Because a big “Join our community discord server!” on the game’s title screen isn’t enough apparently. They have to put a flashy animated GIF at the top of every update notification, change the name of the game’s Steam forum to “Join Our Discord!”, and even reply to posts in the Steam forum saying “You should join our discord so we can chat about it!” as if a forum isn’t a good place to chat about the thing that’s already being discussed.
Bitch please, if I wanted to be in the hell that is Discord I’d already be there, you can stop asking.
It’s so stupid they have discord channels but not a forum where actual discussion can happen. You can’t have a conversation in a live chat room that has hundreds to thousands of people. It’s just a constsnt scroll you can’t actually fuckin’ read!
for like pen and paper role playing it can be nice when you have rooms for particular games but I agree for video games I rather have forums. I mean if its an mmo or such I can chat in game and if its not then I don’t see any point to chating.
I mod a server with 13k people, it’s really not that bad when you have channels, threads, and forums.
(Shout-out to DoMT for D&D folks)
That’s just the Twitch brainrot. People that want forums back (including me) do not want to be in a room with 13k people. That’s not a community, it’s so much bigger than the monkeysphere.
I know this is very unpopular, but something like Discord is very much preferable for real-time conversations than a forum. The interactions with developers and players is a lot more natural, and having a voice chat is always nice.
Discord can also have separate chat rooms about specific issues that can be tagged and searched.
So the functionality of discord is second to none. The only real issue with discord is enshitification. It is very enshitified, and the only way to mostly circumvent that is to have a custom discord client.
If only Matrix was as fully-functional and easy to install and use with just a click.
In my opinion, the biggest issue with pushing communities to Discord is that it traps the information within that platform and their search leaves a lot to be desired.
Discord is a good platform to build a community around a topic, however, more often than not, a lot of solutions to common problems become lost or hard to find for new players/users.
discord is a communication platform for friends to game on. nothing more, nothing less.
It should not be an information archive.
It should not be a source of tech support.
It shouldnt be a source of important news/announcements.
All that shit should be on your fucking website, where it can be indexed, archived, and searched for.
Cause discord isolates information in such a way that you will never be able to find out unless you actively use discord, actively hunt down the right discord channel, and properly luck into finding the information.
verses just going to a web browser and typing " [game name] [bug description]" and likely getting the solution, or at least relevant information, in the first 3 returns.
Discord holds information hostage, and kills it should a channel shut down/delete, losing it forever… and anyone that has played older games know that some of that information and community fixing is essential, even a decade+ later.
bring back fucking forums
It’s only trapped on Discord if one refuses to ever join Discord. Most people playing games use Discord, so that’s not a real issue for them.
Making things searchable, such as problems and solutions, is dependent on how well managed a community is; over the years I’ve had plenty of issues trying to find something on a forum simply because something like keywords, and tagging didn’t exist or wasn’t enforced, or bug reports were regelated to a single forum thread.
The same it is with Discord. If you’re smart you’ll create a “forum” channel for bug and issue reports and force users to use tags as a rule.
Funnily enough, I actually don’t dislike discord as a platform, I’ve even built servers that have grown to hundreds and thousands of users. I’m also well aware of the attempts discord has made at rectifying the issues I outlined. That being said, it is absolutely a walled-garden and whenever discord’s servers are taken offline, countless amounts of information will go with them. At least with forums or a lot of other platforms, people can easily archive the info, not so much with discord.
I’m with you. I actually like discord.
enjoy it. its a great platform to communicate with your friends in game on.
but its not a place for tech support, breaking announcements, etc etc etc
It is if you want to use it for that.
If everyone that cares about your game is already there, it’s much simpler to use Discord to drop an announcement.
Refusing to acknowledge others opinions by just saying it’s a “you problem” when you disagree is really not conducive to a conversation by the way.
But it’s all hidden. It’s not searchable or discoverable. I have zero desire to join or be part of discord. It’s like a hidden part of the internet.
If you want to talk about your game put it out in public. You can have a web page a forum and a chat without that stupid shit that is discord.
You’re talking about a place for suggestions and help which can be driven to something like discourse. Which is a platform specifically made for q&A. But it is not well suited for the type of interaction you would expect in a Discord server. It’s not providing the controls and integration that Discord provides, nor is it providing voice chat capabilities and cross interaction.
Discord as much as we all hate it. For the enshitification. is a well-established high population low friction platform for community engagement.
And one of the number one rules when it comes to community engagement is that you go to where your community has the least amount of friction. They don’t come to you.
If that was a community that preferentially used IRC then the developer should preferentially use IRC. Unfortunately, target gaming audiences preferentially use Discord and are already familiar with the platform. Anything else is adding friction that reduces community growth.
