I think the biggest issue with Era these days is that there are no actual experts. Nobody knows WTF theyre talking about.
Go to a railroad enthusiast forum, and you have people with 40 years of railroad experience. People who drive trains. People who lay tracks. People who work in the corporate office. There are people there to learn, yes, but they ask questions, they dont post like theyre experts. Thats not to say everybody is right, but at least they're pulling from real-world experience.
Same is true in a forum about theme parks.
Same is true in a forum about AV equipment.
I assume the same is true in forums about cars or postage stamps, or whatever other hobbies people have.
Era doesnt have that. Nobody there works at the ESRB. Nobody there works at any developer of note. The closest ties to the industry involve working a minimum wage job at Gamestop.
It's even worse in OT. The people who post in Poliera proclaim themselves experts, but they dont know shit. The people who post in the World Cup thread apparently started watching the sport last week.
It’s no different than Gaf. Take away Wikipedia and they got nothin
10 years ago, GAF had actual industry people though. Real developers. Real publishers. Even "journalists" like Jeff G
They chased them off.
I know quite a bit about the game industry(TM) myself but REEEE just has a habit of chasing people off.
Like I would say: "Diddy Kong Racing 2 was in development" and someone would quote my post and put 'RUMORED" in front of it in bold.
"FIXED IT FOR YA"
I responded with actual assets of the game (that I happen to have collected ages ago) and I get back: "WHAT ARE WE LOOKING AT?"
We used to have this cool club of people who would share stuff of games in development, especially Rareware Xbox prototypes. :'(
But there was now this kid that was considered 'TEH EXPERT' and it was 'HIS THREAD'. Thread ownership is especially the worst.
Sure we may occasionally get something wrong but the debate was just so toxic.
I remember posting that I expected Super Mario Odyssey DLC. And someone started spamming my DM's to say I was spreading fake news. That Nintendo had said there would never be ANY DLC and speculating that they might do that would hurt the games sales.
A week or two later, they come out with some form of DLC but obviously that didn't count because it was free and not paid DLC.

They're just not fun people to be around.