Announcement: Change is Coming to games.on.net

[Drakand]

love it - directed at almost every post after mine

[Tera]

Should do an Admin's vs. Forumers comp like in the good old days.

[Commander Boom]

This sounds great, keep up the good work GON.

[Avant]

Thanks all for your positive response to this, it's great to see

Let me address some questions.

Why'd all the newsbots leave at once? :O

The newsbots are still around, it's just that we'll be doing all of our news in-house from now on and using our resources to push out more features for you We have limited resources and this is the best way to give you the content you want with what we have.

Loved the tech round ups... they seemed to disappear fast

They'll be coming back much more regularly now, hopefully!

As long as the features aren't about turning Diablo into an FPS this announcement can only lead to good for gon! I'm looking forward to it.

What a silly idea!

This is all good but I demand that the reviews while lacking scores at least have a TLDR.

Perhaps a summary is something we should look into! I'll make a note of it.

Cheers! Not that I dislike what you guys write but often I don't read a review.. just the summary or the score and then dissect more from it if I need it.

[Auld]

I would also like to see you adopt a review score system like Ars, its still very mildly subjective but easy to see whether I would like it or not.

[Nekosan]

I'm going to be "that guy" as usual, i reserve my judgement until the "new GoN" has had its run for a little while, gotta treat that bish like an MMO .

[exe3]

I guess i'll have to go against the grain again. I have no issue with what's being added, but I do have an issue with what's being removed. The new articles might be good, at least I hope they are because tbh articles in the past have come across as uninteresting walls of text i've rarely read but hopefully these newer ones might be better (this is mainly an issue because they're a replacement to the news which i'll talk about below). Also I miss The Warp Pipe. T_T

I don't see why the massive drop in console, I like PC as much as the next but there's nothing wrong with console. At least don't have the faux PC elitism i've seen in articles in the past.

Review score 'eh'. I've never really agreed with the need to remove it, all the arguments come across as overanalyzing the issue imo. It's no big deal either way. What will be needed however in replacement is a summary of what's good and bad and/or an epic conclusion to sum up what the game offers and what works/doesn't work etc.

Finally I severely dislike the news changes. The new articles look mindboggling unprofessional (I don't even want to open the friggin links anymore) and quite frankly lazy. A reason I come here is for news, a small wall of text with a link to go elsewhere is not what I want. Yes, GON (since Chienne and co. left) has been some of worst in regards to the copy pasta nature of your articles but just like the mission structure of AC1 and the Mako in ME1 that was something to fix, not outright remove to not deal with.

[Marcus Dunn]

Sounds really good Tim, good work!

Definitely agree with a PC focus, but as someone mentioned, I hope that doesn't skim over the absolute gems like the Dark Souls out there...

[Zisheng Chen]

Looks good. Could do a pros/cons table at the top of the review to give people an at-a-glance view of what they might and might not enjoy in a particular game.

[Zisheng Chen]

I guess i'll have to go against the grain again. I have no issue with what's being added, but I do have an issue with what's being removed. The new articles might be good, at least I hope they are because tbh articles in the past have come across as uninteresting walls of text i've rarely read but hopefully these newer ones might be better (this is mainly an issue because they're a replacement to the news which i'll talk about below). Also I miss The Warp Pipe. T_T

I don't see why the massive drop in console, I like PC as much as the next but there's nothing wrong with console. At least don't have the faux PC elitism i've seen in articles in the past.

Review score 'eh'. I've never really agreed with the need to remove it, all the arguments come across as overanalyzing the issue imo. It's no big deal either way. What will be needed however in replacement is a summary of what's good and bad and/or an epic conclusion to sum up what the game offers and what works/doesn't work etc.

Finally I severely dislike the news changes. The new articles look mindboggling unprofessional (I don't even want to open the friggin links anymore) and quite frankly lazy. A reason I come here is for news, a small wall of text with a link to go elsewhere is not what I want. Yes, GON (since Chienne and co. left) has been some of worst in regards to the copy pasta nature of your articles but just like the mission structure of AC1 and the Mako in ME1 that was something to fix, not outright remove to not deal with.

You make some good points there. While I'm merely an occasional contributor and have no say in what happens, I feel what GON is trying to do is fill a niche in online content in Australia. Going with a PC focus is probably a good move. The nature of online news delivery and our timezone means it's not realistic to be able to fix this issue without the news writers staying up into ungodly hours.

[DarkMellie]

If this means more content from Triggerlegs then I'm all for it!

I always enjoy watching GoN evolve and the writing talent you've attracted (myself most emphatically not included) makes this a serious site... and turning those writers solely to features with a PC-slant is a canny move in a saturated market.

Looks like my dual 580's finally have a reason to live

[Marius]

I like the new news format. The most important part of the news is the lead paragraph, so that's all we need, especially if the site is moving towards more features, which is a good thing.

But if we're ranting about downsides, the only possible downside I can see is that I get a feeling of redundancy when I click on the link that says 'read full article by GON News', as the full article doesn't introduce anything extra.

Not sure what to do about that though, if anything.

[MrAwesomeness]

Sounds great, keep up the great work!

[Tim Colwill]

I get a feeling of redundancy when I click on the link that says 'read full article by GON News', as the full article doesn't introduce anything extra.

This is something we hope to address in the future

The new articles look mindboggling unprofessional (I don't even want to open the friggin links anymore) and quite frankly lazy

I'm sorry you feel that way. Why would you need to open the links though? The entire story is in the one paragraph. There's no need to open any links unless you want to investigate the source.

Do you read the news through the General News forum or through the main page? The overwhelming majority of our traffic comes through the main page, where it looks exactly the same as it used to.

[Marius]

I was wondering about that, actually.

I couldn't make suggestions because a lot depends on the infrastructure of the site as well as traffic sources.