Jetrall here - I'm an old timer, but I've been away for some time now and figured I may warrant a re-introduction.
Many years ago, when this site was still Diablo3.com, before the game was announced and Blizzard bought out the domain, I was a Mod here - and, later, an Admin. I was tasked with re-designing the site prior to the Blizzard buyout and the logo I made still sits atop the site today.
I experienced some disappointment with the initial release of Diablo III and that, combined with a general burnout with online gaming and seeking a degree, led me away for a long while.
I was, however, intrigued by the Diablo IV trailer and it got me reminiscing. I figured, if I wanted to stay up to date on the series and see where D4 is heading, it would make sense to come back and keep an eye on the forums & news.
I'm especially interested to know if there are any others, like me, still around from the 'old days' and I'd also love to see how the site and its users have grown and changed over the years. What are the best new things on DiabloFans.com? Who are the users to know?
Also - thanks to Chaud for resurrecting this account for me!
Greetings It's good to see that this site is up and running again, it was looking kinda grim for some time until Magic Find apparently came to the rescue at the last minute. The posting activity here isn't what it used to after all the posts went *poof* but hopefully this'll gradually change for the better. Diablofans could surely use your expertise once again in some capacity. Like you I joined up while the site was still Diablo3.com. I've been more or less active ever since, at least reading regularly even in periods of not gaming so much D3. Playing some D2 at PoD now and of course logging on to D3 every now and then to whirl around a bit with the Barbarian. Still waiting for the Wiz to be playable yet again (by that I mean that they unfortunately made Archon too powerful at some point and then just stuck with it ..and I don't like that at all).
I suppose diablofans' "downtime" contributed to it being a bit less active nowadays but this site is surely worth being involved with, can you imagine if they actually released a good D2 remake? - The interest would soar in an instant. And as long as D3 keeps going strong surely the activity will pick up as well. I believe many old members aren't actually aware that the site is up and running again because a notice was sent out IIRC informing that the site was going down however I can't recall having seen any actual notice indicating that it was up and running yet again. It's high on the search results but perhaps the old members could use a reminder .. might be something to consider for the mods/admins.
Anyway, had some time on my hands and just started typing I guess. Welcome back, have a great saturday
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"For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and as the last Man He shall stand forth upon the Earth."
i don't recall the exact date but there was a period where the owner of the site did not feel there was enough traffic on the site to justify keeping it going and it was more less shut down, then another company swooped in and bought it
Very interesting. This site has a fascinating 'behind the scenes' history.
Originally Diablo3.com was owned and managed by Mockery who, if I recall correctly, was based out of Quebec (maybe Ontario?). Umaro was aother primary admin for the site with him at the time (who was a bit more 'active' in the day-to-day running of the site).
Blizzard contacted Mockery about purchasing the Diablo3.com domain name in anticipation of the game announcement, but Mockery (I think, quite cleverly) opted instead to 'donate' the domain name to them in exchange for promotion - specifically, listing the new site (DiabloFans.com) on the official Diablo III website. When the game was announced, this led to a huge surge in users (IIRC from about 10,000 to 30,000 - practically over night). It was just before this 're-brand' that Umaro asked me onto the team to help with the graphical elements (e.g. new logo & banner, forum re-skin, etc).
Not long after, it was announced that Mockery was moving on from the site and selling to the Curse gaming network (I believe around 2010-2012). At first, the site experienced a lot of growth during this period as anticipation for Diablo III grew - however, I believe shortly after the game was released, the site's activity experienced a decline. My guess would be this was for a few reasons. I think the mutual anticipation of the game had held more energy than the actual game itself and, when it was released, I think a lot of the spirit subsided. Many of us were tired of the wait by this point. Additionally, some, like me, were probably disappointed in Diablo III and weren't as motivated to remain active in the community. These factors probably combined to produce a decline in activity.
Curse operated the site as part of its network for some time - before being acquired by Amazon / Twitch in 2016. Then, in 2018 the site (and many of Curse's assets, including DiabloFans.com and other similar sites) were bought by Wikia (aka Fandom). The current owner/operator of DFans is MagicFind - which appears to be a subsidiary of Fandom/Wikia - as their advertising is generated by Fandom (though I haven't actually confirmed that this is the relationship).
