The 10th Anniversary of the Wynncraft Forums!

I used to be very active on these forums. The decreased activity is unfortunate, but oh well... Or is it? I have no attachment to this community anymore, and especially dislike Wynn, but if you are still in these lower-activity forums and still have passion in it: Cherish it.

I have come to learn that people who say x is dying contribute nothing to discussion. It is a kneejerk, attention seeking, engagement baiting, baseless talking point shat out from a hasty reaction born from overreacting to a numeric value or graph being slightly lower than usual, or just having a negative view of something. Are these forums past their prime and will never get high activity again? Yes, but I want to let you know something very important:

Nothing on the internet dies, unless it is killed.

Community size is not a good metric for true community health. You do need new people to avoid stagnation, but that's it. Of course, the exception here is universally nasty nasty live service games/servers that need to get obsessive over player numbers to survive, but that's not the topic here.

As long as a passionate ingroup still exists for anything, it's not dead. Even when something remotely popular "dies", there's almost always a wave for nostalgia for it in like 5 years. People are predictable. Think of most games or communities that saw a decrease in activity. Even if it didn't grow back, did they REALLY go anywhere? I hope your answer wasn't a shut-down time waster MMORPG (fan continuations/servers also exist for some of those), because I know many niche communities that are quite alive relatively speaking. Did a niche retro game vanish off the face of the earth because it wasn't in the mainstream spotlight anymore? No, because it likely still has a small dedicated community somewhere. Does something have to be in the immediate, relevant mainstream to be "not dying"?

If something will finally kill these forums, it's its remnant of a community being defined by people that say it's dying. From experience, "actions speak louder than words" is a lie - I also dislike people that say "x is going downhill" and nothing else for the same reasons. It's rooted in entitlement and people not knowing what they want.

I now prefer smaller communities over larger ones, specifically tighter-knit dedicated ingroups. I simply find them better than a mass, out of control, screaming blob of giant communities. When something grows too fast, the dedicated ingroups will get drowned out by the noisy mass. Do you believe these forums would be better if it suddenly gets 100,000 members? Do you know what has that many people? Wynn discord.

I like discord, but I also still like smaller communities. Wynn discord is terrible, but not uniquely terrible.

Remember, as long as a passionate ingroup exists, this little forum is frankly fine. I don't have passion for it anymore, but I am giving advice for people that still do

 

Now this is a classic cruuk line

 

well give us a better word than dying
its easier to say than 'decreasing in popularity'

 

i have terrible repressed memories of this forum when i was fresh into middle school and trying to sell my random level 40 legendaries here

 

If your repressed memories of middle school days on this forum are just selling lvl 40 legendaries you got lucky xD just scrolling through the way I use to talk makes me cringe
Saying stuff in such mid 2010s humor like replacing letters with numbers and making way too many 69 and 420 references is somehow the least embarrassing things I use to do