Comment by dfxm12
3 years ago
Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things
I'm not sure Discord is necessarily good for "gaming communities". I mean, Discord is live chat. This is good for some aspects: match making, news, etc. - anything that has a short lifespan. However, a lot of things about games don't. Wikis are perfect for publishing this info. Think of a Street Fighter type game. Characters have their move set, that doesn't change. Imagine having to search through discord for how to do a fireball with Ryu. Then there's strategy - that changes, albeit periodically, after tournaments, etc. By all means, this stuff can be discussed in discord, but the consensus strategies have to be published because it's a terrible experience to search through chat logs and follow along with long finished conversations over who knows how many posts, figure out context, etc. compared to just reading it on a wiki.
Agreed.
I see Discord being used for things where forums (and non realtime conversations) used to rule supreme, like hobbies, tutorials, etc.
Why? A tutorial is not a real time chat. A showcase of hobby projects isn't a real time conversation either. And the searchability of these tools like Discord is terrible. I really don't understand why this terrible thing became popular.
Those communities iirc nowadays operate a dual mediawiki + discord server. Dustloop (arcsys, Guilty Gear & BlazBlue mostly) for example didn't vanish entirely to Discord, the discord is instead just used to organize edits to the wiki if I recall.
Discord is absolutely terrible at storing semi-structured information like a wikipage and I don't see them fix that without completely overhauling their entire service (although I'm sure they'll try and muck up the death of publicly available knowledge even more).
GP mentions "lore", that has not been deliberately condensed to a wiki. A forum works much better for lore : to search and reply years later to some very specific question / answer.
(I guess wiki comments and especially talk pages can work too, but they are terrible and not the place for community discussion.)
I guess I should be clearer - I'm more referring to multiplayer communities rather than actual game-specific resources. Communities, rather than knowledge resources, are where it's appropriate, basically. Of course, these often end up bleeding into eachother over time.
You would be surprised by the FGC entities that seemingly gravitate towards this very thing.
Most FGC servers solve this by having character channels with the best guides pinned.