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.
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.
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
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.
Grosses me out
You just listed every reason why I have never liked Discord but couldn’t really begin to explain why. Thanks for putting into words so clearly!
Does Discord have something similar to Slack threads? That’s more or less helps to group related discussion together. Still, even threads eventually get lost in the chat history.
Discord literally has forums. Most official game servers that I’ve seen tend to make use of them.
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.
My pet peeve is when the go to response in those exact same forums and chat is “we have an answerflow” followed by a link. I know you have an answer flow, and its indexing and search is shit under ideal circumstances. If you don’t discuss the thing and make a modicum of effort to organize the server then answer flow is even worse and even less useful.
Not good ones. It’s not a good format for actual forums
What exactly is wrong with them, in your opinion? A game I play uses a Discord forum channel for their bug reports, and it seems to support all the features I’d need out of a forum: sorting options (date posted vs most recent/“bumped” threads), search, chronological comments, tags, media support…
The only real issue I see with Discord forums is that they’re not public, so you can’t view them without having a Discord account and joining the server. But as far as functioning as a traditional web forum, they seem to check all the boxes.
they’re not public
This is a huge issue, honestly. Discord’s search function is awful and you have to find the right server before you can even try to find the information. Any standard search engine can find a post in a classic forum.
Also, scrolling through giant pages of constantly updating chatter is a miserable interface. Split it up into pages!
ALSO, Discord has poor tools for managing everything. You can’t merge topics or move posts, that should be day 1 stuff.
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 this nightmare what I find so frustrating is 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 when 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 even now this was one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the multiplayer community around their game which is even more frustrating.
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 and drop off in playtime 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 in my opinion.
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.
Discord is not the right platform to use as a forum.
Quit trying to make it happen
One day we are going to lose an unbelievable amount of information, but do you know what is simple to archive and bring back, a simple form from 2005.
1000000%
It is literally the worst forum platform in existence. For q&A and support, it’s effectively a black hole for information and not only that, it’s a black hole for effort since people will just ask the same bloody questions day in and day out as the information already on Discord becomes unavailable over time
==========
However, It becomes difficult when you use Discord as a place for your community to chat and to talk with and get feedback from highly engaged players or community members who have things to say about your game and want to talk with each other about the game. You could say that any old form will do here. However, you go to where your community is, you don’t make your community come to you. That only works if you are a bombshell of a title, otherwise, your bounce rate for community members joining and talking and engaging is going to be incredibly high which reduces the chances of your game becoming successful.
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.
The other alternative is reddit, but, well, I’m here because I refuse to ever go back to reddit, so, y’know.
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.
Sites that I use IRC with collect and index the logs and have them searchable on their website.
Not natively, but you could log it locally and I guess publish that to a site or something
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.
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.
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 who’s stupid enough to do ANYthing.
It’s actually a running joke because so many people post classified military documents to the warthunder forums
Usually signified with this image
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.
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.
Honestly this is one of the few cases where I wish steam would step in and say “games on the platform must have support on the platform”
I haven’t seen many steam games that don’t use the steam forums… is there a particular example that isn’t using them?
Many of them “use” them, as in have them enabled to allow for members of the community to post to 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 and the only support you may find is if someone in the community has a workaround or fix.
edit: for the heck of it ill look at the current top 20 and see which offer official community support.
- battlefield 6: skipped cause not released
- Counterstrike 2: Contains patch notes; No Support, support is via steam help and email
- steam deck (skipped cause hardware)
- Blue Protocol: Star Resonance: No Steam Support
- Little Nightmare 3: Skipped not released
- Digimon Story Time Stranger: No support, recommended to go through website
- Little nightmare 3 bundle (skipped not released)
- megabonk: contains patch notes, no forum support
- Wuthering Waves: Contains partial patch notes; No Forum Support
- dead by daylight: No forum support: contains link to bug report and issue official forums.
- Absolum: officially supports
- Arena Breakout: infinite: contains patch notes no support
- Call of Duty®: patch notes; no support
- Black Ops 6 DLC blackcell: Skipped as DLC
- Arc Raiders: Skipped not released
- Ghost of Tushima: patch notes; No Support; contains link to official support knowledge base
- Borderlands 4: patch notes; Major issue workarounds pinned but no official support
- marvel rivals: patch notes; no official support
- yooka-laylee owner discount: (bundle so skipped?)
- Sonic Racing: crossworlds: patch notes No official support, issue pinned to give location for support.
Method to detect support:
I clicked the game, went to the discussions, if it had patch notes i noted it, if it has a community support tab or bug fix tab or comments that have staff responses I considered it community support. Else I marked it as no support. If it had a clear area to get support I noted that
Discord is such a piece of trash tool. I have to use Slack for work, which is garbage also, but makes sense in such contrxts, but Discord? I don’t want to feel like using a worse at everything else Slack during my time off.
I get it, building community and such, but come on! Forums are such and easier and friendlier way to do this.
To be honest, Slack is so much worse it’s not even comparable. I haven’t used it in the last year, but I was forced to used it because work and even though they added feature it became slightly worse every time.
Sure, I am forced to use Teams, which is WAY worse than Slack was in the beginning. But Discord is at least fast. It is not a bad piece of software per-se, it is just misused because it is so easy to set up.
I always laugh at the mention of Teams, because it reminds me that at my work we use Teams but the IT department blocked the feature to create teams inside Teams. So instead of Slack is more like a corporate WhatsApp.
They recently finally merged teams, chats, and discussions into one tab, which was probably one of the main pain points and reason why I missed to many messages posted on teams.
The chat is still a mess and I hate it. The calls don’t work about 50% of the time and even tho it is just a PWA in Chrome, it manages to give others echo - not the usual “person X has shitty mic and headphones” type, no, it gives literal 1:1 and the person has to restart tramd and join the call again. The inability to sometimes join the same call on phone and laptop is fucked up - fucking Skype for Businrss could do it, why not this piece of shit that has been developed for several years?!
oh…yeah, forgot about Teams. My employer is using it also and it’s a mess.
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.
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 isn’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)
Thank the gods I’m not the only one! Chat rooms are a terrible way to get community feedback, and the bigger the community, the worse it gets. I tried it a couple of times and find it nigh on useless.
The trend of defacing games with social media links is one of the most annoying developments of the past 15 years or so.
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.
