[2023] Ask the Devs on Discord!

My Dear Fiends!

Now, first and foremost this is a Discord Exclusive so only those who have joined will be able to participate, HOWEVER there's nothing stopping you from asking someone who is over there to ask something on your behalf!

We have some exciting news for you! We are launching a new activity called Ask the Devs!

This is your chance to ask anything you want to know about the game and get answers from the people who make it.

Here's how it works​

From now to November 7, you can post your questions in the following Discord Thread.

On November 7, from 13:00 to 14:00 CET, four of our developers will join the channel and answer some of your questions. You can ask about any aspect of the game, such as features, mechanics, design, lore, etc.

We can't wait to hear from you and share some insights into Elvenar. Is there already a question you like shared by someone else? Add a thumbs up on it and a comment. This will let us know which questions will be the most popular and will help us to prioritize the answers. Don't miss this opportunity to interact with the devs and learn more about the game.

Join us and Ask the Devs!

Kind Regards

Herodite.  

I can't see why not! Go on... spoil yourself... ask away!  

clau63 said: still not answer the question,...why the Forum is closing..??

I'm not the one with the answers I'm afraid!  

I can partially answer the question again if you would like me to...  

Silmaril said: I can partially answer the question again if you would like me to...

I'm always partial to a partial answer...  

The reasoning behind this was simply down to the waning of the Forums, as over time fewer and fewer players have joined and more and more players simply stopped posting and engaging here. Players have also petitioned hugely to get Elvenar onto Discord as their preferred platform of choice and have refused to join the Forum for a myriad of reasons.

From my side of things, since I landed here in 2019, I have been trying to stop this trend and had changed several things on our server, not least the way the in-game news is used. As this decrease was seen, I made a point to use this fabulous tool to boost participation by advertising some of our more important announcements, competitions and at times some threads to reach all of our players and not only spread game awareness but Forum awareness.

In the same vein the support team has also become very active in this; linking tickets to the Forum whenever possible to also spread awareness to players of the discussions, announcements, new releases, competitions etc: to encourage registration.

With the arrival of Discord this means our little team is stretched providing customer service across support, Discord and the Forum. Hence we are actively recruiting to boost our numbers (I know I am shamelessly mentioning this here as I sit looking at the current applications).

Forum competitions also required players to be registered from 2019, in a bid to also encourage more than competition participation here.

At the end of 2020 we changed the Forum to allow player accounts and Forum accounts to be linked in a security measure, announcement is here since then the numbers decreased further as some ''players'' posting here had never played on the server, so could therefore not link their account.

Yes, we can see the guest numbers here, those people who pop in but have never registered to take part here; yes we understand they are getting information from here; but no we don't understand why they simply do not register to be a part of the fabulous Forum family and take part.

Currently we are seeing far more activity on Discord in the last few weeks, than we have on the Forums in over a year, yes we realise it is a new shiny thing and the novelty may wear off.

However, we are also starting to see a slight upsurge here on this Forum (I cannot speak for the others). Its not huge by any means, and it is limited to very few threads and topics. But its seen.

Whether this will be enough to make any changes to the initial announcement remains to be seen. But statistics are playing a very important role here.

I hope this helps a little, although I have been covering this for a few weeks, it has not all be laid out in one space like now.  

The link removal was was done due to the fact that Discord will be used for all official announcements now, especially given that there are far more players registered there than on the Forums already. It would have been a bad move for us to then not provide a link to the platform where these are, hence Discord replaced the Forum link from the game.

As you are probably aware we have a social media presence across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) that has helped us to provide a multiple choice of platforms for our players to engage with us. Discord is no different in this to the rest, as all are third party sites with their own guidelines that have happily worked for years.

Age groups do not necessarily come into this, as all platforms have a great mix of ages participating; no one has a set pattern where Elvenar is concerned as our players ages are extremely diverse ranging from our youngest possible players at 16 up the ages to some in their late 80's and even 90's.  

The information on the post is not quite correct, on the browser log-in screen, if you scroll down you can find the links to our social media channels.

From the in-game cogwheel settings (bottom right) if you click onto the question mark (?) you enter the support suite. The ''How can we help?'' section there has a dedicated section for the Forum, including full links, how to register and more click here to head over. Our ''Did you know'' post recently added this to be more pertinent also here, to help visibility as we see not many players read our ''How can we help?'' section.

Currently the directive is for announcements to only be made via Discord as our main communication channel. This is partially due to the varying formatting that would be involved as the platforms differ greatly and also due to not duplicating information from a point of view of workload and player confusion, as we are transitioning all announcements to Discord as per the original information when we introduced the Discord channel.

Please also bear in mind that all community management roles are part time and our wonderful moderators are volunteer players who are also very much part time too. I think this can be forgotten at times.