These are the facts of the matter. I’m not saying these in support of Discord. It’s kind of a shitty situation
But you could have all of this on your own page. You could run a chat there. You could have forums there.
Discord is friction. You have to join. You have to put up with the shttiest interface. You can’t search and find anything in it if you are not on it.
A game maker that says cone to my discord is going to piss me off and make me not interested in their game.
I am not going to want to join things to find out about them.
And by the way, I really don’t want to talk to anyone about a game, I want to search for issues or report them and move on.
Its a game not an online live discussion
Discord isn’t friction as most developers and gamers use Discord regularly. You refusing to use Discord makes you a tiny minority. So it’s friction for you, and you personally.
These same people want an online live discussion about the issues in the game. This again makes you part of a tiny minority that doesn’t want that.
Since you’re part of a minority, developers lose nothing by your lack of interest in the Discord community they’ve created. A game certainly won’t fail if you choose to ignore Discord. Rather, a game is likely to fail if there doesn’t exist any Discord community for it.
Yeah I guess. Hiding their game in a proprietary black hole is their business I guess. In a few years their game will be forgotten all discussion lost and no-one will care.
Again, they could have all the same thing on their own site and include live discussions.
But people want shit apparently so here we are.
And it might be worth pointing put that discord users themselves have begun complaining about server fatigue. Many suggesting they don’t want live support for every game. They want to look up issues and move on.
Isn’t there a limit to the servers you can join? Isn’t it 100? I know many people already at that limit. How are new games going to crack that problem?
Game devs don’t want to spend time hosting and managing a forum, they want to make a game
Yeah, and for every dozen hours spent on building a “shitty discord” that’s a dozen hours not spent building the game.
And then there’s the high friction. Now people need to sign up for your special website, sign up for your special chat, add another app to their phone if you even provide one…etc When 9/10 of those same people already have a Discord account and are already active on Discord.
You don’t appear to understand what friction means. Because using an established platform that the majority of your community already uses isn’t high friction…
It doesn’t matter what the platform is. You bring yourself to the platform your users use. It just so happens that at this point in time it is Discord and this wasn’t always the case and it won’t always be the case.
You keep talking about how you don’t want to join to find out information how you don’t want to chat about the game.
Okay. That’s fine, that’s your choice, Why are you trying to shove your choice down other people’s throat then, you don’t have to join, you don’t have to talk about the game. It’s not required.
Well from every person I asked who uses discord, the last thing they want is to have to deal with game devs on discord. Making a website and chat is so stupid simple, I question if a gaming dev can make a good game if they can’t do that.
The interactions with developers and players
I don’t want to have interactions with developers, nor other players. Cramming “social media” above the game advertisement itself is… something.
That’s a you problem. Most gamers and developers do want those things and every thriving game I can think of has a very active Discord community.
Guess you’ll have to leak secret military documents the old-fashioned way: posting them on the War Thunder forums.
Hold up, are people really stupid enough to send classified documents over fucking Discord?
…now I think about it, I don’t know why I even asked, there’s always one.
It’s actually a running joke because so many people post classified military documents to the warthunder forums
Usually signified with this image
And then, “@everyone next update coming soon” or whatnot
Thanks for the notification 🫠
(The first thing I do on every Discord server I join is mute it. I want to be very selective about notifications.)
Yea I was steam banned by the stormworks developer because of what I said in discord. Don’t diss trump over there.
Because a big “Join our community discord server!” on the game’s title screen isn’t enough apparently.
Man I hate this shit. So tacky
If I’m not interested that means I’m probably not going to bring anything interesting for the discussion
If I’m not interested that means I’m probably not going to bring anything interesting for the discussion
Ever tried to have a discussion on discord? It’s the most infuriating thing I have ever encountered.
What issues did you have with it? Too busy? Overeager mods? Bad organization?
On very busy channels, and this will probably sound weird, but it all just scrolls too fast to have a conversation. It’s like being in a room at one corner trying to talk with someone in another corner and the room is filled with other people all trying to have conversations using the same voice level. The only other analogy I could come up with is trying to have a conversation with a race car driver using his or her window mid race, and you just yell at each other every time they pass your corner.
Even when it isn’t flying by on a busy channel sometimes it’s just endless scrolling to find the beginning of the conversation or where you need to get it to get an idea of what’s going on. And their solution to that just made things worse in my opinion…
It has it’s purpose, and for my group it’s voice and being able to store notes that we can scroll back through if we need.
That makes sense.
I’m certainly of the camp that it’s bad for developers to use to coordinate with their communities via discord in part because it’s terrible for documentation/disorganized.
