Stop Closing Forums For Discords, They Are Not The Same Thing

As technology advances and online communities adapt, we see it as sort of a default proposition that new sites and platforms should be better than old ones. Reality, of course, has different plans.

Take Discord. It’s a great platform! A huge improvement over older ideas and a convenient combination of a number of outdated messaging and communication services. If you want to hang out in a room with friends, somewhere where you can both write and talk, great!

Discord excels as a means of real-time communication, for people who are talking in the moment. What Discord isn’t good at, however, is being a long-term repository of information, the kind of place where you can ask a question, get an answer, and then have that answer stick. easily accessible for months, years, or even decades to come.

So it sucks that companies keep shutting down forums, which are great repositories, and trying to move those communities to Discords, which are absolutely useless. i said this in 2021 when Bethesda didI said it again in 2021 when Eurogamer did. I said it last year when Gearbox did it and I repeat now in 2023. You have to stop this shit. These are apples and oranges.

The latest company to make the mistake is Amazon, which made the decision to shut down the New World and Lost Ark forums, and move those communities wholesale to Discord. Here’s how the decision was announced on the Lost Ark forums:

As we continue to explore new and amazing opportunities to meet and interact with our players, there will be times when we evaluate our current ways of engaging players. Forums are a venerable staple of online gaming history and have served as the primary point of contact for gamers and developers for quite some time. With the launch of our official Lost Ark Discord along with the features, functionality, and accessibility for players, we have made the decision to adopt Discord as our primary engagement platform for Lost Ark going forward. To help us add as much value as possible to our Discord server, we will be ending the Lost Ark forums, allowing our staff to focus on providing quality engagement opportunities on one central platform and easily accessible.

Our plans on Discord are constantly evolving and we will seek to utilize the platform to the fullest. We will find ways to have engagement opportunities that encompass all aspects of Discord such as live voice, gameplay streaming, live chat, and threads. It will also provide easier and more intuitive access to community-managed initiatives such as group search, guild promotion, and more.

You’ll also find that we’re investing some time in growing our presence on the Lost Ark subreddit, so be sure to keep an eye out there as well.

What does this mean for forums now?

Starting May 1, we will remove the ability for users to post to forums, but will keep them visible so that any type of content users want to save is available to them. During this time, we will catalog all historical comments left by players, ensuring that the sentiments and comments left are not lost.

Once this process is complete, we will remind you one last time that the forums will finally be closed, in which case our URL will be redirected to our Discord 2.7k and other social media pages.

Thank you all for your continued passion around Lost Ark! We look forward to you all joining us on our official Discord. There are many great ideas we will be working on to help grow the Lost Ark fandom that our teams are excited to roll out for everyone.

See you in Arkesia!

No! So many things you said there are bullshit! And anyone who has used both a forum and Discord knows this! Forums aren’t just a place where people can make initial contact with a developer, they’re places where someone can ask a question, get an official answer, and then have that answer easily searchable for thousands or even million people in the future. Discord, even with its recent “threaded” featurejust isn’t nearly as good at it.

What sucks here is that the fans don’t want it, this has been made clear many times (also in this case, as seen in PC Gamer’s collection of negative reviews), but it just continues because companies probably see it as a way to save a small amount of money and resources.

It’s very amusing to know that big publishers spend hundreds of millions on marketing but can’t keep a forum open. Very healthy industry. Carry on, everyone.