Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online both have community-led Discord channels where players and developers hang out, but Standing Stone has apparently conjured plans to open official Discords for both games, with volunteer moderators. SSG’s Jerry “Cordovan” Snook gave DDO forumgoers the news yesterday, telling them that “DDO is getting it first, but [he] plan[s] to bring a Discord to LOTRO as well.”
“We are looking forward to opening our first official Dungeons & Dragons Online Discord, and we are looking for some members of the community to volunteer to help make it a reality! Since Discord is an always-on text and voice communication tool we are hoping to gather volunteers to help keep an eye on things. We are required by law to not provide formal compensation for your volunteer service, but you will be helping to make an official Discord happen, you’ll have direct communication with us, and we’ll do our best to conduct periodic random giveaways for codes for volunteers.”
Yes, mods will be required to sign an NDA drafted by Daybreak’s legal beagles. No official launch date has been posted.
“Having a Discord has been a frequent ask from the community and as others have pointed out, most games have them these days,” Cordovan explains later in the thread to players unhappy about the move. “They’ve become very popular places for game communities to hang out, and their free built in voice chat is a good alternative for some players. Our forums have always been pretty popular, but they only capture a segment of the player base, and there are a lot of players who don’t use the forums but would use a Discord. […] Being able to drop a link in party chat to a voice channel where people have a lot more control over things and which offers much higher quality audio than our baked-in voice chat is going to be appealing for some, especially since a large percentage of our population is already actively using Discord.”
He’s right about the voice chat, of course, but MMO players also know that Discord is ephemeral, not useful for archival purposes for long-running MMORPGs, and extremely difficult to search. However, SSG put a lot of effort into upgrading its forums last year, so it seems intent on supporting both, which is more than we can say for many rival MMO companies.
