finarvyn Wrote:I think it's a shame, if for no other reason then because I hate to lose any boards where I might have fun discussing gaming. On the other hand, since they took the old school section and dumped 3E/4E into it (because it's all out of print) I have found a lot less interesting content there. It's the same issue as when Dragon magazine closed its doors -- most of the good stuff was long gone and the concept was better than the reality.
I got frustrated by a few of the changes that happened to the Wizards COMmunity Boards over the years.
The dump-merging of the out-of-print campaign setting forums into a single Other Worlds forum was a shock to me, but after Havard invited me over to The Piazza (which was specifically set up in response to that) I found that I enjoyed the atmosphere over there so much more than the atmosphere back at WotC that I posted more posts at The Piazza in a year than I had posted at the Wizards COMmunity Boards/Gleemax in ten years.
I didn't even notice that 3e and 4e were "dumped" into the old school section, but it makes sense. They
are old school and people who "refuse to move onto 5e" are grognoids.
I do however think that different rulesets need to have individual forums. If someone asks about a "bless" spell, they want to know about how it works for a specific ruleset. But you can achive that sort of thing with subforums and have your main forum being one for the "current rules", if you are a publisher.
finarvyn Wrote:Actually, years ago when they made the d20 CoC section go away I was pretty bummed. Maybe that was the beginning of the end.
I wonder if they needed to remove that section for some sort of legal reason. :?
I think the Wheel of Time section of the forums was removed for a similar reason. :?
I think this is where independent forums have an advantage over official forums. Firstly, there is no economic incentive to favour new rules and new settings over old rules and old settings (so a forum admin does not need to bury anything to give other things more focus). And secondly, there is no inherant legal reason why a forum needs to disassociate itself with abandoned product lines.
As someone who got invited onto the admin team for The PIazza, I'm very happy that the owner started to add support for things that the Wizards COMmunity Boards/Gleemax never had support for. The Blackmoor forum over there has never been as strong as The Comeback Inn (and with The Comeback Inn being able to specialise and make subforums for multiple ways to play Blackmoor it probably will always be second place) but it's rightful that a general D&D community
has a place for people to learn about Blackmoor.
I think the fact that WotC never had forum support for Blackmoor is a great shame. If I could go back in a TARDIS and have control of the WotC forums, I would definitely have put a Blackmoor forum into the Other Worlds area and I definitely would have let the fans have the vote to make an "official Blackmoor fansite". (My personal choice would of course be Havard's site, but the other official sites were all apparently voted on and it would only have been fair to give the fans the same choice with Blackmoor.)
I don't know the licensing deal for the 3e Blackmoor books (and for the organised play games) but better integration with the WotC forums would have led to some people who were unsatisfied with Forgotten Realms and Eberron looking into Blackmoor. And an increase in Blackmoor fans would have led to an increase in PHB, DMG and MM books. So it's a win all around.
However, it is what it was. And I don't have a TARDIS.
At least with The Piazza, people can work on specialist Blackmoor fan projects and drop links into their Piazza forum signatures and use The Piazza to raise awareness of things like fan netbooks for Blackmoor. I don't think it was quite that easy for people to work with the WotC forum staff, as they were restricted in what they were allowed to do.
finarvyn Wrote:Recently I got the impression that posters wanted to fight about gaming instead of discussing it rationally. I'm sure that was a factor in WotC's decision.
As a Spelljammer fan who quit playing 2nd Edition AD&D and then got dragged back to play D&D in a Forgottten Realms forum, my main question, when I arrived on the Wizards COMmunity Boards over ten years ago, was to ask if anyone was working on 3e material for Spelljammer.
I got a lot of badwrongfun comments directed at me back then. I don't think the fights were something that WotC were encouraging, but they seemed to be unable to control the troublemakers.
I'm sure that dumping their forums has meant that they don't need to hire a bunch of people just to deal with the fact that some grown men think they are entitled to be darn rude to other grown men.
And the great thing about independent communities, like this one, is that they are something that is there to help fans...not something that fans are entitled to control. So if a few badly behaved people come in and decide to have "fun" causing problems for other forum members, the owners can have words with them and...if necessary...exclude them from the discussion.
It isn't good to see people being thrown out of any community, but I think it is necessary to be able to exclude spammers and trolls in order to allow everyone else to have a chilled out conversation.
Aside from the people having "Edition Wars" I also think that the "WotC eats babies" brigade was a major factor in the forums being shut down. Rather than discuss D&D (or even argue about D&D) these folks have dedicated themselves to spreading bizarre conspiracy theories suggesting that Wizards of the Coast have an evil plan to drive D&D into the ground. I realised several years back that time spent interacting with the "WotC eats babies" crowd was time
not spent talking about D&D. In other words, anti-WotC discussions take away from my gaming pleasure and are not in my interest.
I think these folks were attempting to create bad PR on the WotC forums and I think that was probably a factor in the forums getting deleted.
So I'm onboard with your assessment there.
finarvyn Wrote:Anyway, I'm bummed by their decision but I hardly ever go there any more.
I'm disappointed too, because I met some really awesome people there and the forums were a record of our discussions.
I spent time trying to organise a rescue effort, to try to salvage some of the stuff there. I'm still not 100 percent sure how much stuff was saved or how much time it might take to make it available to the public, but I totally empathise with what WotC might have been thinking.
I don't agree with it, but I can see their point of view.
The fact that you can have this forum, that specialises in just one D&D campaign setting, is proof that there is a need for forums like this. I don't know if the lack of "opposition" at WotC has led to the
Facebook "Likes" for The Comeback Inn going up above 200, but it's great to see support for Blackmoor growing at a time when WotC thinks that forums have had their time.
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