The Rise (and Fall) of KaW Forums - My Perspective

Please note that this is totally and entirely an opinion based post. I could be sorely mistaken, but I do feel that I have a good and fair amount of knowledge on the subject.

So, let’s discuss it. The Rise (and fall) of the forums.

To begin with, I will state that I was not around during the days when forum clans and such were a thing. I joined in end of 2010 myself and by that point everything was consolidated into clans, clan chat, and all of the 3rd party comms apps one could have.

By 2011, Kingdoms at War was at or close to its GLORIOUS peak. A bustling world chat, one of the top games in the app store, an awesome web version, and a bustling forums section.

Fast forward to now and you see random spurts of actual conversation in world chat, the game is I think probably somewhere on the app store, but not anywhere close to a top game, no web version, and essentially a dead forum presence. (i’d be shocked if this got more than 5 replies in 30 days).

What happened?

Since I don’t really feel like dragging this on forever, I will be focusing on the decline of the forums and how I believe it’s directly related to the decline of the activity of the player base.

Let’s start.

Point 1.) Moving from the previous forum provider and layout.

Now, I know there’s some people out there (myself included) who actually prefer the way the forums LOOK now. It’s more modern, organized, and has a lot more functionality to it than the previous black, blue, and white forums.

However, two major flaws exist with this change which will be listed in the following points.

Point 2.) Expecting a player base of this “age” to be able to understand/accept change was farfetched to begin with. It is no secret that the average age of KaW players is on the higher side. Even the youngest of us like myself are in our Mid-Late 20s. Social media programs have learned from this mistake time and time and again, attempting to create massive changes at 1 time, as opposed to a soft and slow rollout of changes, can and does hinder the user experience.

A game like Kingdoms at War, which THRIVED due to its rarely seen social aspects, essentially obliterated 1/3 of its social side. Not a great look. There were some players I know personally that genuinely only played KaW for the forums and social aspects (I am one of those people). Forums helped us connect in real time if we wanted, but also allowed us to pause and think before we connected.

I did a brief run and looked through the forums of all of the other games. Do you know what I noticed? All of the newer games that never had the previous forums version, the forums are as dead as they are in this game. Do you know the one game that’s forums actually kind of thrives? If you guessed the only other 10+ year old game with an active player base with a much younger average age, PIMD, you’d be correct.

Very interesting.

Point 3.) Removing the ability for the forums to be viewed within the KaW app. Now, it may come as a shocker to some, but the fact that you USED to be able to read a forum thread while still seeing WC and looking at your newsfeed was… pretty awesome. It meant that for those in OSW, you could watch for hits or strips, chat with people in WC, and surf forums all at once.

Removing this, yet again, separated 1/3 of the social aspect of this game and distanced players even further from forums. Not great.


Those are really the major 3 things forums related that I feel have caused the game to essentially crumble socially.

That is all. Much love.