[UPDATED] WotC To Close Forums - Including D&D and M:tG (aka "Welcome New Forum Members to EN World!

WotC has announced that it will be closing its forums, which they refer to as a "former foundation of our community". The forums will close on October 29th. Of course, WotC's forum members are welcome here at EN World (although the expectations are a little different, so please do check the rules if you sign up!) The forums have been around for nearly two decades, in various incarnations, but WotC cites the rise of social media platforms as the reason for the closure.

Here's the announcement in full.

Choosing to retire a former foundation of our community was not an easy decision, but we feel that we must adjust our communications structure to reflect where conversations about Wizards of the Coast games are taking place.

Social media has changed significantly over the last ten years, and discussions about games aren't exclusive to company-hosted forums. The majority of community conversation takes place on third-party websites (such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other fantastic community-run websites), and it is up to us to evolve alongside our players.

We encourage past and current users to retrieve any information you want to retain from the Community Forums for both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. The shutdown will occur on October 29, 2015, at 10:00 a.m. PT. We want to provide enough time for our forum members to move their content, and we recognize that given our forum's vibrant user base and extensive history, this may take time. Any information still on the forums on the cut-off date will be deleted.

Thank you to all of our past and current forum users. You helped build our community into what it is now, and we look forward to continuing to interact with you on our many active social platforms.

WotC's Trevor Kidd had a little more to add.

"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. Moving away from running our own forums doesn't mean we think longer conversations or fan sites/forums aren't good or necessary. They are both good & necessary. From what I'm seeing, they flourish and you enjoy them more when they are run/managed by fans.

DnD & RPGs in general are all about story telling & talking with friends. It makes sense that we want to share those stories. So, it's vital that we have places to share those experiences & stories, like forums & fansites. But it's not vital that #dnd run those.

Closing our forums does not in any way lessen our interactions. We'll still be talking & lurking in your social media & fan sites. And the idea that forums are going away because dnd &/or magic are doing poorly - that's ludicrous! Both are doing very, very well.

We'll still be talking with you here, and elsewhere. Enjoy your new forum homes and don't forget to migrate your treasured content!

On the topic of losing forum content - it's tough, I agree. Once we knew we were going to close the forums, we also knew we weren't going to maintain the community site indefinitely, so we opted to pull the band-aid off quickly rather than let it linger."

Welcome to new members!

If you're a refugee from WotC's forums, you are very welcome here. You can register here at EN World by clicking here. You'll find out community busy and vibrant, and generally welcoming. We've been here over 15 years now, and there is tons of useful content here and lots of great resources which you're welcome to explore. These include:

• Forums.We have forums for 5th Edition, Homebrews/Houserules. Character Builds, Older D&D Editions, Pathfinder, and more.
• Gamer Search. The world's largest gamer search database: find roleplayers near you!
• Downloads. There are thousands of items in the downloads area, including hundreds of character sheets.
• Features. Useful features like the D&D Pronunciation Guide, Hot Games Chart, D&D Product Schedule, and a history chart of the game.
• Reviews. A system which collects and aggregates reviews on the latest products. For example, Out of the Abyss is currently trending at 79%!
• News. And, of course, constant daily news on the news page, all about tabletop RPGS, including D&D! There's no better way to keep up with what's going on!

(Announcement spotted initially by Critical Hits on the Twitters).

 

[Morrus]

. I believe they shut down the MtG forums in order to take some of the focus away from the D&D forums closing.

Now, now. MtG is ten times the size of D&D. If anything, the reverse would be true. As it is, it's exceedingly unlikely that either was shut down to "take focus away" from the shutting down of the other.

 

[Corpsetaker]

Now, now. MtG is ten times the size of D&D. If anything, the reverse would be true. As it is, it's exceedingly unlikely that either was shut down to "take focus away" from the shutting down of the other.

You could be right.

Edit: Just had a thought. Maybe the Wizards forums actually affected the game overall more so than the MtG boards so they figured removing the boards wouldn't hurt MtG in the slightest while helping D&D.

