Every time the Age team decides to launch new forums it splinters the community. This is now the 5th time it has happened since 2010. Please stop the madness. The Steam Community Hub for each of the legacy games are the best forums for the legacy games community. There is no need to have separate legacy games forums on the official Age of Empires website. If there needs to be a forum on the official Age of Empires website for mobile Age games because the Windows Store does not have a community hub feature, that makes logical sense. Please don’t torture the community by continuing to push it around with “new” forums just for the sake of having something different.
5 times?!?! wow that’s crazy. No wonder there had been so little activity on the Legacy forums before in recent times. I’d probably quit visiting too if everything kept getting reset. I cannot imagine the wealth of knowledge about these classic games that has been lost over the years due to these splits. Very disheartening, and like you say, it only causes further splits in the community.
Don’t get me wrong, I agreed with the one that just occurred, but primarily due to Castle Siege’s overwhelming shadow over the others and the issue of Castle Siegers constantly posting castle siege material in them. When I found out that the Legacy threads would not be moving so to be continued, that was a big setback for the Legacy community here… again. But, I also understand the impossible task of trying to physically move every single thread one at a time from over there to here… and I know also that they wouldn’t have been able to give the original posters credit for the threads once moved. The way it worked it would’ve given credit for everything to the Dev moving the threads, and they didn’t want that.
August 2010 - Move Age Online forums from Age Community website to new Age Online website
April 2013 - Age of Empires II HD forums added to Age Online forums on Age Online website
November 2013 - Age Community forums on Age Community website locked, Age Online forums on Age Online website locked, Age of Empires II HD forums on Age Online website locked, launch half-baked new YAF forums on Age of Empires website for all legacy games
June 2015 - New polished IPS forums launched, content from previous forums migrated
June 2017 - IPS forums locked for legacy games, new separate half-baked Vanilla forums for legacy games
If I had any input, I would ask for the legacy games to be returned to the polished IPS forums. Going from poorly designed forums to good forums and then back to poorly designed forums is disheartening.
Sorry, I obviously didn’t know you guys were in the process of announcing Age of Empires Definitive Edition and therefore a forum update was in order.
Its insane.
It was the wrong move all the way back when they splintered off from Age Community to Age Online.
Age series has always had a poor web presence / community forum since MS took it “in house”. Years and years of content to waste and very poor designs.
Wow that is bad
Well, this Vanilla nonsence may be the worst implementation I’ve seen.
Remember while the forums that were with castle siege are locked…they are still there…all info is there…don’t know about the ones before that. But we have to also remember…MS rents this space from people who host & run forum software…at times those hosts go out of business or things go wrong and things have to be moved.
I am grateful they pay to have a forum for any game…period. Since this is a new launch of a classic game…they felt it needed an update…and we are all following a bit slow behind to catch up.
If not for forums…where on earth would we all complain?? >:)
@“Wicked Wulf” said:
Remember while the forums that were with castle siege are locked…they are still there…all info is there…don’t know about the ones before that. But we have to also remember…MS rents this space from people who host & run forum software…at times those hosts go out of business or things go wrong and things have to be moved.I am grateful they pay to have a forum for any game…period. Since this is a new launch of a classic game…they felt it needed an update…and we are all following a bit slow behind to catch up.
If not for forums…where on earth would we all complain?? >:)
Social media probably. 
Why not hire someone who will export full db from older forums and import it here?
Not only community will be grateful, it will also get better search results and bigger audience.
@batollo said:
Why not hire someone who will export full db from older forums and import it here?
Not only community will be grateful, it will also get better search results and bigger audience.
Its not a level of commitment MS has to Age community.
It really is unfortunate that the forums continue to be shuffled around. I would really like to see the “official” Age of Empires community forums unified in one location for each title, whether that means a Steam community hub, an Age of Empires website forum or a game hub for each Windows Store game in the Xbox app for Windows 10, or a combination of all three.
The fans need to have a voice with respect to the official forums before significant changes are made. Hopefully the Age of Empires Insider Program becomes more than just the platform for the Age of Empires: Definitive Edition closed beta and will give Age of Empires fans a voice for months if not years to come like the Windows Insider Program has done for Windows 10.
@batollo said:
Well, this Vanilla nonsence may be the worst implementation I’ve seen.
It is pretty terrible and half baked. Especially coming from IPS which was nice or use what Crackdown and KI use.
@rhrmn said:
Sorry, I obviously didn’t know you guys were in the process of announcing Age of Empires Definitive Edition and therefore a forum update was in order.
Not really sure ‘why’ it was necessary. I can understand a facelift, but changing the website and the forum software seems silly unless they have deeper integration planned, such as player stats on user profile.
@batollo said:
Why not hire someone who will export full db from older forums and import it here?
Not only community will be grateful, it will also get better search results and bigger audience.
If they are using the cloud based version of Vanilla migrating from IPS to Vanilla is very possible. If they are running the open source version, that might be much more difficult because open source Vanilla is a POS.
Curious if they have tight integration planned. If they don’t, moving to Vanilla looks pretty silly since IPS was working just fine.