I'm guessing that the 'blackout' you've been referring to happened sometime in that 2018-2020 range (does that seem correct?)
ANYWAYS! All this has been very interesting to reflect on and research. I had to dig through some old emails from pre-2010 and do some Googling - which has all been surprisingly enjoyable. Thanks everyone for the nostalgia trip!
ya that sounds about right on the blackout all thought it did not last or seem to last very long all though the damage may have already been done as you can see how inactive these forums are it makes me sad when i go to something like say the barb forums and all i see (mostly) is stuff from a year or longer ago
Heya! Always nice to see oldschool people. I've not been around as long as you, but quite a while at this point. But I love delving in history, so together with Aerisot - who, based on his account date, has even been around for longer - we went through the timeline of Dfans a while ago. Here's the crude picture:
June 2005: DiabloFans was founded as Diablo3.com
May 1, 2008: Diablo3.com was bought by Blizzard and the site officially became DiabloFans.com
Summer 2008: DiabloFans acquired by Curse
September 27, 2011: Molster joins Curse and becomes DiabloFans admin
May 15, 2012: Diablo 3 is released
March 25, 2014: Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls is released
August 16, 2016: Amazon (Twitch) acquire Curse
December 2018: Curse Media is bought by Wikia/Fandom
March 21, 2019: DiabloFans is officially shut down
June 12, 2019: DiabloFans is re-opened after it was being purchased by Magic Find (along with Hearthpwn and a few other old parts of Curse)
I personally joined in September 2012. I'm not gonna re-tell the story of why I joined, because I've written about it here when DiabloFans closed. I also don't remember when I became a mod, but I can tell you that the peak of DiabloFans wasn't shortly after release, but it was around 2015/2016. That is because we often forget that Reaper of Souls really "fixed" Diablo 3 and turned it into the game we all wanted, and the Diablo 3 that we got to enjoy shortly after RoS release was probably the most pure and true successor to Diablo 2 that we always wanted. The game now is in a good state, it's just that many of us have "over-played" it at thousands of hours in, and a stupidly amount of power creep has made the game evolve into an endgame where people can't even comprehend the numbers anymore, and Blizzard recently openly admitted that they now take "paragon 5000" as the average competitive power level. Long before anyone cared, I warned about the destructive impact of paragon power creep, and in 2018 I concluded that for me, the Blizzard I grew up with ceased to exist.
But alas, I disgress. As I said, the "peak" of Diablofans was absolutely in 2015/2016. The site saw an incredible surge of users after RoS release as all of the sudden the removal of the AH and the more balanced approach of RoS, thanks to Josh Mosqueira, brought more opportunity for discussions and debate to the game, and the playerbase exploded. We had tons of build discussions, and as a result there was need to create better ways to share builds. As Molster had developed a deck sharing system for Hearthpwn, it was later on adapted into the build tool for DiabloFans. I don't know when exactly it launched, but it was the prime contributor to the spike in users throughout 2015/2016, as there was very little patch activity (cf. seasons overview), but the competitive playerbase was interested in exploring the development of the "meta", and casual players were constantly on the lookout for those juicy cookie cutter builds. The forums were also insanely active, and members like Jaetch and Loroese (wizard theorycrafting masters) are among those who I personally miss the most, among with many many others who just disappeared.
At the same time of the peak of these forums, in 2015/2016 Blizzard also had scaled down the Diablo development team - as we know now, it was when they scrapped the second expansion and instead decided to create DLCs (and later on decided to even release only one DLC, the Necro in summer 2017, and the rest as content patches). The result was that communication died off completely; from regular developer interaction across all media, including "play your way" panels with the devs, we went to a total silence. The paragon power creep then saw the potential for botters to exploit this, starting in season 4, and Blizzard never really stepped in; every few months there's a few banwaves, but they really only ever catch a fraction of botters, at most. To this day there are people openly mocking Blizzard, having bot references in clan names and character names while occupying top spots on the leaderboards. The silence of Blizzard is deafening, and every year or so we get an apology with "we will improve our communication"... and then again vanishing into the nether for a year. It'd be comical if it wasn't so sad. But in the end, this caused the playerbase to decline steadily, to a bare skeleton. Every so often players come back for a new season, a new patch, or an announcement - like Diablo 4 - but it's never for more than a few days at most.
