Mildly Infuriating

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.

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.

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

Quit trying to make it happen

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.

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!

Guess you'll have to leak secret military documents the old-fashioned way: posting them on the War Thunder forums.

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.

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 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"

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.

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.

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 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.

If I'm not interested that means I'm probably not going to bring anything interesting for the discussion

The only time I would even stop for a second to consider that maybe it's a good thing for devs to be like "Join Our Discord!" would be for things like pokemon fan games or something like Plants VS Zombies Universe, where Sintendo or EA could come in and drop nukes on these innocent enough seeming ( most of the time ) devs.

I obviously don't want the corpo clown creeps coming in and destroying under development fan games ( especially PVZ Universe or Pokemon Empire ), but surely we must have better platforms to hide projects on, right? I mean, come on, we're living in the year 2026, not 2006.