Guess I’ve just never given super big discord channels the time of day since they seem about as productive as a major twitch streamer’s chat. Like you said, a bit like screaming into an avalanche, everything is lost to the noise.
a bit like screaming into an avalanche
I like that, and might use that in the future.
Since you mentioned developers using it to coordinate with their community, I also have seen a pattern where the channel owner invites people to come chat with them and the other people involved. Then when someone invariably pings someone on the team they get scolded for it. Pick one, availability to the people you invited, or stay private. Can’t have both.
Sounds like corporate logic to me. “Successful games have lots of positive community engagement!” Therefore… if we push ‘community engagement’ our game will be successful! Let’s track this metric to see how well this game is doing compared to our 497 other games and whether or not to invest in bug fixes and DLCs.
Damn you seem competent, do you have an MBA?
Nope, just your run of the mill cynic.
I hate discord with a passion. I wish we’d go back to message boards - properly indexed websites that you can search to find discussions on things you need.
Surely IRC would be what you want to replace discord? Or matrix.
Going back to IRC would be fun.
Discord is okay for chat, but a lot of communities seem to think that Discord is a perfectly cromulent support channel… I guess that’s cool if you like to answer the same question a bunch, and want it to be impossible for people to find their answers via Google.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I didn’t think that IRC did any archiving, so it’s actually worse than Discord in that respect.
A lot of gamers actively chose this.
When the teamspeak debacle happened due to the license change a lot of players left out spite and instead of choosing the logical route to independence (like foss alternatives) many went directly to the then soon rising discord to suffer differently in another golden cage.
I will never understand (I chose mumble/murmur).
I’m not here to stan for Discord, it’s pretty crappy. But at the time it first hit the scene it was the killer support app for gaming.
It wasn’t. It just copied slack when it was becoming popular in the dev work world with a marketing blitz. It coincided with team speak sudden death. Slack did most of the marketing and discord bandwagoned on it as the fun slack for video games. Which in essence was just “what if IRC but with voice chat rooms.”
Video game support wasn’t part of Discord intent until people started using it for it. Then they hacked the UX nightmare that is their solution for something the app was never meant to do.
There’s a lot of rationalization there. It was simply the best technical product with lots of killer features when it was rising. People used it because it was the best solution at the time, don’t kid yourself.
This don’t about people choosing one bad voice chatter over another. This is people who can’t bother to use the best tool for the job.
(And web fora aren’t it)
I especially fucking hate when mods are distributed solely through discord. That’s so fucking stupid and a really quick way to ensure I never play what you made.
It is so infuriating espeically when any attempt to interact with the community around the game is met by the developer or community members saying “Ha! Silly you! The only place to socialize about this is Discord!”.
I have hated the fact that Discord was eating all the communities I love from the beginning, but this long into it what I find so frustrating is how game developers who rely on Discord for feedback and to get a sense of where their community is at pretend that the subset of people who use their Discord is broadly representative of the people who buy and play their game and it just isn’t.
Battlebit is a great example of a multiplayer game that only listened to its most active members on Discord who wanted a rush style arcade high intensity flavor to the combat and facilitating those players above all else lead to the entire rest of the game becoming unbalanced. When backlash started to happen, the devs again only listened to the SMG rush style players who were constantly vocalizing in the Discord and making highlight clips from it and stuff so the solution was to further nerf sniper players because that was the class SMG rush style players hated the most.
The game is dead now and I can’t think of a clearer example of how Discord can be a major liability to a game community rather than a boon.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/671860/BattleBit_Remastered/
I am not even sure the developers realize this is one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the mulitplayer community around their game which is the most infuriating part.
I’m pretty sure the game died because the devs vanished, not specifically due to player backlash. If the devs stuck around and kept delivering updates things would likely have been different.
I think that is how people active on the Discord community perceived it from their perspective, but it was not at all how I experienced Battlebit die as an initial huge fan of the game.
The gun balance came utterly unhinged because the developers weren’t actually interested in reaching their fans and listening vs. just using Discord and assuming that accomplished it, and it became frustrating to play any other style than mindless rush smg medic because squeakiest wheel gets the grease…
Once the backlash started coming from the broader playerbase not terminally tuned into Discord, the developers were basically blindsided and unable to adapt so they functionally abandoned the game.
If you are Discord-brained indeed what your complaint about Battlebit would be is that the developers abandoned the game but that doesn’t speak to the context at all.
Thanks. I don’t really participate on game discords and enjoyed playing battlebit. I saw very communicative devs early on and then nothing from them. I guess I assumed wrong.
Still seems like if they stuck around the game mightve survived
long response
Ok I am bitter, I loved playing the support class and building fortifications and that part of the gameplay felt like it was so ignored by the developers that players on your team would start getting toxic with you if you built them.
