BioWare closing most community forums
If you frequent the BioWare forums, you better sit down.
Over the weekend, the publisher explained that everything outside of the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums will be shut down. That includes Mass Effect, Dragon Age — everything. The closure is expected to roll out on August 26, and will transition into read-only capabilities until October 25. So if you have some awesome enlightening post about the ending to Mass Effect 3, back it up before that latter date.
Having spent some time in there during the launches of Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3, I’m surprised it took them this long to shut the place down. To be honest, I’m not sure why studios decide to create community forums for their games in the first place as they often descend quickly into madness.
While most of the boards have been pretty peaceful in recent months, it’s hard to forget some of the terrible things that came out there even just a year or so ago including threats of violence, harassment and more targeted at BioWare developers, writers, etc.
Talk about open discussion all you want but when 90% of the things you read on a message board are negative, hateful messages to the writers, developers, or whoever else they felt had wronged them, it’s not worth the time, let alone the maintenance and server costs. There are plenty of other places online to discuss your favourite games in a respectful way with proper moderation.