-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
The popularity of Discords worries me regarding future preservation of fan knowledge, mods, & guides
- Thread starter Natasha Kerensky
- Start date
I mean, it is literally a chat room.
I do agree with the idea that Discord shouldn't be the fall-back for technical support, though. The amount of shit I've only figured out because of decade-old forum threads...
I get the concern OP but you could have easily said the same thing about IRC years ago and we managed to get by.
I agree. I miss the days where you could skim through a GameFAQs guide.
I'm glad that some big podcasts are transcribing their episodes. Makes getting relevant info quicker.
I agree. I miss the days where you could skim through a GameFAQs guide.
I'm glad that some big podcasts are transcribing their episodes. Makes getting relevant info quicker.
Last edited:
I haven't had trouble finding info I want on reddit, gamefaqs, stackexchange, wikis, etc. Besides, it's Youtube, not discord, that is more likely to supplant traditional text-written guides.
You're not alone, it's an issue I've thought about as well. I've been getting into rom hacking lately, and I've found information on certain games on old websites and forums going back decades. This information is still relevant, and saves a lot of time in figuring it out myself. Having your own Discord server is so easy, I've seen a trend were eventually small groups go off and make their own, which is fine, but the knowledge they have in there is only accessible if you are in the server. Eventually, there won't be any invite links, or the server will be deleted, and the information will be lost forever.
Forums are way better than Discord because people are inclined to put a little bit of effort into their posts. The level of conversation on Discord is usually only one notch above Twitch chat, and I'm definitely not interested in watching an endless stream of spam and meme-regurgitatng drivel.
I suppose I just don't get why now glorified chat rooms are replacing forums when that never happened back in the day. They serve different purposes.
Support certainly shouldnt just be provided there as then you remove the option for people to just google it themselves rather then having to seek out which specific discord it's hidden in and then hope it's arranged in a readable manner for solved issues.
... what ? Twitter is the real issue when it comes down to finding tech for fighting games.
Discord is a goddamn blessing for that.
Most guides and such that I see on discord are Google Docs which you can find elsewhere, usually via Twitter and forums.
OP
OP
I guess that a lot of smaller communities as well as bigger developers start setting up shop at a Discord because it's simply cheaper to set up and host, while forums and wikis are more expensive and therefore all the knowledge and tools that are produced within the Discord can easily disappear if someone doesn't bring it outside the Discord. At least with forums, it's automatically archived for future use.
Many examples;
- Homeworld modding has gone into a Discord that isn't publicly available. Guids and mod releases are in one single channel but it is flooded with chat messages. Before, they would be available in a easily searchable forum format.
- Heavy Gear Assault's forums are completely dead so you have no idea what's going on with this dead game even though it's still sold. You have to find their Discord link in the store page and then you can access it and then you can start going through the old chatlog and see that the developers were bamboozled by some predatory publisher.
- Mechwarrior 5 modding and announcement and dev interaction have gone completely over to the Discord so you no longer have forum threads to help you understand what's going on, what the latest information is, etc.
- Screenshotting forum used to be on Dead End Thrills, but it's completely abandoned and dead now. Instead, it's a Discord now where expert users have to repeat the same information over and over again to new users.
I don't think there's less personal experience between a chatroom and a forum, but that's just me.
The problem is that a lot of developers and smaller communities exile themselves to closed Discord servers as a replacement for forums or asynchronous conversation. This means that a lot of the traditional way of accessing information and getting help is completely incompatible with the Chatroom format of discord.
The problem is precisely that people have to be active there and see your message before it gets flooded by other messages. And there actually has to be an active community, otherwise it's long dead.
I feel the same way but not just for gaming. We use google and other things all the time to find answers, I'm using it for game development so much right now and Unity / Unreal forums are invaluable. All this conversation moving to Discord and only having a shelf-life of a few days max is a huge waste IMO.
