[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).

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

It's nice to know that no matter what changes, something remains constant throughout the ages.

...too bad it's the doomsaying and conspiracy-worthy theorizing.

 

[Morrus]

WotC shuts down social media platform perfectly suited to discussing D&D to focus on awful social media platforms for discussing a game. All I get from WotC for this decision is "We are incompetent clowns. There is a reason our digital media offerings are terrible."

I get it. Social media is better for promotion. Forums are better for discussion and criticism. But promotion - and let's be honest here, social media is king there by an order of magnitude - is not the same animal as discussion.

EN World's core business is discussing RPG stuff. It's optimized for that, and that's how I make my living. WotC needs to promote D&D stuff. And social media is weak for discussion but strong for promotion. Discussion only makes you money if you've been doing it for 16 years and really know what you're doing. Hell, there are various people round the web who snottily proclaim that I'm doing it wrong. Maybe they're right.

We can all sit here snottily deriding the business decisions of WotC. It's what we do. It's what the internet does, and that's OK. What the internet usually misses is that the target of their criticism's goals aren't what they think they are.

 

[Treantmonklvl20]

As someone who posts on both forums, I honestly don't see much difference between the two; people here on ENworld can be pretty bad as well. People on both forums are in general good, there are just a few outliers that turn conversations into personal attacks when people don't agree with them.

Totally agree. Most gamers and posters are terrific in either forum, there are rare exceptions though, in either location.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Think of it this way - you're new to D&D or MtG. You go to the "official" fan site, start scrolling through the forums...

I'm not sure that's actually what the current generation of new players would do.

It might be that they would punch in #MTG or #DND to twitter and see what comes up, or go to the "official" facebook page for the game.

 

[Nightfall]

*looks at the post* *looks at EN World* Huh. And here I thought it would a cold day in Tartarus before WotC closed down their site. Oh wait it's their messageboards! Nevermind then.

 

[EthanSental]

I would say that maybe 5th edition just wasn't well received overall.

I would hope this was a joke as part of the post. I don't see how any logical persona, based on all the sales data, forum feedback, discussion, etc can EVER come to that conclusion about 5e.

I'm kinda torn as others have said, WoTC does seem to have more threads were I think, dang, I do I even come in here and its a downer when I do but the overall knowledge and help outshines the thread crappers.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I'm not sure why they feel the need to delete the old information rather than archiving it. Whenever a site does that nowadays, I feel like it is some great disturbance in the Force. I've just become accustomed to a culture where information, once available, is supposed to remain available forever. We have the technology. I just don't see the need for us to ever experience the loss of the library of Alexandria ever again. (Not that I'm drawing a quality comparison with the WotC forums.)

It's just really disturbing. I don't know exactly how to explain it. I know they have the right to do whatever they want with their servers. Maybe someone else who feels the same way can better explain the sensation I'm feeling.

 

[Yunru]

I'm not sure why they feel the need to delete the old information rather than archiving it. Whenever a site does that nowadays, I feel like it is some great disturbance in the Force. I've just become accustomed to a culture where information, once available, is supposed to remain available forever. We have the technology. I just don't see the need for us to ever experience the loss of the library of Alexandria ever again. (Not that I'm drawing a quality comparison with the WotC forums.)

It's just really disturbing. I don't know exactly how to explain it. I know they have the right to do whatever they want with their servers. Maybe someone else who feels the same way can better explain the sensation I'm feeling.

Because archiving it requires keeping the server running. And of course, WoTC only cares about the bottom line.

 

[Maul]

Just another thing WOTC can add to their list of bad decisions.

 

[Henry]

I'm not sure that's actually what the current generation of new players would do.

It might be that they would punch in #MTG or #DND to twitter and see what comes up, or go to the "official" facebook page for the game.

I think that's the heart of what's going on, really. The main conclusion I get from this is that WotC is having one HUGE influx of new gamers age 35 and under for whom social media is the main form of communication. For this, keeping around your own forum just is not an effective ROI.

For grognards like me and for infosec-minded people, social media just doesn't appeal very much, so we continue to see older and more individually controlled forms of media dwindle, in favor of mass cloud-based forms such as Facebook/Twitter/G+/Pinterest/Tumblr/what have you.