DiabloFans specifically got hit hard by this lack of communication because Blizzard also stopped engaging with and promoting fan sites (with the exception of Reddit, where they became actually more active than on their own forums). So everyone moved over to Reddit and our forums became a bit barren. There were times where I was the only active mod checking in for weeks, and mostly looking at bot posts ;-)
DiabloFans changed owners at their peak, so I can't blame the new owners for shutting it down in 2019, as from their point of view it was in a steady decline, and there was no signs of Diablo 4 at that point (keep in mind, this was half a year after Blizzard literally gave the finger to all Diablo fans with their Diablo: Immortal announcement disaster). But the damage of said closure was probably more than we imagined: the build tool not being available for one season meant that people went elsewhere and removed their bookmarks. Another reason why everything here is quite empty is that when Fandom bought DiabloFans in 2019, they wiped every post and user who didn't explicitly consent to transferring their data (I guess to comply with GDPR).
The combination of all those factors make it quite difficult to get DiabloFans back on their feet. In the end there's only so much we can do; there needs to be a constantly engaging game that a lot of people play and want to discuss to even give us enough meat to revive the forums back to their old life. And then we need to acknowledge that Reddit, because it is graced by the presence of the developers, is favored so much more by the playerbase these days. But... we are trying, and we aren't giving up.
Here's to hoping that Diablo 4 will help return DiabloFans to its old glory!
Hi Bagstone - thank you very much for that informative post!
By the time of RoS, I was long gone, so I had no idea of the effect it had on the D3 experience or DFans userbase! That's very interesting.
It's sad to hear that Blizzard has changed so much - I wonder if this is, in large part, due to the merger/acquisiton with Activision? (I haven't been paying close attention for years, so I'm not all caught up).
Perhaps Diablo 4, if it's able to deliver on what it seems to be promising, will lead to a resurgence. Perhaps if the upcoming Netflix series is revealed, that could lead to some additional activity as well.
Ultimately, Reddit is such a powerhouse, I'm not surprised a lot of the fanbase has moved there. In my experience, Reddit has largely replaced the forum-based communities that once made up such a large part of the internet (from early 2000's through ~ 2010ish, at least for me).
This is too bad, though, because I think Reddit simply doesn't have the same intimate community feel that a more specific website/forum (such as DFans) can provide. This is something I find lacking in the Reddit experience for me - though I know some do get more connected. I think this is largely due to the site being so "like" driven (so only top content really gets viewed by the majority of users, who don't sort by "new").
I'd love to see some more discussion and community posts here, as it does seem that most of the remaining activity is very build-oriented (which is great, but only one piece of the greater picture).
Thanks again for all the information and opinion - and for the welcome!
EDIT: For what it's worth - I was able to 'resurrect' my account by sending a message to the forum's support email (support@diablofans.com) and asking for it to be connected to my Twitch account. It took a few weeks, but it allowed me to re-accedd my old account, even though I had never 'consented' to the account being carried over... I wonder if this is true for other old members as well?
Diablo3.com actually existed as a blog for a bit before it got the vbulletin treatment. I think mockery said that once. There was an odd subtle tension between mockery's site and... god, I forget that other one. It wasn't medievaldragon's, it was that older one. I think it was founded in 2001. It's still around and dated as hell, lol.
EDIT: For what it's worth - I was able to 'resurrect' my account by sending a message to the forum's support email (support@diablofans.com) and asking for it to be connected to my Twitch account. It took a few weeks, but it allowed me to re-accedd my old account, even though I had never 'consented' to the account being carried over... I wonder if this is true for other old members as well?
Yeah, I had to do something similar to this to get my old account connected to Twitch.