The death of Dustloop pains me to this day. Back then it was so simple to find the forum for a character in Blazblue or Guilty Gear and right there would be a combo thread with a list of combos, a frame data thread, match up thread and general guide thread. All in one place, easy to find. Nowadays all that info is behind joining 15 different servers, one for each character and you have to go out of your way to ask about the info or look it up through Discords bogus search engine because nobody bothers to just make one write up and put it up somewhere.
Discord is a good chatroom but a terrible method of maintaining information.
Discord is a good chatroom but a terrible method of maintaining information.
I agree, OP. A lot of things online are making me feel old these days though. I miss the internet from the mid-2000s.
God, yes I fucking hate that. Why are all guides/instructions, even for the simplest things (and not just gaming related), in video format/on YouTube? What happened to text instructions? I don't want to listen to some dude talking slowly and adding a bunch of filler. Just give me a good text guide I can absorb and skim at my own pace.
I think your problem is more how Discord is used vs Discord itself.
Plenty of games I follow have specific channels for important info like announcements that only devs and other important people can post in so that stuff is easy to find.
Like forums it's important that the server owners moderate their platform and make sure everything isn't just a flood of random info.
This has been my main experience with Discord, I was very slow to get on that train and I'm honestly still not really on it, I try going to somewhere like 8wayrun for info and the forums are barren, rarely posted in. Everyone says to go to discords so I do, and it's so hard to sift through. Forums and wikis were, I won't say better because I still don't really understand discord, but certainly much much easier, to navigate if nothing else.
I've also run into this problem with WoW Classic trying to figure things out for the classes I wanted to play, I eventually gave up and resorted to the WoWHead guides even though I know historically that guides on sites like that aren't really what you want to be looking at.
So yea, I get the problem and it's a problem even now tbh. The best information is hard to access and who knows if it'll ever make it out of the channels. Either that or I'm with you in being a dinosaur.
From what I've seen, Discord hasn't really replaced forums, but are supplementing them. Yes, overall membership of online forums is probably way down from the mid-2000s, but the core features that you describe as advantages for traditional forums - like guides and logging development - are still alive and well. And then there's Reddit, which is still highly popular even in the age of Discord.
Discord in general works better with small sub communities dedicated to certain things rather than catch calls for entire games. I've been on a few official game discords that are a swamp of information, huge chunks of it useless. Been in and am still in some ERA game discords and theyre generally better and a good way to keep in touch with some groups despite not always being active in said community.
Discord works good as the IRC tool with voice chat it was designed to be, but it's really bad when people try to use it as a repository of information.
Discord doesn't at the minimum archive chats? Looking at google this seems to the case for public discords which is odd.
i never used Discord for other purpose than replacing Teamspeak. And only because my friends used Discord (i Don't see how Discord is supposed to be better than TS)
I disagree. Forums and a Chat Room serves completely two different purposes. Forums are for discussion and the posting of information. Discord is for chatting. I use Discord everyday but never use it in ways that I do with forums.
It's pretty meh whenever I want to look something up in FF14 about a class and the best answer I can get is "Check 'The Balance' Discord".
Man I wish people would upload fighting game tech in a central hub instead of having to search for character discords
That's how you see it and how it's supposed to work but in reality that's not what is happening. Everything is about being quick and convenient and that's where Discord shines especially with the younger generation.
There are plenty of forums I've been going to in the last few years that have either died or have less than half the traffic they used. Forums like Resetera are an anomaly these days and even some communities that used to thrive here have basically moved to to Discord - the Lego community for example.
For some things, discord is already a mess compared to forums. Fighting games are in a weird spot because of this. Each character has separate discords, sometimes multiple, not always as well managed as the next. You can find great up to the minute tech on one hand, while someone just starting out has to navigate a web of nonsense to find basic info in some cases.
A ton of stuff that ended up on FAQs or forums is now on very ephemeral discords and open Google docs. With blogs, forums and personal websites pretty much dead with a few exceptions, it could be near impossible to find detailed info on this era of games the way we can now with older stuff.
A ton of stuff that ended up on FAQs or forums is now on very ephemeral discords and open Google docs. With blogs, forums and personal websites pretty much dead with a few exceptions, it could be near impossible to find detailed info on this era of games the way we can now with older stuff.
