Why even try to have it be a replacement for forums? It’s just live chat.
Companies claim they’re shutting down (or never opening in the first place) forums in favor of Discord, Reddit, etc. because people aren’t using them in the numbers they used to. I’m sure they don’t mind cutting the cost of administering them, but it’s not just being imposed from above on a whim.
Usenet died out because, ironically, people stopped using it in favor of web-forums, and I’m sure there were many similar threads on there about what a loss it was as that process happened. It still happened, though.
If people need a repository of information about a game or other product, then I’m sure that need will be filled with wikis, faqs, etc. But nothing says “dead product” louder than a lightly-trafficked forum, and so they’re being phased out.
Don’t ask me, but that’s what’s happened. Nowadays if you have questions and want answers, the usual response is “go ask on the discord,” which makes it so that each and every person with the same question must do the same thing for eternity, and when the people are no longer just hanging out waiting to answer you, well, tough shit.
Why are you sure? The answer to everything isn’t “make a wiki,” either. Some stuff is just never going to make it there. A lot of stuff about how to install mods for Silent Hunter 5 is on old threads on subsim. There’s no wiki.
I remember what GameFAQs was the place to go. Now it’s Discord, and this engagement and then being tied to the server and getting responses all the time is not my favorite. It is kind of fun sometimes though to see a dev live respond once in awhile though.
I don’t know it’s an age thing so much as my complete lack of desire to actually fully engage with my entertainment choices.
True. But it may be the answer to “how do I preserve important data that may disappear at any time without warning if someone gets tired of maintaining this forum”.
Not to mention, there are many games to have questions for, and signing up to each Discord just for one answer is the gateway to notification hell unless you mute or leave the server instantly.
I’m not sure I’ll ever actually complete a JRPG that doesn’t have one or more multi-hundred-page txt file GameFAQs guides filled with ASCII art and absurdly overly detailed, meticulously researched breakdowns of stat minmaxing strategies derived from reverse-engineering the code.
Mind, I don’t need the ASCII art or the breakdowns, but they added to the ambience, dangit!
The Harvest Moon and Rune Factory ones were sometimes very cute. Those individuals put a fair amount of work into those full guides. Now we get like Q/A often single sentence questions with single sentence responses or just some weird conversation in the middle of a Discord server.
It’s a loss and a gain.
I’ll admit while I love Discord, I do miss game-specific forums. I can’t keep up with a lot of game-specific Discord servers so I either mute them except for the announcement channels, or don’t join at all. I much prefer the…asynchronous communication of forums.
I know Stardock used to use IRC around 15-20 years ago, so I don’t think it’s anything new for older devs.
Newer devs want the control Discord allows, you get fewer spammers/trolls on Discord. You also can shut down revolts a lot easier.
I’m not on any official game discords: it’s mostly a webcomic, local community, FGC community , and calibur character discords.
I think the voice & video quality on Discord is descent enough, and it’s overall nicely integrated. That said, I think one of the main points of Discord is that you only need one account. If companies ran their own IRC servers, you’d need to create individual accounts/credentials for them.
But yeah, I see more and more devs relying on Discord as their main community hub. I think chat is nice for some direct interaction and to gauge trends and the current mood, but it’s definitely not great and built for long-winded in-depth discussions.
Usually FAQs are pinned on Discord chat channels. There’s often even a #faq channel for this purpose.
I instantly mute every public server I sign up for and selectively unmute. There’s no other way to do it.
Curse actually released “Curse Voice” well before Discord, and had several similar features as it developed. They were very similar competitors when Twitch acquired Curse in 2016. Twitch shifted focus though and the Curse App is no more.
My concern with Discord is their shaky monetization strategy. They’re primarily VC funded, which means the free ride will end at some point - if no one buys them.
I’ve been using Discord for the past three months or so, and I think I finally have it figured out. Basically, it’s a forum. Like this one.
So check it. My friends usually communicated over email. We’d talk back and forth over the course of weeks, as we’re all separated across the country now. But one day, one of them said, hey, let’s continue this discussion over Discord instead.
So I accepted invite, and I read the posts that were there. And then I forgot about it. And then I remembered to check it a month later, and there were a whole bunch of posts there that I read. And I replied to some. And then I forgot about it for two weeks. And then I checked it again, and there were two replies to my posts, and a couple of other posts. And so I replied again. I just checked again a couple of weeks later, and there’s no new posts yet.
So it’s basically just like the email exchanges we were having accept there’s no notifications. Basically with email, I’d get a notification on my phone that someone had replied. This way it’s the same thing, except I have to remember to check it. Like a forum. (And yes, I know there’s some way of posting so that all users of the “forum” get a notification on their phone, but only Lenovo “announcement” seem to do that, no one else).
I mean you can configure the app to notify you at pretty much any event on a per channel or server basis, if you want.
It’s really meant for real time communication; the new threads feature really hammers that home.
Which isn’t to say you CAN’T use it like email. It’s just not necessarily super well suited to that job. But then again, more often than not, neither is email…
I have a hard time with the threads on Discord. It doesn’t seem organized enuff for me since it seems to work more like a comments section and information flies. Hard to keep a conversation straight.
Yeah, I tried dropping in the Qt3 discord a few times, and I have no idea what is even being talked about most of the time. Just no clue.
The email analogy works. Qt3 folks are emailing each other, and I can read it, but I don’t know what they’re saying because I don’t have context.
I’ve found it handy in the AI War 2 discord to ask the random question about a scenario I’m playing and get in a quick real time chat about it because there are some very knowledgeable regulars who hang out there. That’s what I’d consider optimal use of it.
The more common experience I get though is walking into the middle of a conversation full of inside jokes where I not only don’t know WTF anyone is talking about I frankly can’t be bothered to figure it out.
Mostly drunkards talk on that server too, it doesn’t help!
Not particularly surprising they’re trying to hop on the NFT train. Spectacularly dumb given how many Discord phishing scams are flying around (but then, what isn’t wrt NFTs?).