Diablo3.com actually existed as a blog for a bit before it got the vbulletin treatment. I think mockery said that once. There was an odd subtle tension between mockery's site and... god, I forget that other one. It wasn't medievaldragon's, it was that older one. I think it was founded in 2001. It's still around and dated as hell, lol.
You're right on that one.
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Hello all,
Jetrall here - I'm an old timer, but I've been away for some time now and figured I may warrant a re-introduction.
Many years ago, when this site was still Diablo3.com, before the game was announced and Blizzard bought out the domain, I was a Mod here - and, later, an Admin. I was tasked with re-designing the site prior to the Blizzard buyout and the logo I made still sits atop the site today.
I experienced some disappointment with the initial release of Diablo III and that, combined with a general burnout with online gaming and seeking a degree, led me away for a long while.
I was, however, intrigued by the Diablo IV trailer and it got me reminiscing. I figured, if I wanted to stay up to date on the series and see where D4 is heading, it would make sense to come back and keep an eye on the forums & news.
I'm especially interested to know if there are any others, like me, still around from the 'old days' and I'd also love to see how the site and its users have grown and changed over the years. What are the best new things on DiabloFans.com? Who are the users to know?
Also - thanks to Chaud for resurrecting this account for me!
welcome back
Hey, thanks!
Greetings It's good to see that this site is up and running again, it was looking kinda grim for some time until Magic Find apparently came to the rescue at the last minute. The posting activity here isn't what it used to after all the posts went *poof* but hopefully this'll gradually change for the better. Diablofans could surely use your expertise once again in some capacity. Like you I joined up while the site was still Diablo3.com. I've been more or less active ever since, at least reading regularly even in periods of not gaming so much D3. Playing some D2 at PoD now and of course logging on to D3 every now and then to whirl around a bit with the Barbarian. Still waiting for the Wiz to be playable yet again (by that I mean that they unfortunately made Archon too powerful at some point and then just stuck with it ..and I don't like that at all).
I suppose diablofans' "downtime" contributed to it being a bit less active nowadays but this site is surely worth being involved with, can you imagine if they actually released a good D2 remake? - The interest would soar in an instant. And as long as D3 keeps going strong surely the activity will pick up as well. I believe many old members aren't actually aware that the site is up and running again because a notice was sent out IIRC informing that the site was going down however I can't recall having seen any actual notice indicating that it was up and running yet again. It's high on the search results but perhaps the old members could use a reminder .. might be something to consider for the mods/admins.
Anyway, had some time on my hands and just started typing I guess. Welcome back, have a great saturday
Hi Rebjorn,
Very nice to see you here! I wasn't aware of all the 'troubles' DFans has gone through - was it a planned shutdown? How long ago did this happen?
I do think the site activity was at an all-time high around the release of D3, and when I 'took off' the forums were booming!
As much as I would love a D2 remake, I am quite certain it will never happen (unless fans take on the project themselves - a risky proposition).
I've seen a bit about PoD, but haven't looked into it very far. Is it strictly for D2? Is it still pretty active? Could be interesting to check out.
Thanks for your message!
i don't recall the exact date but there was a period where the owner of the site did not feel there was enough traffic on the site to justify keeping it going and it was more less shut down, then another company swooped in and bought it
Very interesting. This site has a fascinating 'behind the scenes' history.
Originally Diablo3.com was owned and managed by Mockery who, if I recall correctly, was based out of Quebec (maybe Ontario?). Umaro was aother primary admin for the site with him at the time (who was a bit more 'active' in the day-to-day running of the site).
Blizzard contacted Mockery about purchasing the Diablo3.com domain name in anticipation of the game announcement, but Mockery (I think, quite cleverly) opted instead to 'donate' the domain name to them in exchange for promotion - specifically, listing the new site (DiabloFans.com) on the official Diablo III website. When the game was announced, this led to a huge surge in users (IIRC from about 10,000 to 30,000 - practically over night). It was just before this 're-brand' that Umaro asked me onto the team to help with the graphical elements (e.g. new logo & banner, forum re-skin, etc).
