Wizards of the Coast recently announced the closing of their Community Forums. I haven't read their forums in years and rarely go to forums in general, but there are folks that just use forums for their gaming news and interactions with other gamers.
Even if, as WotC says, that the majority of the community conversation is taking place elsewhere, I suspect a sizable amount of it was happening on the company's forums. This is simply cost cutting, plain and simple, but I suspect part of the cost will be a loss of traffic to the WotC site.
Instead of trying to build a community, they'd rather cut it loose.
I know few if any of The Tavern's readers frequented the WotC forums, but it's still a shame to see them shut down.
When they should be looking to build up their loyal gaming community, they end it.
This puzzled me a little. Does this mean there isn't going to be any sort of official outlet? Is there even an official Wizards FB page, or Tumblr, or whatever?
ReplyDeleteAs someone who went over to the WotC forums often in the hopes of finding interesting topics and ideas, I have to say this doesn't surprise me....it wasn't quite a graveyard, but the community on the WotC forums was anemic and had a fraction of the interaction you see on other sites like ENworld.
ReplyDeleteI was going on a regular basis. It was the only reason I'd go to their page.
ReplyDeleteWOTC killed a lot of forum traffic with the Gleemax debacle years ago, then followed it up with the revamp that was suppose to make the forums look more like any other kind of social media outlet other than forums. And all of that was after they had already cut lose their fiction forums because they didn't do a good job of policing them and trolls ran off all of the book authors, who would no longer participate there.
ReplyDeleteTranslation:
ReplyDeleteWe suck at doing community, therefore we don't feel the need for community.