Where do you play? rhetorical, but I don't agree that most founders are inactive. Not true on our server. Maybe original founders have stepped back or moved on; I am not an original founder of my guild but rights were transferred to me 5 years ago after the founder was inactive for 30 days. If founders aren't active, they'll be demoted to regular guild members.
I think what KoK meant was guild leaders, not so much literally founders. And it's correct that you can't judge guild forum usage based out of the total of all guilds, tiny guilds or mostly inactive guilds. That's super obvious though, just like you can't judge anything based on all player accounts when lots of them are inactive or multi-world accounts that get logged into once a week or once a month.
The developers could analyze the data (they have it all!) any way they want, but there's no real desire to save the forum or prove its usefulness. If it doesn't work on the phone app, the attitude seems to be, screw the original browser game and all the PC players. Too much work to just adapt the forum concept to the phone app, apparently? Players being able to communicate really doesn't seem to be high on the priority list - and it's a shame because it's the team aspect that retains most players. You know the mobile app didn't even have messages until October 2015? Of course not, but we spent
a whole year not even being able to talk to a bunch of silent phone users!
https://forum.us.forgeofempires.com...ate-1-61-messaging-for-mobiles-is-here.11171/
I'm pretty tired of feeling like I'm discriminated against for playing on an actual computer, especially considering when I started this game the browser was the ONLY option! It's one thing to add mobile and cross-platform features, it's another entirely to take away original PC features - AND specifically state the main reason is the app players can't use it! Wow, so what. And though I'm apparently outnumbered by the people with a phone growing out of their hand 24/7, I hate playing on the app. The more you turn this into an app game the more your original fan base will leave. Which may seem fine for a while, but it will hurt the bottom line in the long run.