In a lot of ways the forum existed separately from the game. It used to be a lot of low stat, highly active users that didn’t participate in the grind that a lot of others did. To be honest, they didn’t really need to grind for gold because stats weren’t super inflated then. You could say that it slowly took a turn because a lot of the forumers were younger and started working, went to college, etc. Although I think that was a contributing factor, I believe what really changed is that the devs started policing any kind of off topic posting. I never really found that necessary because the forum community was its own little ecosystem that policed itself. It used to be that if a thread was bad then the forum community would derail it, and then it would eventually get lost in active topics. If a thread was good and got derailed then it only took a post or two to get it back on topic. A lot of the original moderators understood this and would give a lot of slack before they would lock something. Eventually at some point new moderators were chosen who didn’t actively participate in the forum and would lock the threads they didn’t like or that had been off topic for a few posts. Also, they changed the rules for posting and a lot of the stupid silly fun people had was suddenly against the rules. Anyway the policing got worse and it got to a certain point that popular threads would be graveyarded without notice whenever the devs made a new announcement. For example, if ashes of Eden made a funny thread and people are actively posting on it all week, and a few days later the devs released a new EB that only the top clans could even attempt, then the devs would graveyard that thread. In a lot of ways the forums died because some of the devs and moderators chose to kill it. This was the only place outside of clan chat that you could actually talk with someone you didn’t know (recall ads in WC were insanely frequent and your message would be gone in seconds). Anyway this is just what I observed.
