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!
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!