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 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.
I was like OP. I fucking hate discord.
But then, this little indie game in early access had a bug, but I couldnt find where to email them. So reluctantly, I joined shitty ass discord, sent the dev a screenshot, and within like 15 minutes, the dev was able to figure out the fix.
I stuck around and saw more threads. Updates, future fixes, other people doing speed runs, even a place people were making fan art.
And that’s when he realized Discord isnt so shitty, because that solo dev now has all this conversation and people motivating them.
But then discord sold all his data to GenAI
From the perspective of the indie dev who was able to make a life, career, and grow his audience… Id think they’d be happy with that outcome.
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.
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
Game devs don’t want to spend time hosting and managing a forum, they want to make a game
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
oh…yeah, forgot about Teams. My employer is using it also and it’s a mess.
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?!
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.
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!
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
