People's Intelligence is Going Bad...

I've noticed something on GaiaOnline within the recent year. Not only have they really gone gun-ho with the Cash Shop items (which, to be honest, I love, but I don't have the money to buy all the new ones! XP) -- but the forums are really depreciating.

First off, Gaia's added a new forum section for "Hot Topics" like Twilight, Naruto, Glee and other subjects that pop up. That's fine, I guess. It does kind of bug the crap out of me when new stuff like that pops up and everyone and their grandma spams the forums with "OMG (insert topic here) ROXS!" I'd rather have them in their own forum than see 500 new topics say the same damn thing in the other forums where it doesn't belong...

Secondly, the Barton Town roleplay forum is being overrun with a major problem: cliches. That's right. The noobs who don't care what the hell they write have started to really take over Barton. As a higher semi-lit to adv. literate writer, I am a little pickier about the roleplays I make and join. But seriously, when I have to search over 40 PAGES and STILL not find a roleplay worth joining, it just really saddens me. And no, readers. I don't just go by how the title looks. I look for a genre I like first -- and sometimes, I can't even find that. Apparently, vampires, yaoi, Alice in Wonderland, school, and apocalypse roleplays are all that's in Barton anymore.

I actually feel a little special. My roleplays actually appear unique in this market of RPs. Creepshow, my circus roleplay, was so popular that people were asking to reserve before I even declared it open! But, upon closer examination, I found that it was pretty much the only circus roleplay within 35 pages.

But I also think people liked it so much for the fact it was built like a literate roleplay. Which brings me to my last point: the literacy of Barton has really gone bad. 90% of the roleplays I looked through were poorly done and overdone. "A war between vampires and lycans", "Welcome to so-and-so school of magic", "Fall in love"... You get the point. And the thing is, people buy into this RPs! They could have 3,000 posts that only have three sentences each. Some have 3,000 PAGES chock-full of one-liners. (I cringe at one-liners!) The chances of even finding a literate roleplay is probably 1 in 670...and when you translate to pages you have to search through, it's just a bitch.

Do people not have any sort of decency anymore? Roleplaying isn't supposed to be how fast you can post (but going too slow sucks too!) or just an on-the-fly decision you'll back out of by tommorrow. Any higher literate roleplayer will tell you that a lot of work goes into making a good, unique plot and an in-depth character. And I will agree with that. And what I find is: the more effort you put into something, the more invigorating it is to use it. Just with Creepshow alone, I can sense a lot more passion and realism in everyone's words -- which is far more than I can say for most RPs.

Bottom line is: Barton needs to be cleaned up badly. They were able to do it with the "Hot Topics" idea. Why not Barton, their biggest forum audience?

I have an idea for the clean up too. Right now, Barton is listed under the Community section of the forums, which is logical. But if they made Barton Town into a whole section of its own, and make the different subsections the links into the Barton area, I think searching for specific kinds of roleplays will become easier, and also weed out the random roleplays to make it much less cramped. You could even add more subsections with that option. What do they have now? Organization roleplays, Series-related roleplays.... Those don't span much (and sometimes, people are too stupid to put their RPs in the right place when it qualifys, which leads to the mosh pit known as the main Barton forum.)

...One more thing: Gaia...FIX THE FORUM SEARCH ENGINE. I seriously can't find anything with that thing. I was looking for some of my friend's old topics and it wouldn't bring any of them up. Like they never existed. WHAT THE HELL?! And when I was looking for another friend's old roleplays, it only showed me his three most recent topics, not all of them. That's a little bit of bullshit.