I was reading through this thread that was posted earlier this year by Ancient, and I wanted to touch on an aspect of it that seemed very overlooked. That being forum activity, which seemed to just be taken for granted in the discussion and presumed as the forums are dead because users do not use forums anymore, while I believe its because of a lack of drive.

https://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=653958

I will firstly explain my suggestion, and then go into more detail as to why I think it could be a viable addition to the game.

Forum Incentives : More specifically, something that will create demand for mostly newer players to visit the forums. This could be something like the client TC login bonus, but in a forum visit. Or something that can be decided upon the future. But paired with an actual marketing push I believe it could drive a wave of players to the game over time.

I started playing in 2013, after nearly maybe a year or so I was kinda tired with it and ready to throw in the towel, and then I discovered the forums. Upon opening the forum I was presented with a plethora of various communities in the form of organizations, clan channels that were brimming with activity to where you couldn't refresh the page without there being a new post. The replay thread opened my eyes to an entirely different side of replaymaking, and the general sense of community was nothing short of amazing and I met a lot of great friends through the forum that I would have never had the chance to interact with in-game.

What happened?

Well, you can say in this day in age, maybe the forum type of communication is something of the past.
But that can''t be true, I take place in various other online forums that are still very active to this day, some even more obscure than something like Toribash. Which, let me remind you, is a game where there are *infinite* possibilities regarding how you want to move.

Where does that leave us? Well, I feel as if shortly(1-2years) after Steam Greenlight of Toribash, forum activity had started to fall completely from the activity level it was at before hand.




Source: Google Trends "Toribash" Interest over time.

I would like to comment on long, consistent wave of activity from through 2007-2013. In this time, Toribash was still new, just as hard as it was today, but there were a few differences.

1.) Forums were brimming with activity
2.) Small/bigger youtubers such as MOFF and Chilled Chaos brought people to the game in herds, not to mention an IGN video it was featured in.

*side note* Marketing through smaller youtubers to advertise your game would be a great option still today.

This was all before greenlight and the peak of its activity, so why after that did it rapidly decline?

Let's all be honest we all would have stopped playing this game if there was not a large community fostered around it, and as the forums started to die throughout 2015-16 I believe this was a large part of the inactivity of newer players that had no real incentive to keep them playing.

Personally, I have never been a fan of the environment of the Toribash discord. It is unorganized, sloppy compared to the forums, and is not the correct place that should foster the main portion of the community. Why would you stray from the countless opportunities to create monetization through your actual forum and instead push your community to gather onto a 3rd party platform.

This is an opinion supported by staff. As upon trying to revive a still-viable forum that was once very popular known as "The Tricktionary," which provides toribash examples of irl tricks to users, I was presented with the comment.

"Well, the thing is it would just be better on Discord."
no hate, just saying it shouldnt be completely overlooked

Final comments: It is stupid to foster a community on a 3rd party service like Discord and there should be an actual attempt to push for forum activity. The forum could be a very overlooked and underutilized tool for player retention.
Discord should have replaced the IRC, not the forums in its entirety.