Wargaming closes down World of Warships Community Forum, choses Discord as replacement

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

Summary

Wargaming announced that it will shutdown its World of Warships Forums in all regions (NA, EU, SEA; RU unclear as it was split off several months ago) on the WOWS website, intending to move the community over to Discord. Posting new content will be disabled on the 28th of July, only three days after the first announcement, with the forums intended to stay in read-only mode until October when they will finally be shut down.

 

This was negatively received by an what appears to be a majority of the active forum users, many stating they do not intend to join the Discord server. The forums not only serve as a hub for community discussion, but also contain a large number of other resources like technical discussions, new player guides, as well as community reviews of premium content in the f2p game like premium ships.

Forums also have been the place of many heated discussion and controversies regarding in-game events and holiday sales, among the "Makarov gate" controversy about allegedly false advertising on holiday loot boxes and a large scale walk-out of community contributors.

 

Apart from the closure of the forums, the decision to chose Discord as the main community platform to replace the forums has been a highly contentious point. Many players feel that Discord cannot replace a structured forum with already several years worth of content.

 

As of now, this only affects World of Warships, Wargaming's other popular titles like World of Tanks have not announced any plans to close their forums. Community managers denied any connection to cost cutting measures, instead quoting a "general state of decline with regards to the level of engagement they receive and the number of people who interact with them."

 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

Dear Captains,

For a long time now we’ve been following different behavioral trends in our game community and the games industry in general. One of the most notable is in the ways players interface with various platforms, communicate with each other and with game publishers or studios. This was exemplified particularly by a general migration from the forums to Discord and similar community channels. In addition to the above, our forum infrastructure has also aged quite significantly over the years, so we have decided to lay this particular platform to rest. Starting on July 28, 2023, we will begin the process of closing the regional forums by removing the ability to post. Your posts and the posts of others will remain accessible until October 31st, 2023, at which time the forums will be fully shut down.

We understand that it can be hard to adapt to new community platforms; however, this end only signals a new beginning, as we’re now transitioning our communication and activities to our dedicated Discord servers. Discord may seem daunting if you prefer a more structured environment, however rest assured we feel that the Forums features in discord can be utilized to accommodate that form of discussion and our Community Managers will strive to deliver that experience to the best of our abilities. 

We believe this move will enhance your experience and bring our community closer together. Now, we're here to guide you through this transition.

What Is Discord?Why Should You Join Our Discord Servers?Discord Welcome PackageHow to Join Our Discord ServersNeed Help?

---

What Is Discord?

Discord is a communication platform designed specifically for communities like ours. It allows for real-time chat; voice communication; and the sharing of text, images, videos, and links. It's like a combination of a forum, chat room, and conference call—all in one.

---

Why Should You Join Our Discord Servers?

• Discord Drops: As a member of our Discord servers, you'll gain access to exclusive Discord Drops. These are special rewards that you can earn simply by being part of our community on Discord.
• Direct contact with World of Warships staff: Discord allows for more direct and immediate interaction with World of Warships staff. You can ask questions, share feedback, and get support much faster.
• Regular events and activities: These include game nights, tournaments, Q&A sessions with developers, and more!
• Peer-to-peer help: Our Discord servers are a great place to get technical or gameplay assistance from other players. Whether you're a new player looking for tips or a veteran with a tricky question, our community is here to help.
• Find players for Divisions: Looking for players to join your Division? Our Discord servers have dedicated voice channels where you can find other players to team up with.

---

 

My thoughts

This moves comes quite surprising, especially considering the 72 hour warning period before enacting the read-only mode. Like many forums the WOWS forums contained a lot of discussions, dedicated threads for mod development/release or clan/community recruitment. Many in-depth discussions on history and ship design, as well as how potential new in-game vehicles could look like were also part of the forums.

Many good and very valuable content for the community will potentially be lost with the final shutdown in october.

The Forums have also been a place of vocal critics against design decisions by the developers, as well as the place of controversy with various infamous in-game events.

 

Most surprising to me though is the decision to use Discord as the replacement, which I feel is totally not suited for the type of discussions and content usually found on forums. Hopefully this does not become an industry trend.