To be fair often there was no point, a smg rush player could spawn in with c4 and eliminate the whole fort within 30 seconds of spawning in. I wasn’t roleplaying it or anything, the fortifications I built were always practical but the way the basic gunplay was balanced severely penalized moving slow and carefully in basically every respect except having a smg and moving a tiny bit slower than the enemy who would also have an smg.
I say that to give context, I think Battlebit could definitely come back in popularity, the biggest issue in my opinion is the lack of focus on mod support and it makes me question the longterm goals of the developers here compared to say Easy Red 2 or Operation Harsh Doorstop. If Battlebit had focused on allowing easy modded community servers to pop up, their inability to balance the gameplay to support a variety of playstyles could have been mitigated by the community, but they just kept making the wrong decisions in my opinion.
The sniper nerfs were enraging too because yeah, everyone hates snipers in a battlefield game but it isn’t that people hate the sniper class because it is OverPowered it is that people hate when most of their team is roleplaying being a sniper 3000m from the relevant part of the map occasionally making a crazy long shot that will make a cool clip. Because this is the easy meme to make fun of the battlefield sniper role, the developers nerfed that ability of the sniper class HARD with Halo sniper rifle like bullet trails and very obvious scope glint.
The facepalm thing about it for me was that when snipers would play this role… it was infuriating to be on their team BECAUSE they are contributing nothing to winning the objectives or really even to supporting the other players flanks and backing them up. So… why nerf it? Snipers are extremely important in a well balanced Battlefield game because they allow you to project power from an advantageous position over long distances or they allow you to project power into a space without physically having to be in it.
When a sniper “pushes” an objective their role isn’t to actually BE IN the circle capping the objective unless they are very close or there aren’t enough close range class players to capture the objective. Their role is to get a good angle on the objective and any relevant terrain around it, so that they can ensure their team is able to secure and hold the objective.
It was very clear that the developers didn’t seem to understand or value this role in the gameplay of their Battlefield-like, which ok that is one thing but they also clearly didn’t have a good system to get consistent feedback from a broad section of their playerbase so that they could correct course when they blundered like they kept doing.
It is a shame because what people really wanted was an approachable, low graphics requirement, large social Battlefield game and it isn’t like the game ever had to be perfectly balanced competitively to fit that role. The balance just went sooooo far out of whack it became less interesting and fun for a lot of the playerbase, and the core part that was being listened to didn’t notice until the lights were being turned out…
A community server with a mod that fixed these issues could have easily saved the community around this game even if the developers “abandoned” the game for awhile ughh.
I don’t think Battlebit is dead though, I would be surprised if development totally stopped as there just aren’t a lot of good alternatives. Well there is Easy Red 2. Yeah nevermind, just go play Easy Red 2 instead it is better in every single way basically.
When a developer replied to my Steam review with
Feel free to help out in the community with suggestions to improve the game! I’ve updated the game to include a in game discord link!
🤨 Yeah, not interested in joining your Discord to give feedback on your game when that could be done in Steam Discussions too. Or, you know, start with taking my review as genuine feedback.
Two questions:
Which game?
What would they win with having players on the Discord server?
Upselling
Because having your entire community on one platform is just a hell of a lot more convenient and manageable especially for smaller development studios. And Discord offers way better tools for moderation and real time discussions than any other tool I know.
Sure, the searchability via search engines is pretty much none existent. But then again, you don’t really need that if all information regarding your game can be found via the Discord search.
Additionally, players from all platforms can contribute and ask questions on Discord. The same is not true for e.g. the Steam User Forum.
There’s a lot of problems with Discord and I feel like it’s only gonna get worse now that they’re public. But being blatantly oblivious to the obvious reasons why developers are choosing Discord over its alternatives helps no one.
A lot of small indie or fan games love to hide on Discord. Got banned? Appeal it on Discord. Wanna submit feedback? Come on over to Discord!
What do they gain from this? Besides making their content impossible to find in search engines, clearly they’re optimizing for maximum inconvenience and peak exclusivity. Nothing says “accessible community” like forcing players to re-ask the same questions in a walled-off chat nobody can Google.
I hate that Discord has taken over most communities and put them in a place unindexed by search engines. I hate it so much.
But this is where users all go in Current Year, and I don’t blame game developers for following the crowd. Especially for smaller multiplayer games, if you want to sustain an active community you’ve gotta have that #matchmaking channel for players to organize.
Also, tbh, Steam Forums ain’t great either. At least they’re searchable, but that’s all that can be said about them. In my experience they’ve often devolved into the most toxic hellholes due to Valve’s lack of moderation. Also not ideal for anything multiplatform, that only covers Steam users.
