Why the community fork?

[FOARP]

By my count there's at least three different official forums for this game (Matrix, Slitherine, Lordz) - why split up the community like this? It means that news about mods/patches/etc. has to be posted over three different forums to ensure everyone knows about them. I get that there are three companies involved here, but surely you can agree between you who should host the forum and just put redirects on the other forums - otherwise the net result in terms of community relations over three forums is less than that that from a single unitary forum. Paradox's forum is a good example of how the following a punlisher has can be shared with co-operating companies.

[VPaulus]

Some people just prefer to post here while others prefer to post in Matrix.

[FOARP]

I'm sure they do, since people always prefer to continue doing as they have in the past, but in what way does in make sense to divide things up like this? Theoretically, since all three forums have pretty much identical features, you could just have the same forum accessed from three different portals with three different skins and acheive the same effect without splitting the community like this, which would greatly enhance communication with the community.

[lordzimoa]

I think this is the plan for the long term, but the community was not divided, they already existed complete separate for years before all the merges between Slitherine, Matrix and Ageod took place the last few years-recent months. Now a new situation has arisen and it is one big community as The Slitherine Group.

I have no doubt that there is a way to integrate all communities better in the future without loosing eachothers identity, but it will be a slow progress, servers are different, software, shops, management , etc... integrating it all will take some time.

But I agree, also for all the developers it will be easier to track their games, as at the moment we have to track at least two...

Lordz is still an independent developer so we have our own websites, shop and little forum, Slitherine Group has been so far our exclusive publishing partner and will remain so as we work fantastic together. But who knows what the future will bring....

[IainMcNeil]

The reason is that if we forced [people to do this there would be a riot!

People want to post where they want to post. If we forced them to register on another forum they wouldn't do it. The aim is to integrate the forums at some point but it is a huge job as there are multiple sites and servers with Linux/Windows/ASP/APACHE and various other flavours of things which can;t play together. Plus the logic issue of people with 2 accounts already possibly with matching users and passwords but possibly not. It will be major disruption when it happens.