The forums are primarily supposed to be used for suggestions, however Vetex has not accepted a suggestion since 2020 (Vetex's Accepted). In fact, Vetex doesn’t seem to be active on the forums at all (at least, when compared to the Vetex discord.)
Currently the forums are mostly just used to host fan art and writing, which then gets sent over to the Vetex discord. However, this could easily be done with discord’s built in announcement system instead, and is more cost-efficient than hosting this entire website just for that.
If I couldn’t use the forums I’d just quit the game and leave the discord for several years until I eventually came back to see how the game was doing.
(I am only in vetcord for game announcements)
Discord’s a horrible unorganized mess with bad formatting tools that’s being ran more questionably by the day, and I wish these kinds of forums were normalized instead.
Given that suggestions content has made it into the game since AO’s release, I think there’s one of a few reasons its not being used.
1: Vetex forgot about it (its been years lol)
2: Vetex doesn’t want to use it because he wants to keep future content a surprise and/or doesn’t want to make promises he may or may not be able to keep.
iirc someone made a suggestion about new deckhands drip and it was implemented into the game 100% accurate to the original proposal.
But yeah forum can be dull sometimes. Maybe it’s just me but I’m not interested in interacting with it as I was 3~4 months ago save for a few interesting topics.
That’s where you are WRONG kiddo. We got Butgertown his TITLE. The forums fought in the TRENCHES for him to get that title.
Oh and he also err, reverted a shark buff because we came together to ask. Vet takes suggestions he just doesn’t take stuff thats gonna have considerable dev time when he already has so much on his plate.
The forum was created for the community. We did not soley create the forums just for Vetex to have a suggestions and bug reports channel otherwise that’s only what this forum would consist of.
The only one who can deem it a “waste of resources” is Vetex himself as he pays for it. If discord forums ever got better maybe we would move over to that, but discord is too limiting in its features. As of right now the forum is to stay.
Granted I come on the forum once in a blue moon to update it and see if there’s any new cool stuff to add. Which I have to do eventually.
At the end of the day the forum is an overall net positive and is community building. Without the forum is would just be Chat logs without clear direction of conversation