 

Sources

•  https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/community/forum-shutdown/
• https://forum.worldofwarships.com/topic/268018-forum-shutdown-–-july-28-2023/
• https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/topic/170816-wows-forum-shutdown-on-july-28th/
•  

 

 

[Shimejii]

just another thing for cost cutting. Discord is truly dogshit for this kind of thing, but most devs dont actually use much of the forums at this point for their games.

[Qyygle]

More like the absolute train-wreck of recent developer decisions (submarines, CVs, mines, superships, etc.) have led most of the playerbase who actually used the forums to abandon the game in general. The quality of posts already took a nosedive with the old CC walkout after the fiasco with LWM.

Lots of players have complained recently that the quality of matches have dropped, aside from the base balancing issues. Almost like the experienced playerbase is leaving and games are filled out with new players or whales that haven't learned basic game mechanics.

 

The studio may have moved out of Russia, but evidently you can't take the Russian out of this developer. Their solution is to just have no forum. Da comrade, no complaints, see?

 

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

13 minutes ago, Shimejii said:

just another thing for cost cutting. Discord is truly dogshit for this kind of thing, but most devs dont actually use much of the forums at this point for their games.

Are the costs of a forum that much higher compared to a Discord server? I can't image that a forum that was already running for several years couldn't just be put in maintenance mode, it's not like they needed to constantly add new features. And Discord most likely isn't free either.

Even then, weird to me that they just try to move one community over and not WoT and WoWP as well.

 

I stopped playing ~2 years ago, but damn is it a shame to replace working forums with Discord. Seems to be a trend though, Amazon games apparently also closed down forums and went to Discord. Though I bet not for financial reasons.

[NobleGamer]

1 hour ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

Are the costs of a forum that much higher compared to a Discord server?

Yes, they are higher than free.

 

Discord, unless they're hiding server costs to admins, only monetized individual users via Nitro, though users can give out server perks that increase features for the server.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

11 minutes ago, NobleGamer said:

Discord, unless they're hiding server costs to admins, only monetized individual users via Nitro, though users can give out server perks that increase features for the server.

OK, maybe I am misunderstanding how Discord works, but someone needs to run the infrastructure the server runs on. I doubt Discord is footing the bill for that, at least for corporate users like a game developer or company I would assume they would need to pay for some of that.

 

 

 

[NobleGamer]

15 minutes ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

OK, maybe I am misunderstanding how Discord works, but someone needs to run the infrastructure the server runs on. I doubt Discord is footing the bill for that, at least for corporate users like a game developer or company I would assume they would need to pay for some of that.

Yes, and evidently individual users pay for Nitro to fund at least part of that.  Anybody can create a server for free, but it comes with bare bones stuff unless its users pay for Nitro and apply "server boosts" to the server every so often.  Discord also makes a 10% commission as the distribution fee from all games sold through game developers' verified servers.

 

Whether Discord as a company is making a profit off of monetization of Nitro & such or whether it is sustainable as a company is an entirely different story, but they are a private company, and they've gotten some huge funding on occasion like $500 million 2 years ago.  So they'll get run just like any other private company: Keep getting more funding, get completely bought by another company, become publicly traded on the stock market, or eventually go under.

[Thaldor]

It's not a year without Wargaming managing to anger their playerbase.

 

BTW did they went through with that EU and RU server merge on the WoT side of White Russian... Belarus... Cyprus based company? There seemed to be very little drama around that one after just few months before WG claimed they have sold everything they had in Russia or Belarus and went "Just joking, we just made it look like we didn't own anything while our owners didn't even hide that they owned everything still and now we are just making that official by making the most tonedeaf thing after burning one social media influencer on the stake over calling our piece of P2W daydream scrap bytes with names."

[SorryBella]

4 hours ago, Shimejii said:

just another thing for cost cutting. Discord is truly dogshit for this kind of thing, but most devs dont actually use much of the forums at this point for their games.

Yeah but neither does Project Zomboid yet they still maintain their forum. And The Indie Stone makes far more than what a Belarusian government backed Wargaming get in their sleep.

[shermantanker]

20 hours ago, Qyygle said:

More like the absolute train-wreck of recent developer decisions (submarines, CVs, mines, superships, etc.) have led most of the playerbase who actually used the forums to abandon the game in general. The quality of posts already took a nosedive with the old CC walkout after the fiasco with LWM.

Lots of players have complained recently that the quality of matches have dropped, aside from the base balancing issues. Almost like the experienced playerbase is leaving and games are filled out with new players or whales that haven't learned basic game mechanics.

