Dominions 3 no longer available from Shrapnel?

[Soyweiser]

This is unexpected. Edi, could you ask shrapnel if we could get a warning if the dom3 part of the forum is suddenly closed? We would like some sort of archive of it. It still contains a lot of unique game information.

[Edi]

I don't expect much to change here. The Space Empires 4 forum is still active despite Shrapnel not having been selling that game for years now. Many other forums have simply been archived.

I know that not everyone here is a great fan of Shrapnel and some of their policies, but in this instance an instant shutdown of the forums would not be in their interest in any imaginable way.

[PsiSoldier]

Yeah the Dominions 3 Forum I am sure generates a lot of traffic for their Shrapnelgames website so it wouldn't make any sense to close a forum that attracts business..

[Soyweiser]

That totally depends on the conversion rate per unique visitor. I would not be surprised if they are running a loss for the dom3 forum.

[Gandalf Parker]

People who come to forum.shrapnelgames.com tend to do well for Shrapnel Games. People who have a link that takes them straight to one forum tend to have a different view of how busy, or effective, the site is. Seeing the full days activity on the entire site says things are going ok.

As Edi said, the standard has been to not take down a forum as long as no one is burning bridges. Some uncarried games still beat out Dom3 forum on the scoreboards. And they do generate sales now. A while back a forum format change made sure that some of the screen is ad space and news space even if people are skipping the sites main pages to jump directly into the forum. At the time it made a lot of people mad but its been a good move.

But I am with others in saying that I am not impressed so far with the 3 sites that Illwinter put their other game on. Possibly a fan site can help by providing something more comfortable.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

But I am with others in saying that I am not impressed so far with the 3 sites that Illwinter put their other game on. Possibly a fan site can help by providing something more comfortable.

The Desura forum software has a very barebones functionality and it works for that. It's also fairly fast. It's not as feature rich as this forum or the basic phpbb boards or some others.

The main thing with the Desura forum is that it, like any other successful forum, needs an active management that is on the ball. Especially if the community is active.

Gamer's Gate doesn't seem to even have a forum and the Steam forum is, well, the Steam forum. Didn't like what I saw of it.

An alternative would be to set up their own forum or to use a fan made forum, whether that would be Proboards or Invision or wherever else.

Setting up a dedicated forum takes at the very least time and effort, both in the setup and maintenance, but it gives the most control. It's a question of resources and of how much free time and effort outsiders are willing to dedicate to make things happen if Illwinter cannot go beyond what there is due to their own time and resource limitations.

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

People who come to forum.shrapnelgames.com tend to do well for Shrapnel Games. People who have a link that takes them straight to one forum tend to have a different view of how busy, or effective, the site is. Seeing the full days activity on the entire site says things are going ok.

Without information on the conversion rate of unique visitors. I don't really agree on this. Something that looks pretty busy can still be pretty expensive to maintain if it generates no sales.

And most of the forums here are dead or even stillborn. The mods hardly even reply to simple support question on the main shrapnel forum. (And it has stickies for vista beta testers and site conversion. All stuff that should have been just removed ages ago).

And nobody even replied to this post: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showp...88&postcount=4. At least half the forums here only contains negative posts ("what happened to the development of this game?", or "why you no fix bug" posts).

I don't want shrapnel to go under or something. I just hope they get their act together and get with the times. But I fear this will not happen. Nor will we hear much from them. I expect it is because they live in the 90's world or due to some extensive "secrecy is important" military background stuff. (I assume the people behind shrapnel have a military background).

To me it just feels like they stopped caring years ago. And that is why I fear for the these old dom3 forums.

[Fantomen]

I believe you are right Soy.

Looking around the forums here feels like walking around a ghost town, it's almost eerie. Games with stickied threads and subforums but no actual posts in them, the occasional lone question or complaint echoing out unheard in a digital wasteland.

I have no idea how Shrapnel is doing finacially now that they lost dom3, but it's quite hard to understand how a business with a forum as barren as this could be stable and profitable. If the other games sell well then there should be at least a few users posting in those forums.

I hope I'm wrong, but i requested very politely in the general section that we'd be given some kind of assurance of the forums future or a backup dump of it. No response at all...

[Gandalf Parker]

Edi went abit more deeply but it seems we agree.
Hopefully someplace will be found with a friendly forum software to become the official forum, or we can continue to use this one. If not then a fan site will pick it up.

[momfreeek]

Originally Posted by soy

Something that looks pretty busy can still be pretty expensive to maintain if it generates no sales.

Wouldn't any sort of staff costs dwarf other costs considerably? I'm not surprised there is so little staff activity, I kind of assumed there weren't any.

dom3 is still unmatched, still being patched and deserves a place alongside modern titles. its good to see it move on.