Yeah I definitely hear you. Discord is great as a chatroom but it doesn't work well as an archive. The problem is that Discord has become so popular that proper archival work isn't being done as much.
I also miss the older internet but I guess I'm just old, too. If the newer way is what the people want, then I guess that's how it's going to be.
I also miss the older internet but I guess I'm just old, too. If the newer way is what the people want, then I guess that's how it's going to be.
Yep we regressed hardcore, it's maddening. I think too many people wanna promote their own shit instead of making a single source of information that'd help everyone. It's crazy that it's harder to find information nowadays than it was 10 years ago, even though there's more of it.
I definitely feel that the early to mid 2000s provided the backbone of the modern internet and we've been kind of regressing in terms of easily accessible archives of information ever since.
Like, I can't imagine that Wikipedia or Archive.org would have been successful had they been invented today.
Ya the internet just seems ta be getting harder an harder to quickly & easily find what ya want.
html guides replacing txt ones = slower
youtube videos replacing faqs = super much slower
wiki's are just plain uneven with formatting and other stuff
discord is just another issue ontop of many others. Also what happens for games without official discords? Which of the dozens of fanmade ones is the best? And do the people within even chat about the game or predominantly random crap? What a mess. Even aol chats were far more transparent an easy ta see what you were getting into.
html guides replacing txt ones = slower
youtube videos replacing faqs = super much slower
wiki's are just plain uneven with formatting and other stuff
discord is just another issue ontop of many others. Also what happens for games without official discords? Which of the dozens of fanmade ones is the best? And do the people within even chat about the game or predominantly random crap? What a mess. Even aol chats were far more transparent an easy ta see what you were getting into.
You're dead-on OP.
Putting often one-of-a-kind information on a closed, proprietary platform is an obvious recipe for long-term data loss. And DIscord seems a particularly bad case because so many special-interest Discords are 1) hard to know even exist and 2) if you do hear of them, you must find a working "invite" link to again access. And invites often expire! Awful. Good luck finding out about and then accessing an old Discord with the information you seek 3, 5, 10 years after the fact.
It's a definitive step backward from key principals the web's founders espoused re: enabling, spreading, and maximizing access to information. It sucks to think how much game-specific information we're bound to lose. (And content concerning fields beyond gaming too, of course -- Discord's in wide use across numerous interests, communities, and hobbies.)
Honestly I don't see how anyone could defend this concept. It's already made information harder to find (invisible to search engines), and longer-term, it's obviously going to lead to the loss of tons of unique information / community history.
If we're going to hoard information on proprietary platforms, I wish it would at least be on a more open platform that would more likely care about data export and preservation. I am not aware of any open-source projects that can currently match Discord feature-for-feature though. (Is anything close?)
Putting often one-of-a-kind information on a closed, proprietary platform is an obvious recipe for long-term data loss. And DIscord seems a particularly bad case because so many special-interest Discords are 1) hard to know even exist and 2) if you do hear of them, you must find a working "invite" link to again access. And invites often expire! Awful. Good luck finding out about and then accessing an old Discord with the information you seek 3, 5, 10 years after the fact.
It's a definitive step backward from key principals the web's founders espoused re: enabling, spreading, and maximizing access to information. It sucks to think how much game-specific information we're bound to lose. (And content concerning fields beyond gaming too, of course -- Discord's in wide use across numerous interests, communities, and hobbies.)
Honestly I don't see how anyone could defend this concept. It's already made information harder to find (invisible to search engines), and longer-term, it's obviously going to lead to the loss of tons of unique information / community history.
If we're going to hoard information on proprietary platforms, I wish it would at least be on a more open platform that would more likely care about data export and preservation. I am not aware of any open-source projects that can currently match Discord feature-for-feature though. (Is anything close?)
Discord freaks me out because back in my day I was on IRC and it's basically nothing compared to Discord, which is basically a juggarnaut. I don't even use it. I feel so fucking old. But reading your post about how powerful it is makes me wonder what the hell I've been missing and is a stark reminder of how primitive IRC is in comparison.
