We've completed the forum update now, and are very happy to hear your feedback. Of course, also many thanks to those of you who'd already checked it out on Beta and provided feedback either here, or on the Beta forums.
Just a few short comments in response to some of the posts made in this thread, to hopefully give some insights on why we're updating the forums, and why now.
Don't fix what isn't broken...?
There are enough things broken in the game, please spend time on those issues instead of messing with something that is working just fine.
We're aware that there's plenty of stuff that requires time to be spent on it in the game. However, updating the forums is equally important if we want to be able to keep hosting these forums (and we do want that - otherwise communicating with you all would become a lot more difficult). By the end of the year, we would have had major issues with that, had we not updated the forums before that. This is mainly due to security reasons as the forum software version we were using up until now would not have been supported by its developer anymore after that. That said, maybe it'll give you some peace of mind to know that the developers working on the game are not the same people who worked on creating the new forum designs (and all other things that were required to make the update happen). Both things can, do, and did happen in parallel.
So I have a couple of points. Beta's post is by
@Muf-Muf not Marindor; makes a player wonder why everyone is vanishing and also who is replacing them!
It was indeed made by me, as the forum update for Beta happened relatively short-notice, as the timeslot became available at a time that our Beta CM (Marindor) wasn't available himself. To make things easier for everyone involved, and to give the Beta community the heads-up it deserves, I just posted the announcement on Beta this time. And, no worries about who's going where - Marindor is still Beta's CM. I just happened to be the Beta CM before him, so posting the announcement was easy for me to do.
The ones we had before were also generic ones - sadly we've never had Elvenar-themed emojis in the forums. At least not the for the "basic" ones. Maybe something to look into some day. Suggestions, anyone?