Will the forums be archived or deleted?
With the announcement of the closure of the forums, I'm wondering what will happen to all the posts here?
Old stats articles, legacy tributes to valued members who died of cancer, etc...
In my opinion this is part of our history.
Will this all be cast to the wind, or is there a plan to archive everything here and just leave it all as read only?
Comments
@GentlemanFridge DMed Mandy and shared this with a group of us (he gave me ok to share it on here). The forums unfortunately will be deleted, not archived so we will be losing alot of DBD history here.
Well, I guess you only archive something when you actually care for a community.
First the forums are getting shut down, now they're not even being archived? Disgraceful.
Salt in the wound. More I hear and think about this forum, the angrier I get. It's such a huge ######### you to the community on here.
Some beancounter decides that the pitiful amount of money spent to keep the forum running can be snipped from the budget to save a few pennies. Cutting off the best and most valid portal for well formatted feedback. The forums (despite being somewhat whittled down by nitpicky overenthusiastic ban usage) are full of dedicated and passionate players most of whom, in their own way, are trying to supply feedback and suggestions to improve the game that they love.
And the alternatives? Screaming into the void on discord, watching whatever idea you've just posted get buried under 100 other messages of meaningless drivel in seconds. Or reddit a well documented cesspool of the worst the internet has to offer.
Way for bhvr to show the community how little they care about our opinions. I won't be spending a damn penny on auric cells from now on. And would encourage other players to do the same, probably a drop in the water as far as bhvrs profits are concerned. But it wouldn't take many players doing that to mean bhvr loses more money in sales than they save by killing our forum. And that would provide me with a smidgen of comfort.
This hardens my heart. Not another dime will I spend on anything made by BHVR.
It should be saved but why would they archive a decade of criticism that can be continuously accessed and referenced when they can just nuke it? It lines up with how the forum has been. A lot of great contributors were banned over minor infractions after years of engagement. Many others simply stopped speaking out of fear. Threads were deleted too. Many, many comments as well. They clear weeds with a flamethrower around here, and it'll finally be nothing but scorched earth.
Well said.
It is just insulting that the Forums won't even be archived.
But I suppose it is not surprising. After so many complaints over the years about our feedback never being taken into consideration, all of said feedback will be deleted, instead of remaining available for the future.
It is the final humiliation.
Honestly - the forums likely cost AT MOST $15 a month just to keep up. I have noticed that many of the mods here are also mods in the discord, reddit, etc - so its not like BHVR is having to hire anyone exclusively to monitor these forums.
Just now hearing this honestly shocked. These forums used to always been place to talk about dead by daylight more reasonably with players who care about the game. There are many veterans here who really put though what they write and who devs should listen. People overall are more neutral here than reddit which isn't just good place to really talk about balance.
years and years of threads gone I always wonder what happened to @fussy never knew the account got banned. I loved reading their threads about reworks and artist.
Wow. All our years of love and analysis and discussion and memories, and they just wipe it all away. Like it never was to begin with. So much time spent here.
That's cold Behavior.
I know it's cheesy, but if there's any solace in this, anything positive I can take away from time spent over the years of my life DBD is flagrantly disregarding, it's that I enjoyed spending time and getting to know all of you.
Not subtle prod to check your inbox
Archiving the forums is not a hard task at all. It's more effort than deleting it, but it's still very doable. Of course you'll still have to pay for hosting, but that investment into the community is a duty of BHVR in my opinion.
To be honest, if the forums were archived, it would be evidence of the amount of ideas that were sourced from the community, criticisms that were predicted yet ignored, ideas that were altered away from their original intentions, and so on. It represents both the game's history and evidence of how we got there along the way. If they cared enough to keep that information, they wouldn't be shutting down the forum in the first place. I wouldn't have much to say on the topic if it wasn't for how disrespectful it is to all of the contributions, tributes, and community it fostered over the years. The entire thing reeks of a detatched executive decision.
It's not the hosting of the forums but the community managers to run it that is the cost of this place. Hosting the forums probably costs them peanuts. I think the move to these big tech platforms probably has a lot to do with the future because these platforms will be almost completely auto-moderated by AI in the not very distant future and they won't need to hire as many mods or community managers.
The forums barely function as they are, so they're never going to get "upgraded" with big tech AI moderation. You need real people to run this place. But who needs people when big tech has decided the future of the web belongs to the machines?
I remember them putting out a request for mods to join up not that long ago. I'd offer to volunteer if I felt it might save this place, even though I don't have a spotless record and I know I'd really hate being one. There was one forum member who put in an application to be a mod and they promptly got banned for something shortly afterwards. 🤣
I recently chose not to spent another penny on this game as well. Even before all this, so many of the recent changes stopped me wanting to play and there's also the worry that I won't even be able to pretty soon with the upcoming graphical update. I don't feel like supporting BHVR at the moment.
