Is this forum dying?

It seems its not as active as it once was. I know the Tales games aren't very popular but it looks like a lot of members on this forum have disappeared. I'm even kind of shying away from it because I'm just busy with other things. I don't know if I should leave this forum completely. I kind of like how small and tight-knit it is. I've made some friends on here and I think that is the important thing because most other forums are big and full of trolls and people bashing each other and arguing over things.

I still have no idea why Namco decided to merge all of their forums. The Tales section over there is even less active than this place...

Many forums in general tend to be on the downturn, mostly due to Facebook and similar social networking sites. I am one of those weirdos that doesn't do much Facebooking, and what little I do is with personal friends and family.
Also, I think a lot of the old ToF folk just gave up on forums once Namco shut the old forum down. Especially with how poorly managed Namco's current forums are ran. Kinda hard to keep people in a place like that.

Forums in general are on the way out. The younger generation would rather use social media because that's what they grew up with.

Meanwhile the people who once made the forums lively have moved on to better things, mostly leaving forums behind for social networks or real life commitments.

I'm glad I went looking for this place before it was gone forever, but given how little activity it sees I don't think it will last a whole lot longer.

There's not much going on, really.

I still post on forums way more then Facebook and Twitter, just not this one.

Even if it's not what it used to be, I'm still happy this place exists For me it carries many fond memories from the old forums.

I very much love this place! I keep meaning to be more active but its so easy to just not click on a site when I'm busy, I very much enjoy when I'm able to come back though <3

Yes.

Tales forum will never be the same as it once was.

The Great Time Warp may have changed what we considered "home" but really that home is in our hearts. <3

There's no point in caring how active a place is, it's being able to talk with the the people who are still going there that matters.

The Tales series has never been super huge in America, and small followings are always subject to splintering (Abyssal Chronicles, Reddit, Gamefaqs, these are the big ones but I wouldn't say there's a clear winner, AC's forums are arguably more dead than us, Gamefaqs is splintered into individual games but gets the most activity I suppose if you're far enough to know all the spoilers already, /r/Tales is a lot of repeat threads because of Reddit's format,) that's why it was always great to have an official destination for it. Berseria (or was it just the demo?) even puts the official Tales website on its title screen. Imagine if the old board was still running and the bump in participation that would get. It's really dumb and I sincerely doubt Namco is saving that much by closing down that community, I feel like the logic was ultimately so that it could be managed by the "official" moderators of their all-in-one forums since we didn't have a community manager for years. Personally I don't get why they can't split their EU managers' focus between Facebook and a proper Tales forum, because Namco EU actually seems to give a shit about their fans still.

And no, I don't consider social networks like the Tales Facebook page to be a proper community, the format is too personally-oriented and is more like a question/answer form than an actual discussion forum.

Well it might pick up again eventually

Yes. It's been dying since the official forums were taken down a long time ago.

Quote :

The Tales series has never been super huge in America,

True. They did manage to strike gold once with Tales of Symphonia because the Gamecube was so starved for RPGs but their other titles never got close to that level of popularity.

Also, the original forum crowd obviously got a lot older and a lot busier with RL commitments. People are getting married, having babies... no more time for shitposting on forums like in the old days!

Jean wrote:

Quote :

The Tales series has never been super huge in America,

True. They did manage to strike gold once with Tales of Symphonia because the Gamecube was so starved for RPGs but their other titles never got close to that level of popularity.

Honestly Symphonia and Versperia were proof of the power exclusivity can have in certain circumstances. I would say that those were that real big ones, Vesperia was still part of Microsoft's big push to prove they could maintain Japanese interest in their console before it became just as affordable to develop for the PS3 and Japan stopped caring (remember, PS3 devkits were just fucking expensive so smaller studios like Gust that eventually flooded the PS3 and Vita just didn't care for a long time.)

The Gamecube's small following flocked to one of the very few RPGs on that console, and coverage in Nintendo Power certainly helped. Vesperia got a lot of attention because it really had no other competition after Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey. The PS3 was struggling to gain its identity and the few RPGs for it were more action-oriented, like Folklore. It didn't really get anything going until 2010. Infinite Undiscovery, Star Ocean 4 and Magna Carta 2 came out on 360 after Vesperia, to boot.

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/genre/date/role-playing/ps3?view=detailed&page=3
http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/genre/date/role-playing/ps3?view=detailed&page=4

vs

http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/genre/date/role-playing/xbox360?view=detailed&page=3

I still wish they release Vesperia for Steam atleast. I'm keeping my 360 only because of that game.

Moontoon wrote:

I still wish they release Vesperia for Steam atleast. I'm keeping my 360 only because of that game.

Same here lol. Well, that and another Namco 360 exclusive, Ace Combat 6.

Moontoon wrote:

I still wish they release Vesperia for Steam atleast. I'm keeping my 360 only because of that game.

That would be a really nice way of satisfying the people who are STILL WHINING about Vesperia PS3.

Personally I'm hoping for Tales of Legendia and Tales of the Abyss to become PS2 classics so I have a good reason to come back to them. Star Ocean 3 was recently announced, I'd like for some other JRPGs not published by Sony to make the jump as well.

I'd love that too! Abyss is still one of my top favorites, and would definately buy it again (for the 4th time.)

I thought of one thing that could help this place get more trafic : Considering than so many people nowadays browse the Internet on their mobile devices, I think it would be great to have a mobile friendly version of the forum. I tried to visit the forum during my lunch break yesterday on my cell phone and I gave up because the text is unreadable on mobile.

That's not really something under our control. This is a free, prebaked forum where someone who no longer visits the forum rejiggered a few presentation issues (I remember spoiler tags and signature separators being problems,) but that's the extent of our modifications.

Taiyz wrote:

That's not really something under our control. This is a free, prebaked forum where someone who no longer visits the forum rejiggered a few presentation issues (I remember spoiler tags and signature separators being problems,) but that's the extent of our modifications.

Check your Skype messages.

Personally, if they're re-releasing more older Tales games, I'd really want to be getting the ones that were never released outside of Japan. Even though I can play the games in Japanese, I just tend to get lazy and don't want to read all the text because it takes too long for me to understand it

TalonStorm wrote:

Personally, if they're re-releasing more older Tales games, I'd really want to be getting the ones that were never released outside of Japan. Even though I can play the games in Japanese, I just tend to get lazy and don't want to read all the text because it takes too long for me to understand it

There are translation guides for the grand majority! If that helps at all, not sure how available they are anymore, I know the Hearts and Innocence ones still exist. The only one I had to play through that didn't have a line-for-line translation of main story and skits (unfortunately not many sidequests usually) was Destiny 2, and for that the approximate summaries were still pretty great! I agree though, playing them with full fluidity in native language would be amazing!

... I will casually pretend that I totally realised you had responded to what I said here... and was not responding for very important reasons which are so important that they do not need to be said but their importance is that obvious anyway! And not that, I just kind of forgot that I even posted in here and thus didn't look in here until now, no.

I'm aware of there being translations, and I'm grateful for that. It makes it easier for when I get the Japanese versions of the games if they happen to be cheaper, since I don't mind playing the games in Japanese, as long as there's a guide for when I'm too lazy to understand it myself. I was mainly just thinking, if we're getting remakes, the ones that never came to West would be a nice change rather than a game we already had in the West which had nothing changed to it and really didn't justify getting a rerelease.

But admittedly, me being lazy does play a factor in me wanting to hear things in my native language ^^;