SoE have announced that the forum for their new MMO Vanguard: Saga of Heroes will close once the game launches. In place of these forums, the company is asking fan sites (’affilited sites’) to take up the slack and provide chat forums around the game.

Of course, spreading out the community in this way will only ensure that it remains fragmented and disconnected, and will also ensure that any problems which could have come to the attention of the developers through the forums will be missed, as it’s much harder to monitor multiple forums than just one.

That said, since none of the affiliate sites will actually be official, there will be no need to monitor those forums for potential problems, ensuring that there is little to no communication between the players and the developers or publishers of Vanguard, and that the level of notice generated by any problems which do occur will be minimised.

SoE did something similar with Star Wars Galaxies a couple of years ago, closing the official forums to the public (which were full of customers complaining about problems with the game) in what appeared to be an attempt to mask problems that subscribers were facing.

By closing the official forums, it appears SoE are trying to avoid a repeat of this by removing any official way for subscribers to communicate directly with all other customers. And it also makes the support cost much lower, as the company also doesn;t need to employ community managers or forum moderators to interact with the game’s players.