: As I said, there's a lot of negativity in that thread. We've bashed our heads
: together over and over and over again about how spectacularly incompetent
: Sarah Palmer is. Petra's choice of defensive pistol sparked pages of
: outrage and debate about how stupid it is to carry a revolver in the 26th
: century. But we still come and talk about Halo. Hell, all the news that
: has been posted on this forum I first heard about on that thread.

: This forum may be dying out, but it ain't because of the negativity.

You're right.
NeoGAF is famously negative about Halo but they keep talking about it (or they did the last I knew) and presumably a lot of them keep playing it.
There's a site I go to that discusses games a lot (really it's a section just for games) and has it threads for a bunch of different games. The ones for Destiny have a lot of negativity but they're among the most active and there's also plenty of positivity, people looking for groups, speculation, even lore discussion. The Halo threads got more negative and less active (starting when, I'm not sure) until around the beginning of this year-- now no one even makes a Halo thread any more. There was one during E3, and it's the only I've seen in months and months.
It's not negativity that hurts, it's apathy.