Something I’m noticing from a lot of new or returning RPers is that they’re either looking for an RP guild that does content, or they’re in a PVE guild and want an opportunity to RP without having to change guilds.
ESO has an option for characters to be in multiple guilds at the same time, so they can be in one for content, one for crafting, one for RP, etc. Is it time that WoW also went to this model? This could also be something to stimulate race guilds. Your Tauren or Vulpera could stay in their main RP guild, but also join and participate in a guild catered to their particular race.
I feel like this was attempted with the in-game communities feature, but of course that fell a bit flat.
I like the idea of it, and whenever I hear about yet another cool feature ESO has done, I want to give it a good ol’ fashioned try.
I think it comes from the typical vicious cycle of “I expected to join a super social community since this has 300+ people but I’m not going to talk to anyone - wait, why is no one talking to me? dead community. /gquit”
Let’s talk about communities. Why aren’t they more popular? Why don’t people talk? I’m in one that’s been around for years (started out as a chat channel) and it might get one post a month.
I mean, this is only my personal experience: I can attest that people were a lot more conversational before discord servers really started popping off, because all the text chats and laughs were more or less resigned to guild chat and the only place to talk was the vent server (or teamspeak).
Nowadays, I have 13 discord servers I’m part of, three of which are WoW-based, and putting in all the time to converse and talk and make myself part of the various communities sounds exhausting. Of course, because they’re not in my inner circle / big three servers I chat in, I forget a lot of them exist half the time. Felt bad posting, forgetting, and coming back a week later realizing someone tried to have a chat with you.
That brings us to making friends - easier to do as kids or impetuous youths. Long relationships have fostered into tight-knit circles that even with someone bringing in a new person, melding doesn’t happen immediately (or at all) because you can feel like an outsider intruding on months or years of inside jokes and experiences. Plus, no one can be sure of a person’s character these days until a lot of time is invested in each other, and that can cause rifts or stand-offish behavior.
It is hard for any in-game stuff to match discord, which I guess is why both gchat and communities are sort of quiet.
I was resistant to using discord for a long time but I’ve sort of given in now and its one of the main ways I talk to internet people about video game now. Its kind of goofy but the thing that finally got me to use discord was the lack of anywhere else to talk about Morrowind modding, which isn’t even a multiplayer game, but Bethesda closed its official forums and there wasn’t anywhere to go but Discord.
As for “why is discord so preferable”, I guess it is because it can be really loosy goosy with rules because it is community moderated?
Like, having an in-game chat which lets you do stuff like post clickable links, post images, embed video, and all the other stuff which discord can do would be valuable, and maybe people would enjoy chatting in-game if they could easily share funny screenshots and stuff.
But no big game is ever gonna allow that because if it happens in-game then some GM is theoretically on the hook for moderating all the links and images.
I like the idea of it multiple guilds. As a person who ran a small niche guild, I can see it being really helpful to keep those active and alive. That was one of the problems that we had. People would like the concept, but not want to move their main out of their current guild. So they’d make a alt, and rarely play it. Hard to plan things when you only have a handful of members that show up on a regular basis.
Guild Wars 2 has had this since the start and it definitely had an impact on the RP community. On the one hand, it meant it was a player’s market rather than a guild master’s market; players were never forced to 100% commit to a particular guild and could simply go with the ones that were more active. On the other hand, it also meant guild masters would have to pour a lot more content into their groups to maintain the activity, since players wouldn’t be solely invested in the guild they’d join. All this really accomplished was shrinking the number of guilds down and choking out the variety of guilds that were available, in practice.
It’s the same issue with social media in general. If you spread yourself too thinly, you’ll never really put down deep roots anywhere. It’s hard enough to put down roots in any group to begin with, let alone 2-5 of them at the same time.
This extends to Discord servers as they exist today in WoW, and communities as well. I’m a member of maybe half a dozen various Discord projects, community connections, and so on. For every one of them, I go down the list and try to mute every channel I’m not interested in, so I can focus my attention on the ones that matter. I only have so many spoons to spare, here. Worst-case, I have to mute the entire Discord- but then you’d have to ask, why even bother being a member then? And that’s before we even get into the Discord personalities, cliques, and the difficulty in trying to do any kind of outreach. It doesn’t stop me from trying, of course, but it’s definitely an uphill battle both ways in the snow in the middle of the night.