 

The studio may have moved out of Russia, but evidently you can't take the Russian out of this developer. Their solution is to just have no forum. Da comrade, no complaints, see?

 

The LWM ship reviews were amazing back when I was playing. I have not kept up on much since said controversy but had some good times playing in the early years.

[CarlBar]

19 hours ago, shermantanker said:

The LWM ship reviews were amazing back when I was playing. I have not kept up on much since said controversy but had some good times playing in the early years.

 

Same. Hope Mouse is doing well whatever she's getting upto these days, She really was so much fun with her reviews.

[Mark Kaine]

On 7/26/2023 at 12:36 AM, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

maybe I am misunderstanding how Discord works

the people who buy nitro is how it works, and im sure they're very aware that its not just custom emojis or whatever but also what keeps discord afloat. 

[IkeaGnome]

5 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

the people who buy nitro is how it works, and im sure they're very aware that its not just custom emojis or whatever but also what keeps discord afloat. 

Not to mention the server boosts that the server has...

Spoiler

Currently Discord's net revenue just from server boosts on that server are $805 a year if all 23 people are Nitro users. It's $2.99/month for Nitro users to boost, and $4.99/mo without Nitro. So $805 if all are Nitro, $1,380 if none are Nitro.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

13 minutes ago, IkeaGnome said:

Currently Discord's net revenue just from server boosts on that server are $805 a year if all 23 people are Nitro users. It's $2.99/month for Nitro users to boost, and $4.99/mo without Nitro. So $805 if all are Nitro, $1,380 if none are Nitro.

Wait... so the users pay for the Discord of a developer of a game, and not the developer? Bro.... this "free to play" nonsense is getting out of hand.

 

anyway, looking at e.g. the NA forum it seems a lot people won't switch over to Discord and some will likely leave the game now, given that their community is gone. However, that is probably only a 'vocal minority' as always.

[IkeaGnome]

16 minutes ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

Wait... so the users pay for the Discord of a developer of a game, and not the developer? Bro.... this "free to play" nonsense is getting out of hand.

Yes and no. Keep in mind it's free to make and maintain a Discord server. All servers can be boosted, not just ones for a free to play game. Discord uses it as a way to offset their overhead and gives servers perks for certain amounts of boosts.

Spoiler

Users also get a "custom badge" on servers they boost.

Spoiler

 

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, IkeaGnome said:

Yes and no. Keep in mind it's free to make and maintain a Discord server. All servers can be boosted, not just ones for a free to play game. Discord uses it as a way to offset their overhead and gives servers perks for certain amounts of boosts.

  Reveal hidden contents

Users also get a "custom badge" on servers they boost.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

The mention was more about that probably sinking but still very rich company uses service that would be a lot less if the players didn't pay it for the company.

It's like a company not paying their server bills from their income but directly sending the bills to the players and hoping they will pay them.

 

But then again, it's Wargaming. Considering they did think random Youtubers as official marketing professionals because they gave them a free tank and some PR persons personal email and then going full on cease-and-desist when one of them says Wargaming's new pile of bytes is what it is...

[Battleclasp]

I despise this trend of pushing everything into Discord. It's so incredibly stupid and damaging to the internet to silo everything into a chat app that is inaccessible without being on it. Oh, you have a problem and the answer is on a forum? Lucky for you search engines can index it and point you to the solution. Is your problem something that only has a discord for documentation? Better try and find the right server, and then use the worse search interface to try and hunt down others who have the problem, hunt down the solution, or give up.

 

[RokinAmerica]

If it is like Tanks (I was a Beta for ships and planes, but have not played either much after they went live), the forum has about 34 people bitching back and forth about "is it rigged" or "your a shill", so no real value is lost.

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

10 minutes ago, RokinAmerica said:

If it is like Tanks (I was a Beta for ships and planes, but have not played either much after they went live), the forum has about 34 people bitching back and forth about "is it rigged" or "your a shill", so no real value is lost.

Well, there was quite a bit of bitching and some shilling, but also a lot of valuable discussions and even more important: a lot of helpful resources. A prominent community contributor used the forums to publish quite in-depth reviews on premium ships (there are now efforts to archive it all) as well as other in-depth analyses of mechanics. These even brought some bugs and discrepancies to light, which were then (reluctantly) addressed by WG.

