Forums → The Tavern → Concerning Armor Games and the Future of Forums.
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<--CONCERNING ARMOR GAMES AND THE FUTURE OF FORUMS-->
Hello everyone, it's MattEmAngel. You may remember me.
Since I joined in 2011, people have been constantly saying "Armor Games is dying, we have to save Armor Games" but no one really had a solution. Well, we have a solution now.
PART I: THE BACKSTORY WITH DISCORD
October 2019: Armor Games linked an official Discord in News and Feedback, as, quote, "an alternative option to those who are being displaced by this decision [to remove Arrow chat] and maintain a free and open connection to the other players you've been working with for so long now." There was apparently a wider variety of channels to participate in, but activity was less than stellar, especially since a lot of people either preferred Arrow Chat or were already in a different AG discord.
March 2020: AG reorganizes the discord by deleting "the channels where most folks weren’t participating" and consolidating all of the content into either "general" (anything relating to AG) and "random" (anything else), the idea being to condense all of the small, organized conversations into one big collective (and disorganized) one.
They also rolled out linking achievements and ranks to the server. Post your Discord username in the forums using your account. Unfortunately, due to some unforeseen 2020-happenings, this was never implemented.
PART II: THE PRESENT FORUMS
Currently only myself and sciller45 talk semi-regularly on the Discord. The Discord itself is moderated by no one. Two people, CathArmor and Tasselfoot, are Admins. They're also admins on multiple other Discords. We'll come back to that.
The Discord itself has only two channels to talk in (general and random). There are no voice chat channels, there are no threads, and users cannot post images or emojis from other Discords.
Meanwhile, the forums receive double the traffic, with three or four other members posting regularly. They are moderated by four Mods (one has been offline for long time) and zero admins (MrDayCee and Gantic are gone, and Ferret has been outright removed entirely from the roster). Besides the low traffic, the forums are suffering from bugs. Empty pages, usernames not updating in the "Featured Topics" section, and the occasional post being eaten. User pages are worse; they still use Disqus. In the words of Moegreche, "If you're looking to get in touch with me via this comment section, please be aware that Disqus is very tricky for me. I tend to not be able to see new comments for a while (sometimes up to a month). At any rate it's very hit-and-miss."
Besides the glitches, we appear to be severely out of date. The "General Settings" section has an area for us to put in our Yahoo! Username, XBOX Live Gamertag, and Wii name. The Wii was discontinued a decade ago. Nothing for Twitch, Epic Games, Google, or Twitter? We've fallen a little behind.
PART III: AGS
For some time now, AG has been investing into Armor Games Studios, self-described as "a full-service indie publisher focused on building a supportive, creative environment for amazing developers." The website has fully embraced integrating games with Steam, Epic, mobile apps, and consoles, including the Switch (why are we still asking for Wii IDs when we publish games on the Switch?...).
Several of these games, interestingly enough, have their own Discord, overseen at times by Armor Games admins (remember Tass and Cath? It's Tass and Cath). Some, such as "The Last Stand: Aftermath," boast over three thousand members. AG's stance on this is "[W]e like letting the games we publish have their own spaces. Different games have different needs...Some pubs have one larger server for all of their games but we prefer to do things like this."
All fine and good. It makes sense for developers to want a personal discord, especially if they have more than one game. But when it comes to gamers talking outside of games, as is evident by AGS's involvement here, they talk on Discord, not on a browser forum.
PART IV: THE FEEDBACK
When bringing this up initially on the AG Discord back in December, I was given a twofold reason why this was not going to happen:
"The biggest downsides are:
- it's not hosted on Armor
- it's 1 more place we have to moderate"
But here's the thing:
- None of the other Discords are hosted on Armor, and
- It only had one moderator, who was recently demodded for presumably not doing anything, and no one noticed.
Consider the fact that Discord has most of the things a forum has: (bold/italic text, image and video uploading, links, pings, tags, roles, and now specifically forums and threads), plus features that browser-based forums don't have (voice chat, screen sharing, and Activities), all in one package that appeals to every medium (Youtubers, video gamers, board gamers, chat rooms, etc.). There's no contest. The era of classic forum layouts, with HTML tags and page-by-page navigation, is done. Discord text and voice communication is synonymous with the modern video game player on EVERY platform.
