Quote Originally Posted by JTWrenn View Post
People happy with a game play it. People unhappy with a game forum.
I just don't think that should be the case, and I think that mindset is a loss to the value of what a forum could or should be.

When I start liking a thing – game, TV series, whatever – I seek out the forum for that fandom as a way of engaging with other fans about the thing when not playing it. For every other thing besides this game, that lands me in a community of people who primarily like the game and want to talk about it, or hang around and help new players with questions. (I have literally spent years regularly visiting forums for a game you can clear in ten hours.)

Maybe it has shifted over time and forums have gone out of fashion. Maybe it's an attitude in MMOs specifically, where the game continues on infinitely and you don't reach a point where you're finished but still want to talk about the game. Maybe all the positives have trickled away to other places like Discord or in-game chat and I'm just stuck here going "back in my day..." but a forum doesn't have to be just the place you come to complain. It can (or perhaps could, before social media fractured it) be the place where fans gather and talk about what they do and don't enjoy, and a thriving community like that is going to be a more valuable tool for the devs to understand the mood of the fandom.

If people came instead of, or as well as, Reddit and Twitter, I think that would be more powerful than either. I've always preferred the forum structure of keeping all posts in order and not leaving it up to social media algorithms to decide whether pieces of the discussion are visible or not. But to be really useful, it needs the full spread of community voices.