Yesterday, I said in MOP’s work chat that the New World team deserved kudos for being one of the few major MMO studios pumping out weekly videos with the top devs. Well, I’m about to crush that goodwill for the core MMO audience, as last night Amazon announced that it’s shuttering the game’s forums in favor of Discord, a situation MMORPG players, at least, generally hate. (“Detest” was the word used by one MMO player when we ran a piece about this trend a few months ago.)
“With the launch of our official New World Discord along with the features, functionality, and accessibility for players we have made the decision to embrace Discord as our primary engagement platform for New World moving forward. To help us add as much value as possible to our Discord server, we will be sunsetting the New World forums which will allow our staff to focus on providing quality engagement opportunities in a central, and easily accessible platform.”
Posting to the forums ends May 1st, though they’ll be left open to read. Amazon also promises “growing [its] presence on the New World subreddit.”
Predictably, the MMORPG playerbase isn’t handling it well; one thread calls it a “horrendous, vile mistake.”
We’ll be genuinely sorry to see it go, as the dev tracker was terribly handy for quickly sorting out dev responses to the latest chaos, as well as for linkability and findability. Discord is nice for ephemera, but as a forum replacement, not so much.