PART V: THE ULTIMATUM
Armor Games need to embrace a full transition from browser-based forums to Discord.
Add categories like the ones here (Feedback, Gaming, Courtyard, Forge). Put channels it them for the forums (The Tavern, Games, Forum Games, WEPR, Popular Media, AMW, Programming). Forums go in there (New? Introduce Yourself, Count to 100, How to Create an RP/RPG). Users can add threads to them, or add forums to them, I don't know the exact hierarchy but the AG forums can be adapted. The AG forums need to be adapted. Loosen up the restrictions and let users post pictures and emojis. Add some voice chat channels for people to just talk in. I would be completely on board with being able to actually voice chat.
(There's a chance that it was organized like this when it first launched, but AG decided that the solution to widespread, organized low activity was to put all of the kids at one library table and tell them to talk about whatever they wanted all at the same time. The unsurprising result was that people stopped talking completely).
Simultaneously, Armor Games needs to advertise its own Discord more publicly. The only link is in the Forums, which are still crammed up in the top bar of the front page next to the games categories where it is easily missed. AG Studios would do well to link back to the official Discord as well. There's no reason why a game publishing studio would not want people who play the games they publish to communicate outside of the games. That's literally what the Armor Games forums are right now.
It is an extreme step. But it is a necessary step. For years and years, we have gone on and on and on and on about Armor Games dying but no one ever knew what to do about it. Discord is what we do about it. The Armor Games forums need to adapt, because they finally can adapt, on a thriving, easily-accessible, easily-moderated platform that we already have a presence in several times over.
And, if you still have doubts, I encourage you to check in on Kongregate. They transferred to a read-only forum in January 2022 and moved all community activity to Discord. A year later it boasts 6,000 members, with 1k online as of right now. What further proof do you need that it works?
I can't make it much clearer than this. Many members have been saying AG is dying, but no ones says it has to.
- 12 Replies
This sounds like a good idea. I would hate the community to die out.
I like the overall idea, I would like to comment and add on to a few things.
AG reorganizes the discord by deleting "the channels where most folks weren’t participating" and consolidating all of the content
This seems like such a weird decision to me that this was what was chosen to be done with the inactive channels. Granted I have never seen the channels so I cannot add any further opinions on them, but one thing I've seen a Discord server do is instead of deleting the channels, they're moved into an archive section after some time of being inactive and if it does get posted into, it gets moved back to whatever section is most appropriate for it. I don't know if it's done automatically but I can't imagine it'd be difficult to do manually.
we appear to be severely out of date
Another thing I'd like to add to this is that the site, and even moreso the forums, are not very mobile-friendly. Text is incredibly small, I have to constantly zoom-in. The buttons to quote, italicize and such are too close to their surrounding buttons that it's easy to press on something else. It needs some updating in that regard as well.
- it's 1 more place we have to moderate"
Oh c'mon. I hope this is a joke. This was never a problem before. We have forum moderators, we have knights, we've had chat wardens when the old chat was a thing, hell I'm still branded as a chat warden and a knight both which are pretty much irrelevant titles now. The solution to this problem is and was already in place.
Here's an idea: have the forum moderators or select others to moderate the discord. I am not saying that Tass and Cath need to lose Discord moderation status, they are employed at AGS after all, but they do not need to be the sole moderation team of the site specific Discord. Just select Discord moderators, give them their own text channel that only they can view and chat in, give them very basic moderation powers such as being able to mute and kick users, delete chat messages and stuff like that. Tass and Cath should also stay as admins but have the abilities to do things that a moderator would not, such as banning and manipulating the Discord server as a whole. In this way Tass and Cath can pretty much be hands-off with the site Discord except in cases where they would need to ban someone which would ideally not be very often.
Put channels it them for the forums (The Tavern, Games, Forum Games, WEPR, Popular Media, AMW, Programming).
