Wizards Shutting Down Their Forums


4th Edition

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Gorbacz wrote:

The (dis)advantage of Facebook is that most people aren't anonymous there, making posting stuff like "when I read feat X it felt like the designer slept with my mother, why wasn't he fired yet???!!!" slightly less encouraging given that your own mother may read it and your actual real life friends might discover just what kind of jerk you are.

On the other hand, it makes it possible for your mum/husband/boss/kid to see that instead of being a serious adult person, you are a man/girl-child playing with toy soldiers in your basement. Which will likely discourage many people, given the fact that our hobby is full of insecure introverts who don't quite enjoy the inherent extrovert narcissism of social media.

At the same time, Paizo boards allow for PbP, have several features missing from Facebook (spoiler tags, dice rollers) and well, they're Paizo's property, so they can police it the way the see fit and have all those nice boilerplates such as "all things posted here belong to us" or "unsolicited material won't be read" that help you out if you're in this kind of business.

And on the top of it all, there are all those people who kind of wish computers and IT in general never evolved past glorified calculators, and getting them to interact with you using all those newfangled...

I agree with all of your points. I think it is great the Paizo forums exist, however I am quite sure Paizo would keep on trucking without them. I still however don't see this as a major issue for Wizards who to me seem to be on the rise. Good points about the adoption or otherwise of IT amongst tabletop gamers.

Horizon Hunters

Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I was honestly always disappointed with their (WotC's) forums. There was next to no developer interaction or clarification, and I received no enjoyment for ever being involved. I haven't logged on in ages and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. I enjoy Paizo's forums and the interaction Paizonians have with the playerbase, things work here, and I feel at home here.

In my opinion if WotC's devs and employees will take part in discussion on twitter? Go for it, more power to 'em. There's not a lot of room there for more than question and response, however, and I don't see them becoming involved in other social media so... yeah, it's not a huge change when you really get down to it.


I have a theory, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense, but can I just throw it out there?

See I work for a government sub-contractor at a category 2 nuclear facility, there are about 800 employees and a whole room full of procedures, and the last thing you would ever see happen where I work is anyone "multi-tasking" everyone has a specific job,and that, when they even actually do work, is all they will ever do. But the project was built by a private British Engineering firm (took us about two years) and during construction things were very different indeed

So I imagine that once upon a time, WoTC was a small company and the girl in charge of media releases might also have been responsible for keeping track of the office supplies, running software updates for the companies computers, as well as going down to the UPS store to pick up packages - and she was a vice president!

Then Hasbro comes along, and restructures the "Department" along corporate efficiency lines - everyone has a job to do, annual employee reviews to conform to, and procedures for every little thing. There is no way that an employee in the D&D proof reading department will ever, ever, be employed as a Forum Moderator (allowed up to fifteen minutes every couple of hours to pop into the forum and take a look at how things are going, even talk to some of the members).

Not true for Paizo, a small company with every, and I mean every, employee often showing up in these forums to add their two cents (Even Ms. Stevens comes around occasionally!)

So, with any attempt to even have a company forum at any Hasbro related site, you are just going to see people hired to "police the forums" who might not even care about, or even understand the discussions taking place - IT employees who are bigger fans of NASCAR than RPGs

basically what I'm trying to say is running a forum, for any hobby based interest, in my opinion requires that those running the show have their heart in it

I don't think their heart was in it.

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