Massively Overthinking: Has Discord helped or hurt MMOs?

MOP reader Josiah recently pitched us a rather relevant question about the impact of social media on MMORPGs and their communities – specifically, the idea that “Discord has ruined the social experience of MMOs due to the accessibility of the app,” leading to a reduction in the use of in-game communications.

“You see it everywhere,” he fretted, “a Discord link in your guild UI page, ‘check Discord’ in general chat, etc. etc. Should we as players vie for more Discord integration, or the opposite, less of it? How does a Discord’s server size and userbase play a role into the corresponding MMO’s echo chamber?”

Let’s Overthink it for this week’s Massively Overthinking. Has social media – and Discord specifically – had an impact on MMORPGs and/or their communities and in-game comms? And do its negatives outweigh its positives?

Andy McAdams: We see this conversation come up on the regular, usually accompanied by rose-colored glasses of the “good ole days” that… never actually existed. I would have loved something like Discord when I was active in Anarchy Online and all the people I wanted to keep in touch with and would have followed game-to-game. Without Discord, I wouldn’t have that option.

Today, its a major piece of keeping up with my gaming friends who are spread across the country. When it comes to making lasting connections in games, Discord is a godsend.

But I also haven’t noticed any negatives in-game as a result. Granted, I’m not a hardcore raider, and requirements like “must have Discord” are fine because I would have joined anyway. It’s a great way to get the vibe on the kind of people that make up the guild make it easy to come back with a quick NOPE.

There might be some echo chamber Discords, but that’s not Discord’s fault. Those echo chambers would exist anyway even if Discord didn’t.

So honestly, I’m not really seeing a negative to Discord?

Ben Griggs (@braxwolf): Games had a window years ago to earn the mindshare of players using voice chat. They failed on a couple levels: 1) The voice quality was always worse than third party alternatives, and 2) They used voice chat against players. I seem to recall a games panel where an ex-LOTRO dev told the story about catching some exploiters in the act by listening in on their voice comms. Nothing encourages someone from looking for an alternative solution like being spied on.

Communication has always been important in multiplayer games, but I’d contend that the advent of more action-oriented titles has pushed people away from text chat and into voice comms more than the arrival of Discord. Discord just happened to benefit from the shift, which was largely a result of devs striving to develop games that would more easily translate to console play.

Side note: The big corps in EVE Online still use Mumble because Discord doesn’t have the features to contend with hundreds of members in different fleets all in VC at once. Or at least it’s not different enough to warrant a move

Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog): I don’t see Discord as being a gamechanger. I grew up hanging out in IRC channels with guildies and allies and considering the games secondary to that social organization. That’s just how it was back in Ultima Online in the late ’90s; there was nothing like a global chat in that game, so if you wanted to chat with just your guild or alliance, you used IRC, and so that became the defining structure, not the game. I carried that through with me this whole long way through MMORPG history, and from my perspective, Discord is just the latest version of IRC that my guild hangs out in. The games themselves were always ephemeral to me compared to my guild, and I suspect that a lot of MMORPG vets had the same experiences with things like the message board and voice chat programs that continued cropping up as MMOs got more and more popular. Hell, we even had voice chat in the earliest days of EverQuest (anybody else remember raiding using Roger Wilco?). This stuff was already common before the turn of the millennium.

In other words, I’m saying that a huge portion of MMORPG social play was always conducted outside of the game on third-party comms platforms, all the way back into the ’90s, so I’m not convinced that’s the problem Discord poses to our genre, though it would be convenient to blame it. How could I be sad at the idea that more and more MMORPG players are connecting outside of a specific game, forging real friendships, and sticking together through the years? This seems like a big boon to geek communities independent of whatever the game of the month is. The games just have to try harder to keep us. No easy rides!

Still, the ubiquity of Discord has had a huge influence on MMORPG development. Game studios use them instead of forums now, which naturally privileges the voices of type of players who are able and willing to flood synchronous chats with feedback. It also makes the game/server communities more insular and isolated, as well as significantly harder for new players and historians (hi!) to find, penetrate, document, and search. To me, those are the big problems Discord generates – not the fact that MMORPGs can’t easily exploit a monopoly on our social glue.

Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes, blog): Discord has definitely had some knock-on effects to MMORPG guild formation and communication, but then I’d argue that it’s a symptom and not the disease; lots of MMOs don’t really seem to put a lot of emphasis on guilds beyond a couple of latent buffs and a dedicated chat channel, which kind of makes joining them feel a bit underutilized from a mechanical standpoint (though the opposite argument is that players should make their own fun, which is totally valid).

Personally speaking, I find Discord to be a general benefit to MMO communities. I’m very often hanging out and goofing around with my Final Fantasy XIV free company, forging friendships and familial bonds alike along the way, while also helping to cultivate a community among both members and non-members. Besides, we do stuff together in-game and default to ye olde chate boxe for the most part anyway. I’ll contend that this is a “your mileage may vary” situation, but once more Discord is a tool, and its use for weald or woe is dependent on the user.

Colin Henry (@ChaosConstant): As far as I’m concerned, Discord took something that always existed and centralized it. We’ve always had guild websites and forums, and making an account for every guild I was in was always annoying. With Discord, I just click a link. Voice comms have also been around for quite a while, in the form of Vent, Teamspeak, Mumble, etc., all of which I hated. As a multi-MMO player who has never had great luck with guilds that last more than a couple years, I always ended up installing all of them, they were all so fiddly and buggy and difficult to use. Discord isn’t perfect, but it’s better than anything that came before it, so I tend to give its flaws a pass.

Sam Kash (@thesamkash): I’m going to echo Tyler almost completely: I also tend to focus on my solo game and often just ignore the calls to meet up outside of the game. Most of my action with other players will take place in the here and now, so I just bounce away from them after that.

When I think about my one regular PvP guild, though, I am glad to have them on Discord. I don’t know if they’re still playing Pax Dei; I think they are, but since I’m not, I can still go in and see what everyone’s currently talking about. It’s also easy to call out new games and just have general discussions without being in game. So overall I haven’t really been impacted negatively.

Tyler Edwards (blog): As a primarily solo player, I don’t feel super qualified to comment on this, but I will say this didn’t start with Discord. Remember when every LFG callout ended with “must have vent”?

I’ll also say that if your group or activity requires me to join your Discord server, I’m just going to find something else to do instead.

Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!