Curse Network sites HearthPwn, Minecraft Forum, MTGSalvation, and DiabloFans are set to be archived. This comes a year after the announcement of the closure of ArenaJunkies, which many fans thought was a singular event and not indicative of things to come.
The sites will be read-only, slowly becoming relics of the past. But without these sites, where can fans of these games go to find updates and discuss content with fellow players?
HearthPwn will be archived and become read-only on June 28. But the original team that made Hearthpwn so useful will continue its efforts on another site: outof.cards. The site isn’t as pretty or streamlined, but this is mostly due to the fact that it’s still in beta. An open set of forums, deck guides, and even a deck builder are present, carrying on the legacy of its spiritual predecessor.
Minecraft Forum was around for a decade, guiding users through updates and allowing them to argue what truly was the best way to mine. Alternative sites are sparse, but they usually have active communities that would welcome this new influx of users. Planetminecraft.com is an excellent example of that. Although it’s a bit more focused on resource packs and skins, it can easily be brought up to snuff with new life breathed into its forums by active community members.
Magic: The Gathering players will have a multitude of resources they can use to continue interacting with the online community. While the game is also supported on outof.cards, an interesting forum interaction took place during the archive announcement. A user expressed their sadness of having to find another site to use, to which a staff member said “you won’t need to wander far, we have something in the works. Stay tuned.” Sites like TappedOut.net and MTGArena.com should be enough to tide players over until the original MTGSalvation team announces its new plan.
DiabloFans was a very unique site in the community it brought together, and with the lack of quality alternatives, it’s yet another blow to the neglected franchise. The best equivalent experience fans of the series can find will be icy-veins.com and the Diablo 3 subreddit for forums, and d3planner.com for builds. It definitely won’t feel like the old site, but if enough demand from the community arises, a quality replacement could follow in DiabloFans’ wake.
While nothing can truly replace these sites and the communities that they were able to foster and grow together, time passes and things change. In time, new communities will arise out of the ashes of the old ones, and as long as the love of a game holds strong, so too will its forums and its communities.
