to keep topics sane and allowed an “anything goes” mentality’? Are you talking about the forums specifically or the articles? To a large degree we're limited by what is submitted to us so if we hid everything from the front page except the professional-level stuff the site would seem even deader.