New Day. New Management.

Fifth times a charm.

In-Game forums. We all remember them. They were forums... In Game. They had about 6 broad categories. Main. Trading. Squads. Squad Only. Bugs. Art(?). Other. Maybe more. Maybe less.

I want to start off by stating the obvious. Nobody asked for the forums to be removed. They were replaced with Zone-Play... which currently no longer exists because it was ran by our former and great manager, TashkinHD(didn't he used to have an HD in his name? I feel like he did.). Once he left it became quite apparent, or so I thought, that we would be given In Game forums again... Well we didn't. He did continue to host the website, but did eventually shut it down entirely. What a bumpy end to such a bumpy site. With many ups and downs, I don't believe that Zone-Play ever became what Tash had envisioned.

While we did get a substantial amount of players registered on Zone-Play, many of them never used it. I can confidently say that there were less than 300 users that had posted more than 50 posts. Maybe even less.

See the benefit with these forums were that the community was more contained. Very easy to manage and all of us, for the most part, were pretty accepting of one another, (OFC that didn't stop them from banning me because I wanted a certain word unbanned, with proper reasoning... Just stating it out there...) even when we disliked one another. The downside was that it didn't represent the community very well. Most of us on the forums who were active were well over the game's average age. Most of the time, the users who were active were staff, of ex staff. The "lesser class" was rarely given a voice.

Despite what others say, I believe that everyone deserves to be given a fair oppurtunity to get their claims out there. And while the forums were indeed free, people CBA. I can't tell you how many suggestion forums I made on the behalf of others. With an In Game forum, we can help to expand how many people actively participate in the community. It also broadens the scope of people who will know minor updates from here and there, and plans for the future.

Something I also see now as kind of obvious, an in game forum will have more bugs reported. Like I said, people CBA when it's not already in the game.

Going back to what I said about bringing the community together, I think it goes without saying that in this Graalians Zone community, we would all PM each other in game if we saw one another... if you wouldn't... shame on you, we are very fun and hot people. In the game having forums which would connect everyone would help to establish a sense of server community which we so badly need to keep, and gain, new players. Like I will tell you right now that I met some great friends that kept me on zone over those forums. Like I swear our forum games were in the 4000s...

A following point I may add is that they were very easy and accesible. No real sub-forums made things very easy to find and so threads weren't just lost(and if they were, people knew to bump important ones). Sure some people abused the bumps, but it was pretty minimal. Anybody could use them without explanation and it was dope. It was also really accesible... which deserves it's own paragraph.

So if you did use the in game forums, I assume you probably used them for the trading, the off topic, and the basing categories. Trading with this forum was great. Time consuming... but great. It made getting replies oh so much faster. Just ask Pig, I feel like he would know since he was always selling something or a hat. Actually that's how I found the ***Space Crown Helmet thing... WHICH IM STILL OFFERING 50 DOLLARS WORTH OF ANY GIFT CARD FOR***. Doing that while also in trades, ooh baby that maximized things. Because while you can say you're selling/buying on these forums, again, not a lot of people read them.

Basing with these forums were also fun. Basing is a lot of waiting sometimes. They were a good time saver without being AFK and you were still able to tell when you were being attacked since they were kinda see through. Apart from that, they served as good platforms to get people to join a squad. They allowed tons of detail to write about how much you could write than just "recruiting. blah blah blah" and you can write about your goals and beliefs as a squad.

Lastly for this section, I found the games and etc fun. Like mad fun. I was kinda addicted to em k.

But even then other parts like the Suggestions just improved with a greater community. More people. More input.


Plus with them, people will be more active to check up on forums. I know I was more active then... So yea. Plus I usually have a set time when I check all the forums like graalians, albf, etc etc. those forums were always just easy to connect to.

Plus when you could tap on their heads and it'd take you to their profile so you'd know just who to talk to.






K. I missed a few feelings I have towards em but yea. I've started an ipetitions to get them back. Pliz Sign. http://tiny.cc/ZoneForums