Other things are all the new player guides etc.

 

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't the beacon of civilized discourse - many discussions, especially around balancing, were dominated by quite simple minds/takes - but at least on NA the higher average age of the audience really showed and you had legit communities there as well.

 

Anyway, thinking about this some more, my main questions are just: why Discord and why only three days? One from a wider industry point of view, the other specifically with the fact in mind that we are talking about WG here. What went really on behind the scenes?

[Thaldor]

3 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

One from a wider industry point of view, the other specifically with the fact in mind that we are talking about WG here. What went really on behind the scenes?

You want the hot potato, here's the hot potato: WG is dying.

Warships and especially Warplanes never got even close to the Tanks, the little they tried elsewhere dried up quite fast (like do you remember Master of Orion "remake"? Total War Arena with rock-paper-scissors tactics dried up even faster), the PR side of the company is probably still a complete mess with one hand being completely removed from the body and the second hand was lost years ago and head has no idea how to communicate even with the neck and money just doesn't come as it used to come and then the whole deal with you-know-what.

 

Probably currently the money makers are Blitz, WoT and WoWs, everything else is a sink with little to no returns or still in state of development. From the memory they have sunk so much money into extremely stupid things that probably didn't return anything, like the WoT VR that was only launched in some VR arcades which in themselves were extremely bad ideas, as said Total War Arena that died within a year, buying Total Annihilation from Atari bankruptcy and not doing anything with it while the MoO "remake" was made but it really didn't do well and with it their whole third-party publishing was doomed and buried, their huge push to make it into esports was more comical than realistic with ESL stating WoT being way too much P2W for even them and WGL events were more or less always shadowed by shitstorms about P2W tanks and Wargamings PR professionals outcomes ("It is not pay 2 win, you can either spend time to grind for the premium ammunition or pay real money for it"), the whole deal with buying rather expensive studios and then seemingly doing nothing with them isn't also good for the bottom line (like Wargaming Seattle, ex-Gas Powered Games aka. Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander developers, acquired 2013, closed 2018 and in those 5 years did publicly absolutely nothing, same as Wargaming Helsinki that was acquired in 2016 and closed 2019 without publishing anything but at least tried to hire a ton of mobile developers) and then you get the Wargaming Minsk, Lesta Studios (developer of WoWs) and Wargaming Moscow which all were sold or closed because the obvious reasons.

They tried to move at least WoT RU behind Lesta Studios alone and go with that but (as I stated previously) it was just few months and they were migrating RU servers into EU servers pretty much meaning that went as well as trying downhill skiing in summer down sheer cliff.

 

Their future is pretty shrouded, they are probably all in with at least 2 projects which do not sound very promising. Wargaming Kiyv is rumored to be working on some AAA FPS hero shooter and then the Project CW which is kind of WoT with modern tanks and even more arcade gameplay went into closed testing in June.

WoT seems to be currently in the phrase of "quickly make the last bucks and then RUN", like everyone knows the game and everyone has already tried it, the only thing they have is the old players and even they have been leaving in masses when WG brings something new to the game to try to make it more profitable again, huge changes to mechanics that please others while completely flipping off some, pushing monetization even deeper and making it even more P2W doesn't help. The little I care about following WoWs, this same has been going on over there.

 

Then again it can be just that they are getting ready to relocate and close the Lesta Studios in St. Petersburg, Russia. They are the developers of the Warships and so they probably also manage the forums and the current situation about things are what they are and doing business in the Russia while trying to be western company probably isn't the most easiest job on the planet.

[efrosean]

LWM and a host of other WG Forum regulars are now using devstrike.net which is player run. After just over a week the membership is over 500 I believe.

[Skyyblaze]

On 7/29/2023 at 6:14 PM, Battleclasp said:

I despise this trend of pushing everything into Discord. It's so incredibly stupid and damaging to the internet to silo everything into a chat app that is inaccessible without being on it. Oh, you have a problem and the answer is on a forum? Lucky for you search engines can index it and point you to the solution. Is your problem something that only has a discord for documentation? Better try and find the right server, and then use the worse search interface to try and hunt down others who have the problem, hunt down the solution, or give up.

 

This is exactly my issue with Discord too. A Discord server has its place but it will never replace a proper forum alone for the fact that I have to actively have to join a server and search-engines can't help me with anything content-wise other than telling me: "This server exists!"