Not long after, it was announced that Mockery was moving on from the site and selling to the Curse gaming network (I believe around 2010-2012). At first, the site experienced a lot of growth during this period as anticipation for Diablo III grew - however, I believe shortly after the game was released, the site's activity experienced a decline. My guess would be this was for a few reasons. I think the mutual anticipation of the game had held more energy than the actual game itself and, when it was released, I think a lot of the spirit subsided. Many of us were tired of the wait by this point. Additionally, some, like me, were probably disappointed in Diablo III and weren't as motivated to remain active in the community. These factors probably combined to produce a decline in activity.
Curse operated the site as part of its network for some time - before being acquired by Amazon / Twitch in 2016. Then, in 2018 the site (and many of Curse's assets, including DiabloFans.com and other similar sites) were bought by Wikia (aka Fandom). The current owner/operator of DFans is MagicFind - which appears to be a subsidiary of Fandom/Wikia - as their advertising is generated by Fandom (though I haven't actually confirmed that this is the relationship).
I'm guessing that the 'blackout' you've been referring to happened sometime in that 2018-2020 range (does that seem correct?)
ANYWAYS! All this has been very interesting to reflect on and research. I had to dig through some old emails from pre-2010 and do some Googling - which has all been surprisingly enjoyable. Thanks everyone for the nostalgia trip!
ya that sounds about right on the blackout all thought it did not last or seem to last very long all though the damage may have already been done as you can see how inactive these forums are it makes me sad when i go to something like say the barb forums and all i see (mostly) is stuff from a year or longer ago
I wonder if there is any plan to revitalise the forums, considering Diablo is still such an active property...
Heya! Always nice to see oldschool people. I've not been around as long as you, but quite a while at this point. But I love delving in history, so together with Aerisot - who, based on his account date, has even been around for longer - we went through the timeline of Dfans a while ago. Here's the crude picture:
I personally joined in September 2012. I'm not gonna re-tell the story of why I joined, because I've written about it here when DiabloFans closed. I also don't remember when I became a mod, but I can tell you that the peak of DiabloFans wasn't shortly after release, but it was around 2015/2016. That is because we often forget that Reaper of Souls really "fixed" Diablo 3 and turned it into the game we all wanted, and the Diablo 3 that we got to enjoy shortly after RoS release was probably the most pure and true successor to Diablo 2 that we always wanted. The game now is in a good state, it's just that many of us have "over-played" it at thousands of hours in, and a stupidly amount of power creep has made the game evolve into an endgame where people can't even comprehend the numbers anymore, and Blizzard recently openly admitted that they now take "paragon 5000" as the average competitive power level. Long before anyone cared, I warned about the destructive impact of paragon power creep, and in 2018 I concluded that for me, the Blizzard I grew up with ceased to exist.
But alas, I disgress. As I said, the "peak" of Diablofans was absolutely in 2015/2016. The site saw an incredible surge of users after RoS release as all of the sudden the removal of the AH and the more balanced approach of RoS, thanks to Josh Mosqueira, brought more opportunity for discussions and debate to the game, and the playerbase exploded. We had tons of build discussions, and as a result there was need to create better ways to share builds. As Molster had developed a deck sharing system for Hearthpwn, it was later on adapted into the build tool for DiabloFans. I don't know when exactly it launched, but it was the prime contributor to the spike in users throughout 2015/2016, as there was very little patch activity (cf. seasons overview), but the competitive playerbase was interested in exploring the development of the "meta", and casual players were constantly on the lookout for those juicy cookie cutter builds. The forums were also insanely active, and members like Jaetch and Loroese (wizard theorycrafting masters) are among those who I personally miss the most, among with many many others who just disappeared.
