Game developers desperate for you to join their Discord "server"

Submitted ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone⁩ to ⁨mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world⁩

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.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

brax@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I fucking hate Discord and how it’s absorbed what should be forums.

When I’m creating a discussion online about a particular game or project, I’m looking to hear from the broader community over a longer term; not just limited to whomever happens to be online on this one specific platform at the time of posting.

People have different schedules, we’re not all online together at the same times; especially when you factor in timezones. Discord however makes it massively frustrating if not impossible to hold a discussion unless everyone you want to talk to is present and ready to read and reply now. Otherwise your conversation gets burried in the mess of other people having their own conversations and nobody wants to scroll through thousands of messages in the history of when they last logged on.

You can break out conversations into their own rooms, but that only goes so far and at that point you may as well just have a damn forum; that’s what they are for.

Then you get into the problem of repetition and searchability. People often run into common problems or ask the same questions; but with Discord, you’ve got to re-explain the same things every time they’re brought up, instead of just pointing the user to an old forum post that already solves their problem (they may have even found it themselves through a web search, saving them from even having to ask and waste people’s time. Discord isn’t indexed by search engines so old conversations/solutions are lost).

A group chat platform is not an acceptable replacement for a forum and I will die on that god damn hill.

source
- CouldntCareBear@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  and none of it is indeed by search engines. No one else will ever be able to Google their problem and find the answer. All the useful knowledge put into a box and buried. It’s just awful.
  
  source
- dumples@midwest.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Discord is good for live chatting and messaging only. Unless you are actively playing a game it’s horrible. We use the voice and chat for DnD but even for 5 people we can’t find anything in the text channel
  
  source
- Chozo@fedia.io ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Discord literally has forums. Most official game servers that I've seen tend to make use of them.
  
  source
  - Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I’ve not seen one of those in use in the half dozen servers I’d looked at; but I’ve barely used that shit show of a platform.
    
    Regardless, it’s not publicly accessible/indexable and I’m not willing to enter into their new binding arbitration agreement just to look around. (the new ToS)
    
    Discord can go fuck themselves.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Not good ones. It’s not a good format for actual forums
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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!

source
- HubertManne@piefed.social ⁨23⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
  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.
  
  source
- Witchfire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  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)
  
  source
xvertigox@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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 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 lead to the entire rest of the game becoming unbalanced. When backlash started to happened, 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.

source
Strider@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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 rising discord to suffer differently in another golden cage.

I will never understand (I chose mumble/murmur).

source
- Krudler@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
  I’m not here to stan for Discord, it’s pretty crappy. But at the time, it was the killer support app for gaming.
  
  source
- corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  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)
  
  source
missingno@fedia.io ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Guess you’ll have to leak secret military documents the old-fashioned way: posting them on the War Thunder forums.

source
- Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Hold up, are people really stupid enough to send classified documents over fucking Discord?
  
  source
  - betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Yes.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I refuse to join any of these in protest, and when I can’t submit bug reports via public forums I will rate the negatively.

I am firmly against using closed chat platforms such as discord for informational and support.

Years down the road obscure issues with the game are going to be unavailable either due to the server being abandoned or inability to look for issues soley due to everything being on discord now. I refuse to take part in it.

I’m only in one discord that is based off a game, and that is satisfactory exclusively because I was in the alpha program so It seemed right that I joined the main discord after the alpha ended.

source
- Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I haven’t seen many steam games that don’t use the steam forums… is there a particular example that isn’t using them?
  
  source
  - Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Many of them “use” them, as in have them enabled to allow for members of the community to use them, and sometimes they might offer patch note releases for updates via the announcement system or major issue posts, but most of them don’t actually provide support and assistance via them or even moderate them at times. Huge problem actors are inde studios but, even large producers have the issue. My latest one that I tried to post a bug report to is Phasmaphobia, which locks all support to their discord, but like most games don’t do official support via the forums.
    
    source
yaroto98@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
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.

source
- k_rol@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Damn you seem competent, do you have an MBA?
  
  source
  - yaroto98@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Nope, just your run of the mill cynic.
    
    source
pewpew@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
If I’m not interested that means I’m probably not going to bring anything interesting for the discussion

source
- FigMcLargeHuge@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
  source
  - entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    What issues did you have with it? Too busy? Overeager mods? Bad organization?
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
kartoffelsaft@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I posted a negative review of kithack model club over this exact issue and got 50/50 clown to other awards on it. When I also talked a bit about it on the steam forums, I noticed there’s a guy who clearly isn’t working for the dev and goes to every post to tell them to go to the discord. I’d be fine with that if he didn’t also argue with anyone who doesn’t think that’s good. Some people man.

source
CovfefeKills@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yea I was steam banned by the stormworks developer because of what I said in discord. Don’t diss trump over there.

source
victorz@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

the hell that is Discord

Out of curiosity, what makes you say Discord is hell?

source
- ooterness@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Didn’t Discord just leak a few million “age-verification photos” that they sorta promised to delete, but didn’t?
  
  source
  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Oh yeah, that was pretty bad…
    
    source
  - Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    there was no sorta promised to delete, they stated in the press release, the actual age verification page and the FAQ page about age verification that the files were temporary… then apparently just didn’t, as I highly doubt 1.5tb of photos are “recent” photos.
    
    source
- Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Where do you want me to start? The shady company that runs it? The godawful webapp and even worse electron “native” apps? All the privacy problems? The lack of any kind of guarantee that what you build there will still be there tomorrow? That’s all I can think of right now, but there’s probably more in the back of my mind somewhere.
  
  source
  - victorz@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Start where you’d like, give me all you’ve got. 😄
    
    source