Last week Runescape announced the closure of its official forums. For as long as the game has been running, the forums have served as a vital space for the community to engage in discussions and social activities beyond logging into the game itself.
For those that have been longstanding players of RuneScape you’ll probably be upset to learn that the forums will no longer be a haven for social discussions. Originally the forums were essential in the early days of Runescape, providing a dedicated platform for players to interact outside of the game, however, over the past 23 years, the landscape of online interaction has shifted, and the community has split into multiple alternative social platforms. With Jagex splitting their time between platforms like Discord, Reddit, and Twitter, it has led to a noticeable decline in the forums' usage.
The Runescape team has decided to allocate resources more effectively by focusing on platforms where their players are most active, and have urged the community to join their Discord server, in addition to following the game on social media platforms. This is a trend that we have seen for several developers, including Amazon’s New World where the development team has determined that it is far easier to interact with their community using Discords tagging and channel system which recently included a forum channel upgrade, which developers utilize to track support issues.
The team states that, due to the nature of the forums as a whole, vital conversations and community interactions often get overlooked on the forums, whereas platforms like Discord offer advanced features like livestreaming stages, voice chat channels, and more accessible navigation where the developers can react and participate more easily.
In preparation for this transition, the RuneScape forums will become read-only starting January 25th, allowing players time to adapt to the change and preserve any important content. Then, on March 28th, the forums will be taken offline permanently.
If you’ve been a RuneScape fan for a while and wish to preserve any of your posts, grab social handles for your forum friends, or just give one last hurrah on their forums, now is the time to do so.
