Here is a thread to talk about gaming

[Mercutio]

Do the T&C of the software platform indicate the means of communication? I would think that you want something with records for evidence.

This is mostly for voice communications.
Games may or may not be cross platform. Communication services might be cross platform but only in a single game, platform wide but only for a specific console, or rely on a central service. The most common central service these days is just the one that happens to be something I don't like for a bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with voice communication.

 

[LunarMist]

I would examine the "bunch of reasons" to determine the relevance. Are you making the most rational decision that is best for the business?

 

[Handruin]

One of the problems I have with multiplayer electronic gaming is that every related to communication wants to be in a walled garden.

The consoles all have some kind of chat service and so do many baseline multiplayer titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty or Overwatch. On Windows, you have comms through Steam or Discord, which are both services I've opted out from and good luck trying to convince anyone to use anything else, even if everyone and their brother could just as easily get on Skype or Google Chat or Signal or Rocket.Chat. I've even offered to set up conference calls through my business VoIP lines just so we can all equally hate the experience, but apparently the standard everyone else wants is to speak through a headset to Discord on their phone.

I truly don't get why people like Discord. It seems to be the newest and most extremely entrenched thing.

I dont get why you dislike discord. All of the other options you mentioned are far less convenient and less integrated in the experience of enjoying games with friends. I know you well enough that you've already formed your opinion so I doubt there's any amount of convincing I could do to suggest discord is a good option but I'm also not seeing any compelling reasons to use other services that are far more clunky and offer less benefits for gamers.

 

[Mercutio]

I dont get why you dislike discord. All of the other options you mentioned are far less convenient and less integrated in the experience of enjoying games with friends. I know you well enough that you've already formed your opinion so I doubt there's any amount of convincing I could do to suggest discord is a good option but I'm also not seeing any compelling reasons to use other services that are far more clunky and offer less benefits for gamers.

Discord is a way of burying information, full stop.

Things go in the black hole of Discord and they don't come out. It's one thing if it's a social group sharing memes, but even then, that's something that could be done through a more open platform like Signal or a private Teamspeak server, if someone needs more than five users on the same voice channel. I see groups that want to conduct all social contact through Discord and it becomes infuriating because there are times and places to use E-mail or forums or perhaps even proper documentation instead. These same people then get pissed off or exasperated for not producing a FAQ or something when newcomers pop in to ask the same basic questions that make people desperate enough to install and visit their Discord in the first place.

Discord also sells user data. So do a lot of other things, but that's a down side to being free as in beer.

Were there a way to completely ban all formal organizations from using Discord, I might not have a problem with it, but as it is, it's not doing anything more useful than other chat/voice platforms and I'd rather discourage its use and I choose not to engage with it.

 

[sedrosken]

I truly don't get why people like Discord. It seems to be the newest and most extremely entrenched thing.

I'm not the biggest fan of Discord from the perspective of their application being really bloated JS junkware, but the actually decent clients for it break TOS and I'm not risking getting my nearly 10-year-old account that I actually pay for Nitro for banned over it. I met some of my best friends over Discord though, and while they keep making unpopular decisions, they remain popularly used simply because of momentum. I tried to get a couple people over to a Mumble server I used to run and IRC, but I was, quite literally, laughed at. As you said, good luck getting anyone to use literally anything else these days. Even Steam chat itself is rarely, RARELY used in my circles.

You'll find a lot of the "official" communities often do have FAQs and support sections and such outlined. In a smaller friends-only server segmenting channels too much creates clutter, though. I'm not a big fan of official communities conducting everything through Discords, either, but I wouldn't go so far as to ban the use of it.

 

[Handruin]

I see at least two categories for Discord concerns, one being the closed system for corporate communities, support, discussion, etc that are dark web making it difficult to search. Those I can see an argument against their use of discord.

The other which I mainly use is my own private server instance for local friends and gaming. Managing and meeting up for games, discussions, etc are pretty streamlined vs anything else like gchat, email, slack, whatever. The voice works great and we will often use the integrated screen share and streaming during games to help or show things.

Then there's the integration with using their API and hooks that I use for other tasks and even assisting in homelab management. Adds some nice features that don't easily exist in other communication utilities.

I ran my own mumble instance for a while but it was buggy and never reasonably reliable. I gave that up in 2015 when everyone was moving to discord.

 

[Santilli]

One of the problems I have with multiplayer electronic gaming is that every related to communication wants to be in a walled garden.

The consoles all have some kind of chat service and so do many baseline multiplayer titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty or Overwatch. On Windows, you have comms through Steam or Discord, which are both services I've opted out from and good luck trying to convince anyone to use anything else, even if everyone and their brother could just as easily get on Skype or Google Chat or Signal or Rocket.Chat. I've even offered to set up conference calls through my business VoIP lines just so we can all equally hate the experience, but apparently the standard everyone else wants is to speak through a headset to Discord on their phone.

I truly don't get why people like Discord. It seems to be the newest and most extremely entrenched thing.

I will not tolerate this junk on my computer. Probably why only games I'm using, and not much,
are Call of Duty single player, Oregon Trail.