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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KirayaTiDrekan" data-source="post: 7681091" data-attributes="member: 6755061">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.</blockquote>

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