As someone who for the most part just searches 'New Posts' when I visit and doesn't really worry about the categories it seems like maybe we are just making this much more complicated than it needs to be. I don't want to put words into anyone's mouth but I am getting the impression the concern is that those who want a historical discussion only forum want it primarily so they can discuss tips and approaches for doing things and are concerned it is getting cluttered with 'dynasty type storytelling posts' and will further do so now that fictional is lumped in with it. And I think that probably makes good sense as I know from a couple of searches in the historical section for 'how-to's' I can get bogged down wading through a lot of dynasty-thread like posts.
We already have the Dynasty thread which to me is a catch-all for all storytelling whether it be historical, fictional, modern or a combination of all of the above. When the Historical Simulations category was first added I thought it was pretty redundant to be honest- just based on the way it is described with
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Historical Simulations Discuss historical simulations and their results in this forum.
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Maybe the wording is the issue as to me that sounds like an invitation to talk about your personal career saves just like the Dynasty report has always been. If the goal is to share tips and ideas on to accomplish different goals and a place to answer user questions to improve their historical sim experience would it not be better to alter the title description of that to remove the 'dynasty type' posts? I can see it making perfect sense then to keep the historical and fictional aspects together but for ease of searching divide it into two sub-forums (Historical and Fictional)
So the Dynasty forum could stay unchanged - unless perhaps a slight description change to maybe change the word 'Dynasty' to something else if there are truly a large number of people (and I am not sure there are) who think of it only as building a powerhouse team and not a catch-all for sharing stories about your OOTP world leagues.
The new combined historical and fictional section should perhaps remove it's reference to discussing 'their results' as that to me sounds more like a dynasty forum topic.
So in summary maybe it is as simple as leaving the Dynasty forum as it is and making just a slight wording change and the addition of 2 sub-forums similar to the many sub-forums in the mods section.
OOTP24- HISTORICAL & FICTIONAL DISCUSION - Discuss how to get desired results out of historical and fictional OOTP leagues
with sub-forums
HISTORICAL - share ideas for optimizing your historical play experience
FICTIONAL - share ideas for optimizing your experience in creating and maintaining customized fictional OOTP worlds.
With this setup I would think at that point the main Historical & Fictional Discussion thread would be a catch-all for asking questions and sharing general ideas that apply to both fictional and historical games. For example, if a user wants to duplicate the real historical league structure and statistical output progression but with fictional players it would be discussed here.
The sub-forums are more for dedicated historical-only questions (like why use recalculate over the development engine) or Fictional-only questions (like how do I set my league up with teams in multiple nations but only allow players from certain nations on each team).
In my opinion the dynasty topic should not be split up. I think most who visit it read multiple types of dynasty reports and having them all together makes it less clicking to find ones with new posts added to it. To me all historical and fictional dynasty type writeups should go there along with the modern-day dynasty reports as well. I enjoy reading the random-debut and other recaps done in the historical section from OOTP23 but often miss them if I go straight to the Dynasty report section instead of checking new posts.
I also think (but maybe I am of the wrong opinion) the historical and fictional discussion threads should be for sharing ideas and asking for help and not another spot to write about your personal historical dynasty, (which belong in the dynasty report section in my opinion) and I can see a lot of "here is what happened in my last sim" type posts clutters it up and makes searching for a particular topic a little more difficult. Just my .02