Learning from sunsetting of community forums in favour of Discord and Reddit

🧠 Forum Collective
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I saw on the Discourse forum the mention of sunsetting a forum in favour of Discord and reddit.

The comments are learning opportunities for us community builders

You can see in the reddit comments and analysis from members, that most don’t seem happy.

For me, it’s interesting to go through the comments that we could all probably use as learning:

Discord doesn’t have exact search, it’s an absolute hell for live support. Nobody, not even the server owners, can index it without pulling the data into another program. It’s absolutely garbage for this.

Bad move, we’ll lost German / French section. Discord seems English only.

If this isn’t a red flag that’s fine. The others weren’t to you either. But it’s an overal negative sign that a game closes a forum they willingly launched with. Which means they saw no point in them any longer.

I think that’s still scary, because it implies that Amazon is reducing the budget/infrastructure of the Games division as a whole.

You can’t archive Discord posts… not easily anyway. Really wish companies wouldn’t do this…espicially “small independent studios” like amazon

Well that is one way to get less comments!

They ban pretty overzealously in the official discord. Most of the people who typed in the forums would be banned lol

They IP banned me from their new Discord server on day 1. 2 hardcore fanboys/trolls were saying stuff that was too far from the truth. Stuff like: “You can easily run NW on a PC from 2012 with no issues”. “NW would have 5 mil players if it went F2P”. I said to these guys: “I wish I was this delusional” and they threw me out without any warning. I got IP banned to this day for that lol

All MMOs have a forum. If I’m told I have to go to a discord channel I’m going to think this game is some weird private server not an official AGS product and legit MMO

Wouldnt be surprised if in a year we hear about a diferent sunset

While I agree with the idea that AGS should focus on centralizing their hubs for communication and player interaction, I’m not sure the Discord server is going to be as useful as the official forums were. For things like Bug Reports & PTR feedback, the Discord currently doesn’t seem well-suited for those purposes, and I think it’s much less accessible than the forums are (I know a lot of people don’t like that you need to give Discord your phone number for verification before you can comment in any of the New World channels).

I dont mind having less places where to search for info but Discord aint build for potentially thousands of ppl having long term discussions, it’s way more suited for short chit-chat and easy gif/imagine posting.

Definitely not in the minority on this one. Discord is just not well suited for what the forum currently provides. It’s going to be an absolute mess.

the forum is very confusing for me and if they go to discord its gon be mayhem

This game is doomed

Good forums are asset to the game and community. Unfortunately NW forums were a total mess with so many problems that it boggles my mind that AGS people thought it’s actually working.

It’s probably for a better. One main reason: security. I never saw any gaming forum before connected to the payment account. People were told that if they want to close NW forums account they need to delete their amazon account. Can you even believe that? Crazy. Now NW discord demands mobile number which is also a security problem. Someone obviously didn’t think when made both of those decisions but it wouldn’t be something new.

Now, I’m no gamer and I know nothing about this community, but if you’re planning to make a move to Discord, from this experience we can learn that we should prepare ourselves:

  • whether the functionality exists for current forum behaviour
  • for how members will feel
  • whether people will start to worry about the future existence of the product/community
  • if accessibility for certain demographics will become a problem
  • etc

Of course, we could also potentially learn from the positives, like maybe the cost saving is just worth the hassle of not having something as comprehensive as a community.

Now imagine what we could learn if we followed each one of these stories of forums/chat shutting down and gathered insights. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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I have been digging into this a bit myself. One thing that I am noticing is that gaming communities are starting to close forums in favour of Discord when things start getting toxic. Rather than handling the toxicity in a healthy way and attempting to change the behaviour, they drop everything and move to a platform that is more ephemeral, meaning they can ignore the negativity. At least that’s how it appears from the outside.

Note: I’m not specifically talking about New World – I haven’t dug into this one yet, but it seems to be a general pattern.

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And where a big forum has been sunset there is a post about it by Luke:

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When I was working for NCsoft in my first forum job cough years ago there was a trend in the gaming industry that one of their studios jumped on of not having your own forum for a MMO and instead annointing a few fan run forums as “approved”. This strikes me as a similar knee jerk kind of thing, as it can be sold as a way to solve the “forum problem” rather than doing the work of community management.

NCsoft also made a similar choice to shutter their small but passionate european language communities for their MMOs. I believe the assumption was that “well everyone will just join the english language one”. That went down with the community like a lead balloon.

My personal experience with Discords is that they’re difficult to follow actively if you’re a member of more than a few as they move pretty fast. And forget being able to search for hints & tips via a search engine as all that info is behind a Discord login. Basically what Luke said in that post :slight_smile: