D&D 5E Trevor Kidd tweets on the closing of the Wizards forums

Evenglare · Sep 18, 2015

MerricB said:
Here's what Trevor Kidd recently posted on twitter about the closing of the Wizards forums, edited only for formatting:

"I could hop onto all the forums having this discussion or I can say it here and let it disseminate. I'm choosing the former. ""

...
Does he know what former means? It's usually coupled with latter meaning former is the first option while latter is the second...

melichor · Sep 18, 2015

Evenglare said:
...
Does he know what former means? It's usually coupled with latter meaning former is the first option while latter is the second...

He meant 'farmer'.
Plant the seed and let it grow...

WotC_Trevor · Sep 18, 2015

Yeah, that was me being dumb and once I got it going I didn't want to delete the tweet and replace it. I should have said latter. I'm not sure how we'll recover from such an egregious error, but I think we'll find a way.

Corpsetaker · Sep 18, 2015

I'm A Banana said:
I suppose this is just proof of what they're saying - they tweet and it gets out to more places than a post in their own forums ever did.

Not really.

Anything of importance that would be posted on the Wizards boards made it here anyway. I don't buy the whole "social media" is better avenue because if Wizards hadn't of been involved with Gleemax and actually made an effort in having a great forum then people would flock to there. Using Twitter and Facebook is just cheaper, not proven to be better.

Tia Nadiezja · Sep 18, 2015

Yeah... WotC dropped the ball here. A running theme of my understanding of 5e-era WotC is that they have the best designers - and by far the best game - D&D's ever had, but their corporate structure, outreach, and community engagement are a horrible mess. The closing of the forums is the most recent example of this - before that came the Sword Coast book (whose marketing copy specifically mentions using it for Rage of Demons) being banned for Rage of Demons characters in Adventurer's League play.

WotC's forums should have always been the go-to place to engage with the devs. You're on the site wanting to look at D&D, talk about D&D, and give feedback about D&D, but the actual people involved in making and running D&D were nowhere to be seen.

cmad1977 · Sep 18, 2015

WotC_Trevor said:
Yeah, that was me being dumb and once I got it going I didn't want to delete the tweet and replace it. I should have said latter. I'm not sure how we'll recover from such an egregious error, but I think we'll find a way.

Clearly you are new to the internet. Your error is a clear sign that WoTC is crumbling as a company. Run for the hills everyone! dungeons and dragons is gonna die!!

Umbran · Sep 18, 2015

MerricB said:
Right, [MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION], I have the beginnings of a Windows program that looks at a page on the Wizards forum and converts the post text to BBcode. Currently it's working on url links, bold and italics. Woo! Unfortunately, the Wizards forums seem to be offline just at present, so further development will have to wait.

I was wondering how long it would take for someone to figure out how to script it

I'm A Banana · Sep 18, 2015

Corpsetaker said:
Not really.

Anything of importance that would be posted on the Wizards boards made it here anyway. I don't buy the whole "social media" is better avenue because if Wizards hadn't of been involved with Gleemax and actually made an effort in having a great forum then people would flock to there. Using Twitter and Facebook is just cheaper, not proven to be better.

How do you measure "better?"

When you're communicating with a broad audience, the better communication is typically the one that reaches the most people with you having to do the least amount of work to reach them.

Social Media was *made for that noise*, so it's pretty good at it.

The WotC message boards were not as good at that as social media (or ENWorld) is.

So if the goal is to reach more people, it follows that they'd ditch the message boards and use social media, even if this means giving up some people who use boards but not social media. That marginal group might not be worth the investment it'd take to reach 'em.

Corpsetaker · Sep 18, 2015

I'm A Banana said:
How do you measure "better?"

When you're communicating with a broad audience, the better communication is typically the one that reaches the most people with you having to do the least amount of work to reach them.

Social Media was *made for that noise*, so it's pretty good at it.

The WotC message boards were not as good at that as social media (or ENWorld) is.

So if the goal is to reach more people, it follows that they'd ditch the message boards and use social media, even if this means giving up some people who use boards but not social media. That marginal group might not be worth the investment it'd take to reach 'em.

The Wizards boards weren't good because they let it fall asunder. Social media maybe good for getting the one sided message out, but when trying to discuss it, not god because it gets buried very quickly and it's very difficult to keep certain categories in separate sections.

It's actually funny the excuses we are getting. All they had to do was coordinate the forums, twitter, and Facebook to act together where Facebook and Twitter was to get the message out while the forums were a place where people can have discussions and hang out. The fact is they are limited in employees and therefore don't have enough people to keep it going, nor the funds to invest in a better forum. Has nothing to do with forums being a thing of the past or social media is somehow better.

It's like me owning a restaurant, never cleaning it, and then closing it because people stopped coming with my excuse that people don't really eat out anymore.

Morrus · Sep 18, 2015

Corpsetaker said:
The Wizards boards weren't good because they let it fall asunder. Social media maybe good for getting the one sided message out, but when trying to discuss it, not god because it gets buried very quickly and it's very difficult to keep certain categories in separate sections.

It's actually funny the excuses we are getting. All they had to do was coordinate the forums, twitter, and Facebook to act together where Facebook and Twitter was to get the message out while the forums were a place where people can have discussions and hang out. The fact is they are limited in employees and therefore don't have enough people to keep it going, nor the funds to invest in a better forum. Has nothing to do with forums being a thing of the past or social media is somehow better.

It's like me owning a restaurant, never cleaning it, and then closing it because people stopped coming with my excuse that people don't really eat out anymore.

I assure you that the migration of people from forums to social media is not a WotC issue. It's a widespread evolution of the way people choose to communicate online. It affects every message board on the planet.