I don’t get a lot of comments. This is an IRC replacement, not a forum or anything else’s. The same knowledge always been lost to the electronic ether before, excepting it didn’t even have the chat logs accessible at all.
Since I see it as an IRC replacement, the comments about the UI are quite weird from that point of view. As are the comments from people scared this will take over forums, while pissed there are no searchable threads saved forever. Pick one or the other!
Discord, like Slack and other contemporaries is just themed IRC.
The problem is game devs in particular are treating it like it is a forum and using it in lieu of maintaining an official forum, or even just posting on Reddit or Steam or whatever.
I see it as a very handy solution: Steam forums are a forsaken place that I hope no developers are still exposing themselves to anymore, and individual devs having their own forums has mostly been an exception in my experience.
A typical exchange for me was to look up a developer having no forum, finding his blog, me posting a message there, him telling me to contact him over email, we sending email back and forth from then on.
I guess the sort of knowledge that could emerge from such exchanges was not technically lost, since nobody could know it existed excepting for the two parties.
:-) I just love your point about knowledge being not lost technically. Amazing phenomenology.
You can see it however you’d like, unfortunately in practice there are communities that are deciding to use it as a one stop shop for everything and moving away from or never setting up a forum or subreddit or anything else. Just as one example, one of the Final Fantasy-themed gachas (Record Keeper) has a subreddit full of by now mostly outdated information. If you want the latest it’s all on Discord.
And there were plenty of IRC networks back in the day that had bots logging channels and throwing those logs on websites to be searched :)
This is the typical hyperbolic article, it didn’t invent anything, it’s just another iteration of what it existed before, with more polish and features.
Which is fine, it’s how software mostly evolves.
I agree, for example most of the Dominions community seems to have moved to a pair of Discords, instead of having a solid presence in some forum.
How can you be surprised a freaking gacha “game” community is shit?
Also Reddit got a way higher bar of entry ( and those ads everywhere, urrh)
It has a vastly bigger uptake than IRC ever did, so when people ask questions they don’t do it as much on places that are accessible to others who come after. I’ve run into multiple instances of, for example, missing files that used to be hosted somewhere, like an English translation for an obscure Stalker mod, where the answer to, “what is the most up to date version of this” becomes “check the discord,” where it’s not even immediately clear where “the discord” even is.
That sucks. Much prefer a subreddit.
I actually deleted a part of one of my messages where i argued the file sharing in discord was way more intuitive than any of the external linking found in other places (let’s not even talk about dcc servers XD )
It all depends on the mods and members being able to maintain order or not after that, but i rather stick to good places where i can ask questions about varied game topic without any issue usually.
Of course my interest is mostly in outdated games…
You should join my discord!
“Oh, that game’s community doesn’t matter” is an awful take. I could name more, and Dominions was mentioned as an example above. As an aside the FFRK community is very helpful and has a lot of great resources and at this point in the game’s life the expectation is that pretty much everyone coming in is F2P because the monetization just isn’t worth it for the benefit.
What bar to entry is there for Reddit? No account is required to browse or search the information that’s already out there. And if you’re using the internet without an ad blocker in 2021 I don’t know what to tell you.
I wish it was only a Pair. There are at least 4 dedicated Discords for Dominions. Each relatively active.
The break down is partial because of modding rules. The one I frequent is relatively strict, but it’s also about getting a responses.
There are only X number of channels to have discussions, and if one is being used, then it’s harder to start a new discussion on that channel until the other discussion natural ends. Or go to a different discord. That’s why each of the discords I know about have a question and answer channel and a General Chat.
On a forum, each new discussion gets its own thread, making it easier to scale.
I think one of the biggest failures of Dominions, and the reason for the fragmentation is mostly a failure of Illwinter. The use of Steam as their main platform for their forum drives people to seek help or community almost any where else. The software is awful.
I think Discord helped fill in that void.
It doesn’t prevent that take to be true. When I was into Langrisser Mobile, the “English” speaking community was absolutely terrible, and I was perusing google-translated Chinese wikis. I bet you can do the same with Japanese wikis for your Final Fantasy game, to much benefits.
As for Dominions, [blah].
Reddit pushes ads within posts as replies regularly, which the blocker have to adjust too. That place sucks, and so does searching info on it
That’s a very good point, because on discord, things can get messy with so many servers and channels sharing so many users on a given subject matter.
It’s sad sometimes it jumps around and can get confusing or lose intervenants that matters.
https://illwiki.com/dom5/discord-servers
I count 13 discords. Only 3 are Foreign Language ones. Just for Dominions 5.
But it is used as a forum replacement. See Old World:
Now try Googling anything about the game. How far along is Old World in early access? What about a development roadmap? Try finding information on certain mechanics that are unclear for you, or maybe a guide to playing Egypt. Google barely finds anything, because it’s all lost in an IRC chatroom replacement.
I’m having similar issues with another game I’m playing now, Nioh 2. Some youtubers have put out content, but trying to find details on mechanics is extremely frustrating. The Wiki is barebones and most of the Reddit discussions were back in March when the game first released. There’s stuff in the Nioh discord, but again it’s just not searchable.
This isn’t just me being an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn. I use Discord almost daily and like it a lot. As someone who grew up as the internet came of age and spent a lot of time on IRC, it does absolutely feel like an IRC 2.0 for me. It’s fantastic for chat, it’s great for me to voice chat with friends when playing a game together. But it really has sucked to see so much content moved to ephemeral chat instead of forums which can be indexed, searched, etc.
OTC was the same way, living in its own remote space with barely anything filtering out before release, didn’t it? I think that was a preference of the developer to manage the number of feedback inputs at the time, and it probably still is?
I’m not interested in playing Old World before its release, but to relate to something else that is probably very close: I had been using Discord for Offworld Trading Company exclusively, after that game’s 1.0 release, and it never felt like a poor trade off to me then. The information on that server was readily available in guides that were updated regularly depending on the updates.
To get back to the point, probably, there was an OTC forum. It was a terrible place.
I was told earlier it wasn’t a valid criticism, but again, that stuff is up to the server admin to set up things so knowledge database can be put together by some people on the server, and be actually searchable.
It’s up to people, be it admins or members, to turn a server into an interesting place or a stupid free-for-all meme/gif/twitter link throwing mess.
I’m on various servers discussing the MiSTer FPGA platform, and the gap is staggering between them and the crowd they host. Some I just keep around just for the announcements. It might be a matter of finding the good Nioh server out there. And it’s true there is no easy way to find that out, that I know of.
I love that Discord can run in a browser – even with voice chat! That you don’t have to install an app removes a huge barrier to entry.
But somehow, just last night, we were raiding with a new guy and he couldn’t get in the Discord. WTF. Eventually he got in, but, dude. It’s not hard. It’s just a URL.
But I strongly agree with everyone above that Discord is just chat. It is absolutely not a repository of information and in absolutely no way could it replace a forum or subreddit.