WotC shutting down its community forum

[tenbones]

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/wizards-coast-community-forums-be-shut-down-2015-09-16

I'll stipulate their reasoning, but I suspect the non-stop hand-wringing and shitlording by the "fans" is an easier reason. Plus - why pay money for someone to run them when they can post their PR in short bursts on Twitter etc. and not have to delve into them.

I still think it's a shame tho.

[Omega]

Doesnt surprise me really. Hasbro has been tightening WOTCs leash gradually and phasing out various things for WOTC and themselves. Couple of months ago they announced they were phasing out their board game manufacturing fascilities and moving to outsourcing or somesuch.

That and if the boards have been flooded with the loons any recently then WOTC may be reaching the breaking point. Mearls and a couple of the others have expressed disgust at the various things the so-called fans are doing.

[Willie the Duck]

I'm not up on what the so-called fans are doing, could you be more specific?

[ForthrightRay]

I honestly cannot recall the last time I visited the WoTC boards. I believe it was to find out details about the Gamma World rules released during 4E.

I never went to the forums to find out about the new 5E products. The press releases and product descriptions for online vendors were enough to keep me informed. The focus on char-ops and complaints during 3E gave me a bad impression of the forums long ago.

[Doom]

I'm not up on what the so-called fans are doing, could you be more specific?

Agreed. I'm very curious what "shitlording" is.

[Omega]

I honestly cannot recall the last time I visited the WoTC boards. I believe it was to find out details about the Gamma World rules released during 4E.

I never went to the forums to find out about the new 5E products. The press releases and product descriptions for online vendors were enough to keep me informed. The focus on char-ops and complaints during 3E gave me a bad impression of the forums long ago.

Was pretty much the exact same for me. Poked in to glance at 4e D&D GW. Was turned off that. Though the forum then was relatively tame. The 3 and 4e oddites then did not ping as much for me though as I knew nothing of either system at the time. But still felt... odd?

[Omega]

I'm not up on what the so-called fans are doing, could you be more specific?

Now? No idea.

Around when 5e came out and even during the NEXT playtesting there was some bad behavior. After 5e came out and certain factions saw Zak and Pundits names in the books they flipped their wigs and hounded Mearls and others to the point Mearls was saying some rather unflattering things about them and 4e fans in particular.

Id thought that had all died down by now.

[Iron_Rain]

That's too bad, there was some really good discussions I enjoyed on their forums back in the day.

[JRT]

Honestly, it's just changing times IMO.

I remember when TSR and WoTC had their own "Newsgroups" and ENWorld was rec.arts.dnd (or whatever it was).  I remember when e-mail lists were the primary means for communication and forums were brand new concepts.

Forums are slowly becoming outdated.  Younger people are more used to Facebook and Twitter, and I know that G hangouts were used to faciliate a lot of table-top games.  Reddit is become the way to interact with a lot of developers and famous people.  And many folks have their own blogs or tumblrs.  It might not make sense for a company to pay moderators, maintain the servers used for them, etc.

There are advantages to forums over other communication mediums, but there were more advantages to newsgroups (NNTP) than forums, but that didn't stop forums from winning the format war.  I think this is a sign of things to come.

[Lynn]

I have heard from a number of publicly traded companies that they dislike hosted forums because it gives a way for outsiders to have a bit too much influence. That doesn't stop a lot of American companies who curate the bad stuff out of their forums, but maybe Hasbro just doesn't want that expense.

[Philotomy Jurament]

I can't recall the last time I was on WotC's forums.  It's no loss at all, as far as I'm concerned.

[Omega]

Could be the first battening down for the announcement of 6th ed in 2019. :banghead:

[Bedrockbrendan]

When they closed one subform over there about a year or so ago, En World got flooded with new posters who had a....unique posting style. I don't know how indicative they were of the whole forum, but it left me with the impression that the WoTC forums were probably best left unvisited.

[Tahmoh]

Surprised they lasted this long given the amount of toxic bile pretending to be posts they have on that board.

[Ratman_tf]

I think I've been to the official forums a handful of times., and never registered there. So I'm not going to miss it as I rarely used it.