I'll just paste what I said in the other thread about that mentioned Bay's response.

Quote Originally Posted by Duelle View Post
This is very poor reasoning. If this is a place for the community to come together, then there needs to be something to allow off-topic discussions (or just general gaming). Each of us plays and sees much more than just Final Fantasy XIV, and if anything it would allow community focus to remain here rather than spread it throughout various sites. Not to mention that as a community it would also allow us to help each other out where possible.

WoW's forums happens to have a general gaming/hardware sub-forum, and amidst talking Skyrim, Megaman being abandoned by Capcom, and other MMOs and how they're faring compared to WoW, you also have immensely helpful threads like the primer a poster made for building a PC from scratch, along with several threads asking for OS, anti-virus and hardware advice and people trying to help and give advice as best as they can.

Sure, you run the risk of it turning into something like that trollfest known as Allakhazam's assylum sub-forum, but meh.