I think the lack of discussion has less to do with the bidding system and has a lot more to do with how the TSE forums are structured. Right now the forums are split into one official perpetual thread for each game, plus one for each console and publisher, plus the general and help threads. This sounds like it should be plenty, but in practice it's not, especially for the general thread.
This format kind of limits the discussion in each thread to one topic at any given time. If more than two groups of people start talking about different topics in the general thread, things can get confusing fast. Eventually one topic wins over the other while everything else gets pushed down and maybe forgotten until the current discussion peters out.
The current format makes it a chore to follow a discussion and their perpetual nature makes it almost impossible to follow old topics since it's difficult to figure out where one discussion starts and another ends.
I'd kind of like to see a more traditional forum format here on TSE. I think there would be a lot more discussion if we were able to create our own separate threads, maybe within a general forum. We could still keep each separate game thread as the 'official' one where news, reviews, and information regarding each game can be posted. A system similar to NeoGAF's might be good idea, one forum for gaming plus all the official threads and one for off-topic discussion.
Of course a change like this would be a lot of work and we would eventually have to have some sort of moderation here beyond the bidding system.
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I think the lack of discussion has less to do with the bidding system and has a lot more to do with how the TSE forums are structured. Right now the forums are split into one official perpetual thread for each game, plus one for each console and publisher, plus the general and help threads. This sounds like it should be plenty, but in practice it's not, especially for the general thread.
This format kind of limits the discussion in each thread to one topic at any given time. If more than two groups of people start talking about different topics in the general thread, things can get confusing fast. Eventually one topic wins over the other while everything else gets pushed down and maybe forgotten until the current discussion peters out.
The current format makes it a chore to follow a discussion and their perpetual nature makes it almost impossible to follow old topics since it's difficult to figure out where one discussion starts and another ends.
I'd kind of like to see a more traditional forum format here on TSE. I think there would be a lot more discussion if we were able to create our own separate threads, maybe within a general forum. We could still keep each separate game thread as the 'official' one where news, reviews, and information regarding each game can be posted. A system similar to NeoGAF's might be good idea, one forum for gaming plus all the official threads and one for off-topic discussion.
Of course a change like this would be a lot of work and we would eventually have to have some sort of moderation here beyond the bidding system.