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I concur.
In fact, I would like to suggest something pretty radical. Perhaps we need to expand the forum's focus beyond Oddworld. I think that we could draw in more members if the forum didn't revolve around a game/media company that, for all intensive purposes, is practically nonexistent as of late.
This is asking a lot, I know, but what about a forum that celebrates ALL forms of innovative gaming, rather than just the games of a single company? Katamari Damacy, Psychonauts, Oddworld, the list goes on. Not only would we attract the (rapidly shrinking) OWI fanbase, but I think that we would soon find ourselves in the company of many, many competent forumers with different interests and tastes.
Couple a broader spectrum of gaming with our strong roots in Off-Topic discussion, and I think we will have an extremely busy, and therefore interesting, forum again.
So, in conclusion, I'm pushing for a total forum makeover. Don't screw OWI; keep it. Just broaden our horizons.
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You know, I was thinking of suggesting that whole idea a while back when I suggested the Non-Oddworld Gaming forum. And to be honest, you're absolutely right. The main reason I didn't suggest it was because I never pictured NOG being anything other than second best to OT.
Though, there is one, perhaps minor hitch. This forum's authority and success stems from the fact that it is the number one, almost official Oddworld forum - therefore, it is a major player in that field. But if we changed the subject of the forums as a whole, to gaming in general, we would lose our position and be up against some MAJOR competitors, and would therefore find it quite hard to have the kind of "draw" we're looking for with crowds from Google without them first visiting bigboys like IGN and Gamespy.
That's not to say I don't agree or don't think we should do something like that, but I say that if we do, we should go about it carefully, and have ourselves a bloody good forum (one that clearly outranks the others), otherwise climbing up the ranks could be very difficult without buying expensive forced first page result places from Google.
I think that idea combined with various shopping type hacks and other such innovations and some brilliant ideas from our members could put us ahead of the competition easily. We've already got a strong core of regular members with some brilliant ideas here, and the OT forum is really top notch, far better than many other forums I've been to. Also expanding our roleplay and user created content sections will create a powerful, self sustaining community of loyal members that never gets boring. We could expand OT by adding a "world events/news" subforum, and move NOG to it's own zulag, giving it more priority with it's own supplementary forums such as "general game help", "mods, mapmaking and editing", "Spoilers" and perhaps even a section for multiplayers, lan parties and general gaming related "get togethers" online or offline, XBL or internet.
That would generally broaden the whole forum's, and I've not even touched on broadening non oddworld fiction and role play.
The only other hitch would be the domain name...possibly might confuse the direction that this is all heading in. Of course, with nothing set in stone it's gonna be confused anyway, but would a more "general gaming" themed domain be in order if the OWF were to broaden it's horizons in such a way?