Yes, as Yran said — GW2 has had this for a long time. And while it does have drawbacks (see above), there are also positives such as folks having designated guilds for raid, PvP, roleplay, etc. As for GMs, instead of being catch-all like many guilds eventually become in WoW, they can specialize.
As for in-game communities, I’ve mentioned this before in other threads but when you pop open the API, it has a lot of incomplete functions such as references to streams and tickets for said streams. IGCs were definitely meant for something more than the iteration we got but genuinely seem to be abandonware by the Blizzard team.
As for why they didn’t catch on, I think it’s a number of factors:
Discord was already established when they were introduced
Re-adding IGC chat when you log in is a pain in the butt
There are no sounds, notifications, etc. to call attention to IGC activity
So everything is 100% manual on the user’s part and there are plenty of other things that grab our attention away from IGCs. Discord is also phenomenally better as a communication platform in nearly every aspect (notifications, inboxes, organized DMs, chat history, moderation, etc.).
Though FLAK has definitely been the exception, I sometimes wonder if it’s the immediacy of PvP vs. the optional, “nice to have” in-game inter-guild communication that’s basically Discord bought from Temu.
You have to talk, and if you’re the creator you DEFINITELY have to talk. And hopefully have people helping you create conversation.
Its not meant to match Discord. It is immediate interaction in game. Not posting gifs, links or using voice or whatever. Its a hell of a lot easier to grab people in game, than to open up discord and hope someone sees it. Its instant.
We dont need any of that crap in WoW.
Ive never seen this in game, and dont know why you always bring it up as a downside lol.
I think everyone needs to quit focusing on how theyre not Discord, when theyre not meant to be. Its just a quick way to get in touch with people in game… Without having to open another App.
Ive had active RP in game communities on my old server. It just depends on the focus you put on it. If you’re active in it, others will be active in it.
Well yea. People prefer discord because of ease of moderation, instant messaging, and I can check discord anywhere. Communities had only been useful to me as a means to flag down event runners- events that were already advertised and planned out in discord. And wow’s chat boxes have always been pretty garbage, that’s why we pick up stuff like listener
I note it because it’s a very incomplete implementation, imo. For what functionality it does have in the game, it doesn’t do it all too well. I think user adaptation of IGCs would be more widespread if Blizzard implemented some serious QoL improvements, but they’ve unfortunately haven’t touched the project since it’s incomplete iteration was put into the game.
From a dev standpoint (my RL profession), it reeks of being abandoned and I’m also not fond of players carrying water for incomplete projects. Implementations should be more seamless and feel second nature. If you can see the boundaries of Skinner’s box, you’re not having a good time.
We used to be able to check the in game communities/guild chat from anywhere. RIP WoW App.
Can still do that with Bnet Groups, but not everyone likes giving out their bnets, and its also hard to know who is who with that. (but the same can be said for Discord usernames if they dont name them after their characters.)
I dont know, I feel like people just scoff at the in game communities, and its a good tool to use to get people involved, even if its not something THEY prefer.
Im so tempted to create one out of spite, just to show it works, but I do too much already.
Does it have to spite? Can’t it just be a useful experiment? If people aren’t using it correctly, then it’s not a bad idea to try and show others how to do it
You’re not wrong. I was a lot more trusting when I started WoW than I am now.
That makes sense. There are a lot more people who have 2 monitors now and no one really has to tab out. Plus you can message on Discord any time, not just when in game. And it’s basically free unless you want boosts, special emojis, etc.
I’ve had a lot of those “I’m going to play in a friend’s guild but I’m leaving an alt here” in my guild over the years. I know they mean well, but please can’t they just take the alt, too? We all know they’re never coming back to it.
I feel this. I can say that I stay in muted Discords in case I need something from one of them - either a contact or to reference something is the usual reason.
I also have a guild Discord, a Discord for friends across several platforms, one that I set up for a defunct Conan server that is fully fleshed out with channels, rule set, etc., and a personal one that only I can access - that I use as storage. I’m part of my own problem here, lol.