If the OW forums were to disappear, I’d be gone from the discussion (and miss quite a lot of the game news) too.
I’ve a strong dislike for Reddit (and it seems I’m not the only one) for various reasons; Twitter isn’t a place for discussion, and in Discord everything relevant gets lost rather quickly between all the chatter, no matter how well segmented the channel is. I also think that a game company should have an official line of communication and platform for conversation - to give an easy way of finding info and conversation for fans and hopefully devs too, to have a place for official answers and info, and a place for conversation about their product that they can keep under their ToS. It could be something else than a forum, but nothing else gives the same kind of opportunity for longer-term conversation.
If there isn’t an official channel, it makes it seem that the company has little interest in people’s opinion about their product (whether it’s true or not). In addition, it makes it rather difficult (or at least unnecessarily complex and high-effort) to find a reasonably moderated and reasonably large place of socializing with other users, at least when you don’t already have a connection to the playerbase. I also find it weird when there’s an official channel and the company doesn’t use it (like seems to be the case with Blizzard and OW) - it also shows to me that they don’t have significant trust in their own system, or that it doesn’t fit their needs, or that they think it just isn’t worth paying attention to.
I could understand when a smaller company just makes it the easy and cheap way, and assigns an official subreddit and/or a Discord channel as their official comms channel, but a company as large as Blizzard needs the better structure that a separate platform can offer, and can certainly afford it.
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So basically, your saying but then I’d loose my power
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Bethesda is the last company Blizzard should follow.
I agree with that. Bethesda and its partner ZeniMax has to develop its own deal if it wants its MMO, Elder Scrolls Online, to survive and thrive in the MMO world. Same with Blizzard.
Blizzard and Bethesda should not follow each other, they should each develop their own deal with their games and let the consumer decide who is better.
But without these forums, what am I supposed to do? go outside? 
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Aaaannd I just learned my LEGITIMATE post complaining about B.O.B.'s “tail” on “Red Hood” Ashe skin was removed by staff because “the community” flagged it as “trolling”. Congratulations for you, children, now you can go to sleep.
If anything this event only further strengthens my realization born when my post complaining about the far too obvious homage to Jair Bolsonaro (Echo’s Spray “Finger Guns”) was also taken down by the same reason: Blizzard community does NOT deserve its forums.
I really hope Blizzard extinguishes its forums someday, sooner than later. I hope Activision Blizzard realizes this thing here is less and less worth the trouble.
I mean no disrespect, captain, but you calling folks “children” and you in a separate thread “daring Blizzard to put these unpopular 5v5 changes on an Experimental Card” and calling out the devs isn’t helping your case for staying on the forums. If anything, it’s giving mods more reason to give you a temporary vacation from the forums starting Tuesday (I would say Monday, but Monday is Memorial Day and Blizzard is likely giving everyone except Intern Ted that day off, so…).
Whatever, I am only bothered about my posts getting deleted. I make the posts for Blizzard, not the players.
weird deflection
what does “being afraid to spend an extra buck to look polished” have to do with me saying its not a big step above reddit to just pick a out-of-the-box feature complete + already polished (and in the case of discourse, sometimes convoluted) software and use that like blizzard did
Discourse isn’t a service, it’s a software package. It’s no different than stuff like vBulletin and phpBB. This distinction is important because actually writing your own forum software is a gigantic waste of time unless you’ve got some really off-the-wall goals.
Almost everyone with official forums uses some kind of software package for it. On the spectrum of “DIY to just letting someone else do it” it’s a lot closer to the former than the latter.
I’d even go so far as to say a company with its own forum software that didn’t also launch it at least a decade ago is a huge red flag. It screams of an NIH culture.
i know, i didnt think anyone would care too deeply about the jargon tbh
dont get caught up in the semantics, in context my point was that it’s not hard to set up a forum, it’s not exactly a “you’re putting in a lot of effort to do it” type thing if youve already got developers… with how much of the heavy lifting is done for you these days i would go so far as to say setting up a forum is only marginally harder than setting up your own subreddit
there is a stigma that companies are lazy if they don’t do everything themselves which is a bit ironic considering most of them don’t even do the majority of their self hosted stuff themselves 
I wouldn’t mind this happening and it would eliminate a lot of ridiculously bad ideas that are repeated by what it seems to be a hive mind.
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Because then they will be dependent on that service working correctly all the time and if something happens to it, that will affect them as well and they have no control over it.
If it is there just as an extra (like it is now we have reddit, twitter etc on top of the forum) then that is fine even if one of those shuts down for some reason you still have the forum that is maintained by blizzard themselves.
The twitch and YT OWL rewards are a good example of 3rd party service that is not working correctly and blizzard not being able to do much about it because they don’t have direct control over it.
Bioware did the same to their forum five years ago. The immediate response was the creation of an unofficial one instead. The downside has been that a lot of forumers (clear majority) disappeard an never came back, but on the plus side a lot of toxicity and troll posts disappeard as well. The fan moderation is infinitely better than the mods we used to have on the official forum, and the topics are more relevant. Ironically, while still not a lot, the devs actually interact more there now than they did the last year of the official forum.
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well for your sanity let’s hope blizzards contract with discourse let’s them receive a permanent copy of the codebase in the unlikely event that discourse shuts down soon, and that they fully intend to not migrate to an actively maintained alternative… because blizzard is still licensing out an important part of their forum 
but i digress
i get the angle of wanting to be solely responsible for your projects uptime, tho it’s a bit of an absurd angle when you’re talking about something so non critical like a forum. maybe if it were about their auth servers or something lol
i just don’t get the lazy angle
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With all the scrutiny Activision Blizzard is going through on these days I wouldn’t be surprised if Administration decided to terminate these forums soon enough…
But if they remove the forums
Where am I supposed to hear bad takes and give bad takes for the funsies?