‘World Of Warships’ Forums Shutdown: The Great Community Rework [Opinion]

As you might’ve heard, Wargaming has just very recently shut down the official World of Warships forums. As of this writing, no one can post anything to the forums, and it’s just 3 months away before WG shuts down the servers altogether, deleting everything on said forums. This is just my opinion on the matter: but I believe that WG is just sick and tired of their own community. They don’t want to have a community anymore. Or rather, they don’t want a community that is capable of disagreeing with them on anything. Thus, I believe we can accurately call the forums shutdown “The Great Community Rework”. Here’s my reasoning on the subject:

World of Warships Forums Shutdown: The What

Wargaming (WG) announced both on the official World of Warships website and on the official forums that they were shutting down said official forums on July 25, 2023. The shutdown would begin 3 days later on July 28, 2023; when WG removed all ability for users to post posts. You can even check for yourself on those official forums. You can no longer log in to the forums. Any attempts to do so will take you to a password request page in which you cannot type anything. You can still read the posts on the forums until October 31, 2023; at which point, WG will shut down the servers for the forums entirely.

Note the timing of the dates. WG gave all World of Warships forum users 3 days to react to the shutdown, and 3 months to archive everything. This is important for what I’m about to argue next.

Red Flags All Over the Place

The first red flag for this latest decision by WG is the fact that there was no warning about this. You would think something as big as the official World of Warships forums being shut down would get at least some warning to the player base beforehand, right? But no. WG didn’t even so much as make a peep about this before they just suddenly sprang that announcement to the game’s community. It’s almost like they wanted to shut down the forums with absolutely no warning or protest until it was too late.

The second red flag is how little time WG gave between that announcement and the removal of any ability to make posts on said World of Warships forums. 3 days is not enough time for anyone to make anything more than initial comments and reaction to it. In fact, there’s almost certainly a large proportion of the player base that missed out on posting their final messages to said forums because of how little time WG allowed for it.

Combined with the 3 months WG gave to archive everything, you begin to see a disturbing pattern here. It’s pretty clear that WG not only doesn’t want the World of Warships community to respond to this sudden decision of theirs, but they also want to severely limit the community’s ability to archive anything that can be used as evidence against them. A lot of the evidence for WG’s past miscommunications and wrongdoings are on those forums and are just going to get deleted because of this shutdown. Gee, it’s almost like WG wants to sweep everything under the rug and pretend that it didn’t happen.

But What About the Other Forums?

The third and most damning red flag is the fact that WG isn’t shutting down any of its other forums. The World of Tanks forums is still very much active with no indications of any shutdown imminent. You know, despite the fact that it’s just as popular and populated as the World of Warships forums? Even the World of Warplanes forums are still active despite the fact that practically no one is even playing the game.

This one fact alone should tell you that WG’s reasoning for shutting down the World of Warships forums is a big lie. WG insists that their reasoning for this shutdown is, and I quote:

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.

If this is the case, then why are the other World of Games not getting the same treatment? Why is WG singling out World of Warships as a target here for forums shutdown? The problem is that WG offers no explanation for this whatsoever beyond the obvious lie above. Thus, we can only speculate as to WG’s true intentions for this shutdown. Alas, even the speculation paints a pretty iffy picture as to what’s really happening.

WG and the Great World of Warships Community Rework (Speculation)

For years now, WG has continually alienated its community time and time again. It started with the Puerto Rico dockyard debacle back in Christmas 2019 and only got worse from there. It reached a fever peak when almost their entire World of Warships community walked out of their Community Contributor (CC) program over a combination of WG’s hyper-aggressive and extreme monetization of their game, and their relentless harassment and gaslighting of one of their own and best CCs: LittleWhiteMouse. All the evidence of their wrongdoings (which WG blamed continuously on “miscommunications”) are in those forums. Alas, all that evidence is going to disappear soon.

The fact that WG is moving all the functions of the forums to the official World of Warships Discord channel hints at the true goal of this forum’s shutdown. See, Discord is great for a lot of things, but discussing things isn’t one of them. Discord only shows you the latest post in response to a discussion and not the initial topic that prompted the discussion in the first place. Thus, it’s very easy for the initial point to become lost in a sea of responses. To the point where you can really only see the replies to the replies.

This works to WG’s advantage. By moving all discussions to Discord, they not only are able to use bots to automatically control the discussion and shut down anything they don’t like, but the very act of discussing anything becomes very difficult to the point of impossibility. Thus, WG creates the conditions for a new community. A community that they hope to shape into something that will better attract new players for World of Warships. Again, this is pure speculation though barring any official explanation from WG. Feel free to take it with as many grains of salt as you like.