There are a few good points here so I will respond to them individually.


Well, I always saw the forum as a more "official" landing page for anything Toribash. As I explained in the OP, I believe newer players entering an environment like this would be conducive to larger player retention over time. I believe Discord is not helpful to beginners as 90% of replays are glanced over or foreshadowed by random conversations. The forum is in a position to either die out entirely or actually become a useful tool and meeting place again. With a coordinated efforted by the active community and staff we could see this happen.

It just hurts to see a game that is so creative be overshadowed by its lack of community and help towards newer players, which is definitely not reflected in the Discord environment.


I am a computer networking major, so I wont claim to know the ins and outs of marketing entirely. But having ran a family business for years, the one thing I can tell you is where ever there is a large group of people gathered, there can be many methods to monetize it.

Furthermore, the monetization could come from overall activity based of forum visits. Game activity going up over time would lead to more newer players getting some of the microtransactions.


The point about reports and and issues that need to be resolved with staff, I believe discord could be a great tool for that. There could even be a "contact" section or something that would lead you right to the reports channel or something.

But as far as replay threads, clan chats, event threads, etc. I have no problem with them not being in a chat message environment. It is neat to add on to a thread and go about your day instead of having to divulge in a drawnout conversation in discord, or having to scroll back up hours later when i want to see if anyone commented on a replay.


This kind of mindset from staff actually makes me sad. To see something once so amazing and something with what I believe could be a second opportunity for activity over time being referred to as an "Archive."


Have we ever thought of why this is? Literally there is still nothing else out there like toribash, the closing thing would probably be Endorphin and even that is a stretch. By its own merit of being so unique, Toribash should have atleast a somewhat active playerbase compared to the golden years.

Are people just too obsessed with triple A games nowadays? Maybe. Are there better games around that spoonfeed you every tutorial you need? Maybe. Was Toribash not marketed properly after greenlight causing it to die? Maybe. Is there a disconnect between the community and the staff? Maybe. But there is still nothing that exists like Toribash and with the proper ad campaigns I believe staff could push to see a new wave of activity and retention.


To clarify, using "staff" in my original post was more so an attempt to not to call anyone out by name, rather than to reflect the ideas as staff in its entirety. As far as the Tricktionary, I would definitely be interested in talking more about this aspect. I believe with the tricking community in Toribash still somewhat active, this could be a great resource that would lead to *slightly* increased forum activity among that subset of the community.


All in all, I see the forums as a great option for the main place of everything Toribash. Other games still have very active forums in the day-in-age of discord(Star Citizen, for example.) The way I see it in my eyes, community is everything about this game. We can either keep pushing them all away to discord or either create a better environment for the newer players trying to learn your game to actually thrive. I see this as even more important since the release of Toribash Next is under development, and this new wave of players will be first introduced to a unorganized discord filled with random chats, wibbles, and banter not conclusive to the main thread.

My suggestion all-in-all is not groundbreaking. Implement something like the in-game TC bonus into the forums. Not much TC at all but something that will give newer users the knowledge that the forum is even here. Upon visiting to get their TC bonus, they get to see all the various sections of the forum and be exposed to areas of Toribash they would have not discovered.