As for the forums not being archived, I think that's a huge loss to the community. And if I do happen to join up to one of their future official community platforms, I won't be posting nearly as much as I have done in the past, knowing how little our contributions on the forum mean to BHVR.
I get what you mean entirely, but I don't agree with their reasoning if that were the case. Think about it like this:
You buy a fishing rod, and it will have minor upkeep between bait/lures/line/hooks/etc. In return, the amount of return on investment you get is incomparible by comparison. It may require things like patience or commitment, but the theoretical return on investment is near limitless. Your material cost is a distant second to the pool of opportunity you have opened yourself up to.
This platform has been invaluable to them over the years in a variety of ways. The posters weren't paid for their insights, the theory crafters and design contributiors providing a vast pool of invaluable information that augmented concepts like playtesting without needing to spend a dime, hell, with people literally paying to do it. Nobody provided these things expecting any form of compensation, they were not on any payroll, they were simply fish in the sea. All they wanted was a hook with the bait of a better game on the line, and they gladly provided value in response.
For every penny saved by cutting out what is required to run a platform like this forum, the amount of free amateur labor in many facets, both creative and technical, created a massive RoI that is now lost. That return diminished because of how things have been handled, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who considered grace to the ground level following the demands of those higher up and more detatched. At this point, even making an announcement like this is a clear sign that it's essentially irreversable: Every decision in this vein has done nothing but scare away more and more fish, reducing the potential gain of the investment.
If they wanted to roll something like this back, it would cost more than whatever they hope to gain by cutting such a cost. They've already told the community we're not wanted for any more than statistics to present to shareholders.
Totally agree. I can't say it any better than that, especially the part about the free labour.
I know the common criticism is that BHVR don't listen to us here but that just isn't true (obviously, they don't listen to everything we say, but they do listen more than they are often given credit for). In the relatively short time that I've been playing, I've seen many of the suggestions people have made here in this very forum put into the game to make it better for everyone.
This is also the only place that a regular, everyday DBD player without a platform can have a shot at actually being heard by the developers. I get the drive to "modernise", but the signal to noise ratio on all their other community platforms is not good. This is such a short-sighted move from them.
I guess the expansion of the content creator program is also another way they're looking at to reach out to the opinions of the wider community, but that's still going to be feedback filtered through one single person. There isn't anything that can replace a dedicated forum like this. Forums have been such a treasure trove of information in my life. Away from here, I've often found posts from 10-15 years ago that have helped me solve problems and repair things and none of that information has been behind a login wall. I know I'll sound dramatic saying so but this act is like setting fire to a library to me.
Agreed on all counts, especially regarding accessing previous information outside of something encyclopedic in nature, but this comment is particularly poignant:
I know I'll sound dramatic saying so but this act is like setting fire to a library to me.Last I read, the copyright stipulation for AI scraping literature is that the original work must be destroyed, which has led to aquisition and destruction to facilitate it. When you think about this decision while keeping that in mind, it feels particularly grim.
Like the burning of books, in a way.
I've noticed that trend to and it really worries/upsets me. Companies just want to farm as much labour as they can out to AI to save money and recruiting effort. But it comes at the cost of quality and drinking water as well as removing jobs from the industries involved and means there's no point in people building any of the skills for tasks that companies will use AI for.
From Mandy's announcement post:
"From the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank you for your support and the passion you have brought to these forums all these years. You have been a foundational, core element of this community and we do not take this change lightly. We know many of you have built bonds and connections with each other, and even directly with our team, because of this platform and we’ll always honour that."
Clearly that's not true at all, unless by "honour" they mean erase. This is really BHVR talking out the side of their mouths if they're just going to scrub the forum from history.
Not only going to put the forum down like a dog but bury it in an unmarked grave.
If this is the route they are going, it's hard to see it as anything but disrespect.
I can't help but feel the decision to shut down is merely the decision of a bean counter who had the great idea of "why post things twice when you can do it once?"
remember to check out https://fog-dwellers.com/ if youre super cool and also sad about this news btw
Answer in the first post.
Archiving the forums would be the best thing. There is so much discussion here that is hardly find anywhere on the dbd community.
If someone find a way to download their post, give me a hello. I would like to save my topics and discussions.
I have to copy and paste all of my perk ideas before they are forgotten.
It's actually amazing the forums have been kept alive for as long as they have been, forums in general have been a forgotten medium since before DBD was even a game
Ironically I never ever check here, but I would be sad to see ti completely gone, would be nice if it was archived to read only, but I can understand why it would just disappear.