Mildly Infuriating

It kills me every time I see a support or community forum fall to Discord.

Fuck, even PROFESSIONAL APPS have started doing this shit (example Parsec).

Eh, it's entirely logical.

Let me explain:

• The area that most indi developers underperform at is.... Marketing. Many of them put their heart and soul into a game and then completely fail to gather a community or audience that is interested in such a game.
• so what is one of the easiest ways that a developer who has effectively no social media skills can gather a community of interested individuals to talk about provide feedback and announce changes to?
• most of the target audiences for most games are going to be on social media
• You expect to chat with your community and so do your users that care
• Discord is a well-established platform, with a large ecosystem and many integrations meant to target games
• The developer chooses Discord as it is effectively the best option for their situation and available resources

This makes perfect sense. I don't see why you should be outraged about something of this sort.

That said:

If you don't want to join the Discord, you don't have to.

The trend of defacing games with social media links is one of the most annoying developments of the past 15 years or so.

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.)

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.

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.

Discord is not the right platform to use as a forum.

Quit trying to make it happen

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 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.

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.

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!

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 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 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.