At the same time of the peak of these forums, in 2015/2016 Blizzard also had scaled down the Diablo development team - as we know now, it was when they scrapped the second expansion and instead decided to create DLCs (and later on decided to even release only one DLC, the Necro in summer 2017, and the rest as content patches). The result was that communication died off completely; from regular developer interaction across all media, including "play your way" panels with the devs, we went to a total silence. The paragon power creep then saw the potential for botters to exploit this, starting in season 4, and Blizzard never really stepped in; every few months there's a few banwaves, but they really only ever catch a fraction of botters, at most. To this day there are people openly mocking Blizzard, having bot references in clan names and character names while occupying top spots on the leaderboards. The silence of Blizzard is deafening, and every year or so we get an apology with "we will improve our communication"... and then again vanishing into the nether for a year. It'd be comical if it wasn't so sad. But in the end, this caused the playerbase to decline steadily, to a bare skeleton. Every so often players come back for a new season, a new patch, or an announcement - like Diablo 4 - but it's never for more than a few days at most.
DiabloFans specifically got hit hard by this lack of communication because Blizzard also stopped engaging with and promoting fan sites (with the exception of Reddit, where they became actually more active than on their own forums). So everyone moved over to Reddit and our forums became a bit barren. There were times where I was the only active mod checking in for weeks, and mostly looking at bot posts ;-)
DiabloFans changed owners at their peak, so I can't blame the new owners for shutting it down in 2019, as from their point of view it was in a steady decline, and there was no signs of Diablo 4 at that point (keep in mind, this was half a year after Blizzard literally gave the finger to all Diablo fans with their Diablo: Immortal announcement disaster). But the damage of said closure was probably more than we imagined: the build tool not being available for one season meant that people went elsewhere and removed their bookmarks. Another reason why everything here is quite empty is that when Fandom bought DiabloFans in 2019, they wiped every post and user who didn't explicitly consent to transferring their data (I guess to comply with GDPR).
The combination of all those factors make it quite difficult to get DiabloFans back on their feet. In the end there's only so much we can do; there needs to be a constantly engaging game that a lot of people play and want to discuss to even give us enough meat to revive the forums back to their old life. And then we need to acknowledge that Reddit, because it is graced by the presence of the developers, is favored so much more by the playerbase these days. But... we are trying, and we aren't giving up.
Here's to hoping that Diablo 4 will help return DiabloFans to its old glory!
Hi Bagstone - thank you very much for that informative post!
By the time of RoS, I was long gone, so I had no idea of the effect it had on the D3 experience or DFans userbase! That's very interesting.
It's sad to hear that Blizzard has changed so much - I wonder if this is, in large part, due to the merger/acquisiton with Activision? (I haven't been paying close attention for years, so I'm not all caught up).
Perhaps Diablo 4, if it's able to deliver on what it seems to be promising, will lead to a resurgence. Perhaps if the upcoming Netflix series is revealed, that could lead to some additional activity as well.
Ultimately, Reddit is such a powerhouse, I'm not surprised a lot of the fanbase has moved there. In my experience, Reddit has largely replaced the forum-based communities that once made up such a large part of the internet (from early 2000's through ~ 2010ish, at least for me).
This is too bad, though, because I think Reddit simply doesn't have the same intimate community feel that a more specific website/forum (such as DFans) can provide. This is something I find lacking in the Reddit experience for me - though I know some do get more connected. I think this is largely due to the site being so "like" driven (so only top content really gets viewed by the majority of users, who don't sort by "new").
I'd love to see some more discussion and community posts here, as it does seem that most of the remaining activity is very build-oriented (which is great, but only one piece of the greater picture).
Thanks again for all the information and opinion - and for the welcome!
EDIT: For what it's worth - I was able to 'resurrect' my account by sending a message to the forum's support email (support@diablofans.com) and asking for it to be connected to my Twitch account. It took a few weeks, but it allowed me to re-accedd my old account, even though I had never 'consented' to the account being carried over... I wonder if this is true for other old members as well?
Diablo3.com actually existed as a blog for a bit before it got the vbulletin treatment. I think mockery said that once. There was an odd subtle tension between mockery's site and... god, I forget that other one. It wasn't medievaldragon's, it was that older one. I think it was founded in 2001. It's still around and dated as hell, lol.
Welcome back Jetrall! Miss those days!
Yeah, I had to do something similar to this to get my old account connected to Twitch.
You're right on that one.