So, I agree in concept with this but I do not think the channels should be the same as the forums. I think as a start we should have a general channel just to talk about whatever, a channel for site help for when someone needs assistance with something on the site, a channel for flash games (NOT combining them with video games, those topics should never have been combined on the forums in the first place), a general channel for AGS indie games, a "****posting" channel for posting things such as memes or other jokes to not derail any serious discussions that might be going on in the general channel and probably something else that I can't think of. I think since the Discord is so quiet and inactive, the Discord itself should also start out small and if we need to add in more channels for specific things like music, sharing gaming news or whatever then those should be added so long as there's demand for those channels. I think cluttering it with things such as popular media or forum games can look very off-putting especially if they wind up . I am part of another relatively small, but also very active, Discord server and this is essentially how they did things there when a lot of us would constantly post pictures of food, eventually they just made a food channel to post in instead so it wouldn't muddy the general topic.
Simultaneously, Armor Games needs to advertise its own Discord more publicly. The only link is in the Forums, which are still crammed up in the top bar of the front page next to the games categories where it is easily missed
Easy solution: put a link of it in the follow us section of the footer. Like, that should be the easiest place to put it in rather than a stickied thread on the forums. HowLongToBeat did that for their server and traffic to the server heavily increased
Quick update:
The two Discord admins are planning to discuss things sometime this week.
Concerning adding permissions to users to allow them to upload pictures:
"We do not have plans to relax the server settings at this time."
I can sort of understand why they wouldn't want to relax those kinds of settings, preventing spam I suppose, but to be honest that doesn't really do much considering users can just upload images on stuff like Imgur, Photobucket, and whatever else is out there and then post them to Discord
@R2D21999 It's kind of ironic that, here on the forums, images are allowed anywhere but editing and profile picture selection is incredibly strict, while on Discord the exact opposite is true.
AG could shift two mods from here to the Discord, allow users to post basically anything, and it'd be fine. Heck, they could at least do a test run of, say, a week, to see if the mods are comfortable with it and can reasonably manage rule enforcement. They need at least one moderator there anyway, a user was harassed today by another one and they weren't dealt with for four hours, since the only ones who can deal with it are the admins, who are busy with their actual jobs.
Update, I was banned from the Armor Games discord this morning. I received no warnings before, I was not given a reason given, and I was not contacted a single time by anyone.
Sorry to hear that. It could be that they are trying to enforce the site rules and guidelines on the ArmorGames discord, but if so, this would be a classic example of jurisdictional over extension (e.g. claiming the whole world as the jurisdiction for a particular country's laws that don't explicitly state otherwise). See if your favorite mod (probably @Nicodemus) knows anything about it also.
@nichodemus has no authority on the Discord. None of the mods do. It is exclusively @Tasselfoot (and Cath, but she is very rarely online).
As for jurisdiction, there aren't even any rules here that I violated that could be carried over to Discord. I highly encourage them to pinpoint exactly what rule I broke, to such an extreme level that I wasn't even given a warning, but I doubt it. That's not how they do things around here.
I disagree wholeheartedly with moving to Discord.
Browser game website exist explicitly as a medium to play games in a very simple fashion. They are supposed to be a one stop shop to quickly and easily play games. No downloads, no installs, no subscriptions, no regular updates, and most games on here are equally simple and enjoyable.
Why would the people coming to AG for these type of experiences want to complicate their lives by having to sign up for and download Discord and then figure how to navigate it's interface.
Maybe it's because I'd be considered "old", but I only ever use discord as a way to easily establish voice chat with friends while playing warzone; otherwise, I have no interest in using Discord, and don't understand the obsession with it. What's wrong with these forums?
@xeano321 He never did get unbanned, and any activity that existed dropped dead the moment it happened.
G moderation has always been questionable, but why in God's name he would get banned is so baffling, such an utterly, unimaginably stupid decision that I struggle to fathom why they'd make it other than out of sheer malice or a room temperature IQ. In deGrasse Celsius, of course.
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