While I applaud the return of General Discussion to be about 'General' topics and not those pre-determined to be the only ones appropriate to be talked about by the staff, I think there is one, overriding, ultimately-important change that must be done if you want players to look at participating on these forums again and take the time to use them seriously.
The Devs MUST devote themselves to using the Forums.
What this means is that other methods of communication (Twitter, Facebook, ect.) should not be considered before these Forums for the release of any information or communications with this game's community. Other communication means are useful, and can be entertaining, but they are, at their core, social sites. These Forums are about MWO, and when it became clear the Devs were using other means to support the flow of information about MWO and leaving the Forums to pick up the scraps (as well as relying on Forum users to keep the Forums up to date), that was when I (and probably others) decided the Forums were no longer important to the Devs except as a secondary support site to those other social sites (i.e. to let people discuss or vent about the actual 'real' game activities on Facebook/Twitter/ect.).
If these Forums are to be truly made back into the source and primary engagement point of the players in the game, it needs to be treated that way by those who are responsible for their existence. Do that, and cease relying on third-party sites many of us don't visit, and you'll have the participation here that seems to be the goal of this reorganization.
My opinion.
EDIT: I do think going from one extreme to another is not a good thing, either. I'm hoping there will actually be sub-forums for things like Mech Builds (maybe combining Loadout, Weapon, Battlemech, tags into an Engineering subforum) , News, and Gameplay (combining Gameplay, Maps, and Balance items). A General Discussion area should be for discussions that don't clearly fall into a specific category or are not about a specific item/battlemech/map. Just throwing everything into one General Discussion pot smacks of a desire to generate chaos instead of improvement. It's not hard to have sub-forums -and- keep a 'General' section that is open to catch the odd posts that might touch on multiple subjects as well. It's not 'either complete restriction on discussion topic or none'.
Trying to control and manage all discussion by coming up with specific topic sections and removing any possibility to discuss other things was the problem with the former version of the Forums, including having too many sections to try to regulate everything. Trying to over-generalize by combining too many threads that are clearly about different specialized discussions is a possible danger to the new one. Everything in moderation, as they say. I suggest some sub-forums for those discussions that are clearly related, and one over-arching General Discussion open area to catch everything else ( in other words, the best of both worlds).
Edited by Jakob Knight, 14 April 2014 - 02:50 PM.