Yup, a lot of the old mods used to be an extension of the community, now they are KaW’s version of a Mall Cop who takes their job too seriously… There’s been an influx of older players the last few months calling out how badly the forums have been run into the ground, specifically on this thread, so prepare for it to be locked soon because Lord knows the devs can’t even bother to see suggestions from the players.
another part of the problem is now the mods don’t even care. not much community engagement from them in the times ive popped back into the game for a week or so the past year or two. sad times, but the fact is the game a lot of us forum nerds grew up on didnt adapt the way we would have liked. i think its a mixture of both mods and devs no longer caring and the players who cared growing up.
i am way behind but i actually asked the devs about this, and from what i understand it wasn’t cost related it was the fact that the “old forum” was simply outdated or in their minds wasn’t compatible fully with newer updates of the game. this forum was what i believe was being tested in kingdoms of heckfire during the beta and when i was asked my thoughts on it i told them it wasn’t going to translate well if you’re looking to bringer forumers from KAW and PIMD over. oh well
Honestly that doesn't make much sense. I dont remember exactly but they were similar to vBulletin or PHPbb forums which are updated regularly. They weren't the prettiest forums but they worked phenomenally. Regardless the forums are a separate entity from the game are they not? Not sure how they would be tied to game updates.
Pretty sure the forum was PHPbb, and the devs chose not to enable certain features of it despite updates and requests from forumers.