 

[Leatherhead]

It seems quite a few of the forums I used to go to are shutting down or missing now. Makes me feel old~

 

[Mistwell]

It seems quite a few of the forums I used to go to are shutting down or missing now. Makes me feel old~

I still went to a BBS for about 6-7 years after the Internet became popular

 

[skraig1]

WotC is very small guys. I think less than 20 people. They have only so much time to allocate to each part of supporting the D&D brand. I suspect but have no proof, that they are choosing to not spend time moderating the message boards and focusing on other social media. (Twitter, Facebook, whatever comes next)

Skraig

 

[Morrus]

It seems quite a few of the forums I used to go to are shutting down or missing now. Makes me feel old~

My basic strategy is to just outlast everyone else without selling to a corporation.

 

[Jester David]

WotC is very small guys. I think less than 20 people. They have only so much time to allocate to each part of supporting the D&D brand. I suspect but have no proof, that they are choosing to not spend time moderating the message boards and focusing on other social media. (Twitter, Facebook, whatever comes next)

Skraig

I assume you mean the D&D team and not all of WotC.
But they're also closing the MtG forums and that brand team is huge.

 

[KirayaTiDrekan]

The WotC community has been on a steady decline for a number of years.

Once upon a time, I was Crazy Monkey - first a VCL and then part of the community team.

In 2007, the forums were at their height when Gleemax hit the scene, along with a new community management team. Several changes took place, including several that alienated many of the forums' core contributors, such as the shutting down of Knowledge Arcana, the community fan magazine. The first mass exodus took place at that point as most of the 3.5 era Character Optimization crowd left and formed their own community. The Community Manager of that era was let go shortly after Gen Con 2008, but the damage had already been done.

Gleemax was a disaster, as most folks know, and was quietly shut down around the same time. A new community platform was introduced at the beginning of 2008. It featured many of the features promised by Gleemax, without the baggage of the Gleemax branding. Groups became a thing and many of the Play-by-Post communities made the move to Groups, though those that didn't died off. 4E also debuted, which escalated the edition wars exponentially. The WotC community gained a reputation for being toxic at that point, driving away more users.

When the D&D Next playtest was announced, the edition wars took another turn for the worse. 4E fans were already disgruntled due to the waning support for the edition after Essentials and the failures of D&D Insider. While the D&D Next playtest brought an influx of new users, it was nearly matched by the exodus of 4E users. And then there was the OTTer incident. The Off-Topic Tavern (OTT) was, as its name suggests, an off-topic forum. The regular users of that forum started to rebel against things like the no poliltics/religion rules, with a few becoming outright hostile toward the rest of the community and the community management team. They used the groups function to form their own private area from which they could plan trolling attacks and harassment campaigns. Rather than attempt to ferret out the ring-leaders (who used multiple sock-puppet accounts to get around bans), the higher-ups decided to ban them all and delete their private group.

That was the first wave of "refugees" who landed here at EN World.

Another change in forum software resulted in a loss of some functionality in the groups section. This resulted in the play-by-post groups dying off completely. On the Magic side of things, entire sections of the forums decided to migrate elsewhere due to the second forum "upgrade" - Flavor and Storytelling, Deck Building, and Duels of the Planeswalkers users all packed up and left, making the Magic section of the WotC community a ghost town except for a couple of specific forums.

The only truly active area of the community by this point was the D&D Next playtest. The community management team dwindled, either leaving the company or being let go, until there were only three of us left. When the playtest ended, I was let go as well. The forums limped along after that, slowly losing users, not in a mass exodus, but trickling away nonetheless.

The shutting down of the forums is thus the logical conclusion of a series of events that began in 2007, with Gleemax.

 

[Remathilis]

Interesting, this is a Magic: The Gathering fan forum responses: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/...3170-wotc-is-closing-the-forums-on-their-site

The contrast between that thread and this is striking.

ENW: "Noooo! D&D is dead, the sky is falling!"

MTGS: "Huh. Surprised they didn't do it sooner."

 

[was]

... I originally left the WoTC boards due to the lack of moderation, and the lack of civility from many of the posters. I hope that they do not bring such behavior here.