I absolutely agree with this. Discords are basically undiscoverable.
Compare something like smashboards where early melee discovery was labbed out and discussed. You can still go look at that stuff now. When it's gone someday there is archive.org. The independent character discords nowadays for ult just don't come close. It's ephemeral and we will be regretting it someday. Or maybe we just won't even realize what we don't know and have lost.
I'm mostly a lurker on forums (I've been lurking here for a year and just joined!). Discords are rough for the likes of me. I like to read discussions, not stream of consciousness chats that are always in medias res and never really have a concrete beginning and end.
Compare something like smashboards where early melee discovery was labbed out and discussed. You can still go look at that stuff now. When it's gone someday there is archive.org. The independent character discords nowadays for ult just don't come close. It's ephemeral and we will be regretting it someday. Or maybe we just won't even realize what we don't know and have lost.
I'm mostly a lurker on forums (I've been lurking here for a year and just joined!). Discords are rough for the likes of me. I like to read discussions, not stream of consciousness chats that are always in medias res and never really have a concrete beginning and end.
I can see why this is a problem, while this is probably not affect most games, some games with very small community might had this.
Case in point: Alice Gear Aegis. A mobile game that I would say was moderately successful in Japan. It only has two fan-made Discord servers. (Only one is active, while the other is mostly silent) And one wiki site. Which is also dead for now as the founder have quitted. Because of this, most English-language infos and translations are only found on Discord or Reddit (with the latter beings outdated) There are some works to putting info into said wiki, but as I said earlier, it's dead for now so no new info was put.
This leaves to a situation where newcomers to the Discord server asks the same question again and again. So I can see where are you coming from. As someone who did contribute to the wiki and Discord server. (mostly provides visual translations and editor for the wiki) I would like to make this better for newcomers of course. But as I have no knowledge of Japanese, and the community beings so small only a few English-speaking players can provides new infos. It's gonna be continue this way for now.
Case in point: Alice Gear Aegis. A mobile game that I would say was moderately successful in Japan. It only has two fan-made Discord servers. (Only one is active, while the other is mostly silent) And one wiki site. Which is also dead for now as the founder have quitted. Because of this, most English-language infos and translations are only found on Discord or Reddit (with the latter beings outdated) There are some works to putting info into said wiki, but as I said earlier, it's dead for now so no new info was put.
This leaves to a situation where newcomers to the Discord server asks the same question again and again. So I can see where are you coming from. As someone who did contribute to the wiki and Discord server. (mostly provides visual translations and editor for the wiki) I would like to make this better for newcomers of course. But as I have no knowledge of Japanese, and the community beings so small only a few English-speaking players can provides new infos. It's gonna be continue this way for now.
Right there with you...I definitely miss IRC, though. Made some great friends back in the day on it. I've used discord to call another user (actually played some Dragon Marked for Death with another Era user) and that's it...I feel too old/behind the times for whatever the "real" Discord is.
I still remember Reaper511's KOTOR guide from BSN, which basically unlocked my understanding of the game and what goes into the builds and such. Sometimes these guides can be really well-done and helpful.
As for Discord, you can pin posts and such to channels, so a particular discord could keep its guides documents handy if it wanted to.
As for Discord, you can pin posts and such to channels, so a particular discord could keep its guides documents handy if it wanted to.
Not everything but a lot of stuff from discord finds its way to a subreddit.
You bet the Assassin's Creed discord for example shares a lot with the subreddit when a new game is to be announced.
Same with mod focused discord like the one to add music into Beat Saber.
Like I said not every bit of information is moved over but since the hardcore are usually in both the subreddit and the discord the small bit that is moved over isn't really inaccessible
You bet the Assassin's Creed discord for example shares a lot with the subreddit when a new game is to be announced.
Same with mod focused discord like the one to add music into Beat Saber.
Like I said not every bit of information is moved over but since the hardcore are usually in both the subreddit and the discord the small bit that is moved over isn't really inaccessible