Back in the good old days of gaming of 2011, back when BioWare was blowing people’s minds with the Mass Effect trilogy, they had community forums. A place where fans of Dragon Age and Mass Effect could gather and speculate about what happens next. Or, pester the developers for whatever romance they believed should be in the next game.
And then, after the release of Mass Effect 3, they promptly erased their forums and moved all discussions to Twitter. This effectively silenced many discussions, because by nature, Twitter is an algorithmic beast that prioritizes only certain things.
With the collapse of web2, Twitter especially, I wonder if they might bring those forums back.
BioWare, if you’re reading this, bring back the forums!
What bothers me most about such decisions is that I am denied access to the official discussions (and sometimes even the tech support) of the product I paid for, unless I’m willing to maintain yet another online account and accept the third-party platform’s terms of service. And those terms are always invasive, designed for that third party to get away with collecting as much information about me as possible.
Discord is another common one. It’s a sure-fire way to lose me as a customer.
If businesses don’t want to host their own community-facing tools, they should put them on an open platform that respects users’ privacy.
Honest question. Where do you draw the line and why? Because I do not believe that you can make full use of almost anything you paid for in this age without relying on / utilizing a third party.
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Want to get tech support for a game? You might have to use Twitter/reddit/Discord
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Want to have your hardware repaired? You’re very likely to have to use some post service unless there’s a repair shop you can drive to.
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Want to get tech support via phone? You definitely have to use a phone carrier as third party middle-man.
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Want to use the internet on your phone? Definitely need to use the infrastructure of some big corporation.
So I must ask, if you draw the line at “requires a third party service to receive support”, is it because of the third party in question specifically?
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Can they bring back making games worth playing first?
I think movement to some sort of social media is pretty much inevitable. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where the forums are more active than reddit/twitter.
Paradox, for example, still maintains advertises their forums but lots of players still congregate in the subreddits instead.
If you’re looking for any discussion, Twitter is worthless. It’s a jumbled mess of an endless stream of algorithm-based random thoughts and ragebaits. No searching, no browsing, reading it is some idiotic quote-at-the-bottom atrocity, and its interface and limitations are hate-inducing.
I don’t understand why anyone would use this, apart from companies promoting products or giving updates about projects.
With the death of Reddit and the absence of a Paradox community on Lemmy, I’ve actually switched to the Paradox forums.
Lemmy could be a great place to restart this communities
I don’t have much of an opinion on the bioware forums, but man - it’s crazy to think about this period as the collapse of web2. I mean, I’m aware of it, but somehow, giving it that title seems so real.
The online spaces I’ve spent most of my time in are collapsing, and all that’ll be left is the shambling, soulless husks of bankrupt cryptocurrencies. I guess we can just go ahead and skip straight to web4?
I’ve been in mourning lately over this
If they are dumb, they bring the forums back in form of Subreddits. If they are smart, they bring them back in the Fediverse. Using Twitter as a discussion platform is a dumb idea. The most likely thing that would probably happen is, they bring discussions to Discord…
Oh boy, the odds are not good. Too many shiny alternatives to fail and only one way to make it right.
I just want a phpBB forum ☹️. So tired of services like discord being used as a “forum”.
Remember that this exists.
That really does give some warm fuzzy vibes.
Oh, that’s nice! I miss the simpler times of phpBB forums. I always thought conversations were much easier to follow in that from.
Ugh, never liked phpBB, vBulletin or Invision were always far better. Of course, tapatalk managed to ruin them all with their invasive integration that foolish board owners insisted on accepting.
The forums I frequented were mostly based on phpBB. I remember the vBulletin name, but can’t say I remember Invision. There were so many great forums out there back in the day. Sad to see most of them seem to be gone now. Although I like services like Lemmy, things just seemed easier back then. Maybe I’m romanticizing the “old” days😅
BSN is the unofficial fan forum for BioWare related content these days. I quite like it. Rarely, someone from BioWare drops in and leaves a comment so BioWare does monitor what fans are saying.
BSN
Do you have a link? BSN DDG search isn’t giving me anything relevant.
Yes, of course, here you go!
No way. Forums should never be run by the people the forum is discussing, for the same reason that newspapers should never be government-owned.
Right. Instead they should be run by someone like u/spez or Elon Musk. That’s so much better.
Do you understand the difference between owning a forum and running it? u/spez isn’t moderating /r/bioware. This isn’t about who should own these forums, but how they should be run.
I do agree with your general point but there are some niche use cases, like how Paradox uses their forums for posting long-format updates and patch notes. That being said, the only use the paradox forums get at all is pretty much restricted to those long ass patch notes, and they could just as easily post them anywhere else
Apart from posting announcements, news, and patch notes (which can be done on a blog) I don’t see the benefit of an “official” community these days. Fan-run forums have been a thing for decades. More recently the likes of Reddit, Twitter, and now federated alternatives make it really easy for communities to form and be discovered.
Personally I think game devs/publishers should be spinning up their own federated instances (e.g. Mastodon or similar) on their own domains to make announcements on. Let communities form naturally.
Dev studios spinning their own instances would be cool, but you mention Reddit and Twitter, both of these websites are on the way out, dying, and that’s the sole reason I feel like BioWare should bring back their forums, because Twitter is the reason they deleted them
This place grew pretty large when the official forums closed: https://bsn.boards.net/
Probably more focused on regretting making Anthem and Andromeda, haha.
In all honesty though, no, the company they are now is a far cry from the one they were then. Newly sold to EA only a few years before that, still had a lot of the “old guard” who made the great games great and hadn’t undergone enshittification at the hands of their capital overlords searching for dollars from fomo and GaaS.
