Increasing discussion on the simExchange

One of the areas on the simExchange we have been striving to improve is the discussion on the simExchange. For those who have been with us for a while, you have noticed we have added numerous tools to make discussing on the simExchange easier.

You can quickly find all comments that have been posted recently anywhere on the site from the Recent Comments aggregator page. You can also check out which are the comments people find Most Valuable.

You can now reply to a player directly so that readers can track the exact comment you are responding to. Permalinks for every comment are available so you can reference what other people are saying. We integrated news articles so that they can be better used in discussion.

However, we have heard from many of you that the environment leaves more to be desired. We would also like to see more people posting, lively conversation and debate. Some players have suggested a separate forum for casual discussion. Today one player expressed that the moderation system through bidding deters people from taking part in debate, especially if arguing for an idea other people don't like.

The discussion space is not intended to limiting posts only to sales numbers. For a game, you can be posting about sales numbers, but you can also be posting what you expect from the game, your impressions from playing it, whether you think anyone at your local store is buying the game, etc. This isn't a statistics forum. We have set up the discussion so that articles are more integrated into discussion. We encourage you to discuss the articles--say you think the article was great or you didn't like it.

The moderation system is there to root out spam and allow people to express what they think about other people's comments, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be any fun in the forums. The goal was to allow people to more easily identify which comments other people found useful. Do you think the loss of DKP is too penalizing? Or is it the track record of down bids?

We would like to hear how you think we can handle discussions better here. For those of you who rarely or never post comments, tell us why! We don't want you to feel like the simExchange community is an "elite clique" to any degree. How can we make you feel more welcomed?