However, NMA will, at least as an incarnation of a glittering gem of hatred, eventually die.
Not sure it will be well structured.
Should we mourn the decay of hate ? Hate is a feeling that fades away naturally. Many people tends to like or forget about their childhood bully after a few decades.
I am amongs the people that came here recently and stayed, and i am not the only one. I was already registered in 2006, but it was mostly to download mods, not to be part of NMA. I only became active in 2013 when i finally played the later Fallout games (Fobos, Fo3, FoNV. My hardware wasn't strong enough before that) and wanted to share my feelings about those games with the community. French community produces a lot of contents, but the members aren't much versed on discussions. I wasn't aware then about Beth fans community, and even if i was, their mods are trigger happy and many members have red fish memory (or just don't bother reading previous pages of threads they answer to) so the discussion rarelly reach high level. (and when they do, more red fish memory members come posting arguments that were already debunked ten time already, so we are back to stone age again). Some other communities had already disapeared. NMA is one of the rare example of a Fallout community that existed before 2008 and is still active today. Many older communities outright disapeared after the release of Fallout 3 (people just didn't want to bother any more with a franchise they considered dead after that huge disapointement) and many other Fallout communities appeared after the IP became mainstream. So, if i wanted to discuss about my disapointement with other fans that actually knew what the series was about and wouldn't ban me for expressing a straight opinion, i had to come here. I started lurking, then became more active when i felt it would be worthy.
So, in a way, NMA is indeed a comfort zone for the people that knew what the older Fallouts were about (and FoNV to an extend) and were disapointed (or not) by the mainstream ones. You won't be shunned by expressing a straight not toned down opinion about Fallout 3 or Fallout 4. But i don't see NMA as a place to gather and spit hate on a product. If you want to do so, you won't be bothered, but it isn't the goal of NMA and shouldn't be. If you love Fo3, Fo4 or Fobos, you shouldn't be banned, kicked, harrassed or trolled by anyone. The big problems are people mentioned in the elitist vs fanboys thread (can't find the link), including the guys whom the whole point of their very registration on the website is to get in conflict with NMA members and maybe gather some quotes. They come with a torch and get a bigger fire. A regular member that just come into the website to exchange about the series and just happen to love Beth game better rarelly get any troubles here. Some are even members of the staff.
So it makes me uncomfortable when i read that the sole point of NMA is to hate Beth Games. First, you are free to love Beth games or not and still come. Second, if you won't be shunned if you hate Fo3, then you shouldn't be shunned if you love them. Third, even if you hate Beth games, this isn't the only reason you stay on the website. It gets old very fast. Fourth, NMA existed way before Beth meant something to us. It does't need them to exist and will still exist after them.
IMO, NMA is a Fallout fansite with minimal censorship (contrary to many others), with many people knowing the IP from the beginning and still caring about the very specific factors that made it so famous in the first place, but who still care about newer titles and how the universe grows up and what the modding scene is producing and who will be passed the torch. That is enough to qualifies the NMA community. No need for hate. Many members don't care for hate and love NMA.
Although, what cripples NMA a bit, IMO, is the lack of coverage of the new things. It isn't an easy task, considering it needs people active and interested to cover those things, but there is many things happening that could interest a Fallout fans. On a globale scale, there is many interesting things to learn about post-apocalyptic contents, post-apocalyptic games, indie post-apocalyptic games, Role-playing-games, isometric games with turn-based combats, incline games as a codexer would say. About the Fallout universe, there is a very active community with solo and multiplayers (like Fonline) mods for older and newer Fallout games, released pretty often. It would be awesome to have official test from NMA staff, interview of content creators, a curated list for existing mods, a list of unreleased awaited mods. Why bother spending days talking about a boring Gamebryo popamole that half of us probably won't play, while we sit on so much contents, contents that need some level of coverage that only us will provide. Don't expect Zenimax or Bethesda to make an interview of Sduibek or Killap. Don't expect Todd Howard to release a Let's Play video about Hexer's Van Buren. Don't expect Kotaku to do a lenghty test of Mutants Rising. Don't expect Peter Hines to copy each Underrail uptade on his personnall blog/tweet. (even if they did, i am not sure our members & lurkers would bother to aknowledge those news/contents) I would say to "let the people who want to talk about Fallout 4 do it" and use the specific position of curators for Fo1-Fo2 fans to promotes things that would have much less coverages if they were mentioned by another community. And i am only mentionning mods. Games like Underrail or Age Of Decadence and some other indie and/or RPG and/or Post-apo games should have their own sections if they are faithfull to the factors that made Fallout games stick to you in the first place. Who care if they aren't branded as Fallout games and don't provide money to Zenimax, as long as they remain Fallout spiritual successors in our heart ?
Although, as said before, it need people ready to invest their time for the community and it can be hard and time consuming (i can't catch up with all new things while part of Fallout French community), but there is a LOT of things to talk about. Some of these things wouldn't even have a better coverage than from NMA. We don't need to wait about some games we don't care (much) about because they are branded as sequels of a series we love, in order to bring back activity on a website that was built on other values that exist in other forms, not under the same brand.
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