Hi everyone, ThisCaptain is coming to you for my very first official blog post!

The topic at hand is Community.

Combat Cards is incredibly lucky to have a very engaged and active community, who help each other as players and us as developers on a daily basis. It really can’t be overstated how important this community is to us and the game, and that’s why we’re going to be making some changes in the near future which are intended to ensure the growth and accessibility of this fantastic group of individuals for new and existing players alike.

At present, the potential of this community is limited by the fact it is a bit fragmented, and this is something that we’re seeking to change. We have very active users in our in-game forum, as well as on the community Discord server. Both of these channels are immensely useful to us for collecting feedback and interacting with players, but they can be quite siloed.

To change this, and make the community more central and open to all, we are going to be making two very important changes:

1. We are taking over official management of the Combat Cards Discord server, previously an unofficial community server. Almost everything will stay the same for community members, including asking Community Moderators to remain. The server will be prominently linked in game, and all users will be invited to join the server should they wish to.
2. The in-game forum, which is managed by a third-party, will be closed down on the 5th of June. Resources that were previously devoted to managing this platform will be reinvested in the Discord server and Social Media channels.

So why are we doing this? It’s a fair question.

The primary drivers are three-fold:

1. Engagement data shows that only 4% of daily users actually use the forum. The reasons for this could be many, but the fact remains that the forum does not see as much engagement as we would like, nor do we feel as though enough players are benefiting from it.
2. We are a small team of developers on Combat Cards, and none of us has an official role in managing the forum or community. There’s an overhead involved with checking and posting on the forum, which detracts from our ability to perform our main roles, as well as our ability to respond to queries on the forum. A platform like Discord from a developer perspective is significantly quicker and easier to engage with, and allows more of us to be more engaged with members of the community directly, without it interfering with our primary roles in developing the game.
3. Finally, and very importantly, the forum uses third-party software which has not been updated since March 2021. This is why we have not been able to fix the android image upload problem for example, as it is out of our control. By taking over management of the Discord server, we can use it as our main channel, and can be more confident about it being fully supported in the future.

Ultimately what this all comes down to is creating the right environment for the Combat Cards community to flourish, and we believe we can best serve that goal by concentrating on a fewer number of channels. This will allow us as Devs to be significantly more engaged with you, the players, in a direct capacity. We’re aware that there is a wealth of useful community information currently available on the forum, and we’d like to invite anyone who is interested to assist in the transferring of this knowledge to Discord, where we plan to include sections for FAQs and introductory guides.

We’ll be turning KTPlay off on the 5th June, and we’ll continue to post reminders up until that date. The button will still exist in the game, but instead of taking you to the forum, it’ll instead open a menu to access our social channels. If you have questions or concerns, please raise them! We’re eager to hear what you think, and hope to see many of you join the Discord, where you can chat with us and your fellow players.  Join the discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/9teFN6G