Intrepid V.S. Google, Discord, and YouTube for the Soul of Verra

Long ago, some genius decided to create the first MMO. It was near the beginning of the internet as we know it, and so the internet was undeveloped. The memory we have of these MMOs in the early 2000s is one of an amazing social community. These games were for a lot of people, their gateway to social interaction on the internet. Glorified chatrooms if you will. If you wanted to have the experience of being surrounded by strange people in a strange world, an MMO was one of the best options.

The internet has now matured. In terms of strict communication, third-party applications have taken over the community functions MMOs used to serve. If you want knowledge about the game, you do a google or YouTube search. Hell, even if you asked a question to someone on your server about the game, you're likely to get a link to a guide or YouTube. Discord helped take us further and further away from the world we sought after as well. Instead of looking at the screen right in front of us, the world we want to be a part of, many of us have a second monitor we use strictly for Discord. The immersion and the community we claim to seek after so much was damned for convenience.

That makes plenty sense. We may yearn for the communities of the past, but 3rd party convenience is... well convenient. Even if we don't actually want it for our game world. As an example, I know potato chips are bad for me, so I don't buy them. But, if potato chips are placed right next to me, it's hard for me not to partake. And if the guy next to me is eating potato chips? Down the hatch they go.

If Intrepid wants to take us back to the communities of the 90s and 2000s they need to give us a reason to stay on Verra and not our browsers. Ashes already is successful in some respects to this. When it comes to guides on the best farming route, the best build and how to get it, etc. the effect of servers having different node maps is a great disincentive to make those guides. YouTubers are making videos on MMOs to get views and subscribers, so that they can make an income playing a video game. If your guide is only potentially useful for 15,000 people, then your audience is hard-capped. Making that guide isn't going to potentially give a YouTuber their dream. So, you may be better off forming a social connection with people on your server to discover that information.

With how augments will work, resource quality from gatherables ala SWG, seasons affecting our damage, and different raid bosses existing on different servers, Ashes also disincentivizes those meta guides we all know and love. Maybe you'll have to actually think about the kind of build you're going for based off what materials and augments you have unlocked for once. Can modern gamers even contemplate such horror?

But this is hardly enough. Discord is probably the biggest monster Intrepid has to deal with, ironic since that's where the most active Ashes community currently is. If people become secluded to only talking in their guild discords it takes away a large amount of the chat in-game, and leaves usually the worst kind of chat in-game.

Discord is superior to any in-game communication functions in many respects. First, all of the text based chat is recorded, so if someone happens to miss your message they can find it later. Second, it has higher quality voice chat than any VoiP I've used, with background noise-cancellation for voice activity, and Discord allows for moderation to prevent noise pollution in a channel. It has streaming services that lets you share your screen with others. And it also has a bot community that allows for notifications to be pushed to users, polls to be easily created, and whatever else they can imagine. Simply a superior form of communication to any guild chat I've seen in a MMORPG. And unfortunately, far better than anything I could hope Intrepid to make.

To me, Discord already won, and it's not close. But if you can't beat them join them. Discord in the past planned to have a "gamebridge", where a game could create a Discord server that's still hosted by Discord, and then represent that server in-game through the game's own customized UI. Imagine if instead of scrolling through a saturated guild list, you could click on that guild recruitment notice on a town board and take a look at that guild's community introduction. You would still be looking at the same monitor, you would still be in Ashes of Creation for social interactions. It also has great utility for talking to guild-mates in game through a phone app.
Here's an archive of Discord's past plans for gamebridge: http://web.archive.org/web/20170919214205/https://discordapp.com/gamebridge

All of that would be contingent on Discord, or even a Discord competitor like Guilded, willing to work with Intrepid on that project. I wouldn't expect that to be ready by the game's release either, so it would be updated into the game after launch.

Intrepid, you can add a VOIP. You can put in what you think are all these amazing communication features that you think people will use. But you have competitors, and more than likely those in-game features you think are amazing will just never be used unless there's a good reason to use it over a third party application.

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Nerror

I think way back they mentioned something about integrating discord, but they might have dropped that idea again in favour of their phone app and whatever ingame options we'll get.

Here is the thing though. Discord is a third party app with an unknown longevity. Ventrilo, Mumble, Teamspeak, and all the other programs that have been popular and the go-to voice chats over the years have fallen to the wayside. Discord will too at some point. It just takes one bad decision about monetization for people to abandon it, or for a competitor to come along with even better features.

Aside from that, it would also tie Intrepid to Discord in ways that could be bad for the game. Discord servers go down once in a while, even though Intrepid's servers are just fine. There's the whole monetization thing that might conflict with what Intrepid is doing. Who owns the chat? Who has rights to the private messages? And let's say Discord closes down with relatively short notice. Intrepid would be screwed. I just see a ton of problems with integrating Discord into the game. Much more than not doing it.

I am not trying dismiss the issue, because I agree to a large extent that people will use Discord or whatever next 3rd party app is popular. So there is definitely an element of "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" to it.

In the end, I think the best solution is release with standard (but good) ingame chat and basic phone companion options, and then over time expand and improve those options while accepting that people are using 3rd party apps in the meantime.

Btw, as for discord voice quality, Teamspeak 3 has it easily beat IMO. If Intrepid can implement a good quality voice chat, I think people will use that over Discord quite often for group play and such.

Voxtrium

Excellent counter points @Nerror, It's definitely important to think about the different goals IS and discord pursue, however it might be possible to allow discord to be a crutch initially and remove them later on, once IS has the game developed and time to spend on implementing their own comms. This also allows them to see what exactly is desired and what is needed within the game. The type of contract this would require would obviously have to be well thought out, but they usually are so we will assume that trend continues.

However, who knows just how viable this solution is. Is it even necessary? I know for myself I hop to other guild servers all the time and know many others who do as well.
I want to have my group of online friends that I like and enjoy playing with and that is why I made a guild. For me I will have the most fun when I play with my guild and PvP other guilds thus having temporary social interactions with random guilds in Verra while continually interacting with the few I have chosen to play with.

For IS to mimic this would certainly be too much to take on, and I definitely want Is to avoid any further scope creep.

Noaani

To me, the reason a game should have voice chat integrated in to it is because of if/when Discord does eventually sell or go public, and the entire platform changes, it will be a while (potentially years) before gamers decide on a standard platform once again.

Intrepid are far better off having it in place now, rather than having to scramble should that ever happen.

As to comments about guides and such, I honestly don't remember a time in MMO's where there weren't guides. Even back in the 90's people would write guides and post them. They may not have been as popular as they are now, but neither was the genre.

anyone that thinks there was a time in MMO's before guides and such is simply thinking back to a time before they realized there were guides and such.

Goalid

Nerror wrote: »

I think way back they mentioned something about integrating discord, but they might have dropped that idea again in favour of their phone app and whatever ingame options we'll get.

Here is the thing though. Discord is a third party app with an unknown longevity. Ventrilo, Mumble, Teamspeak, and all the other programs that have been popular and the go-to voice chats over the years have fallen to the wayside. Discord will too at some point. It just takes one bad decision about monetization for people to abandon it, or for a competitor to come along with even better features.

Aside from that, it would also tie Intrepid to Discord in ways that could be bad for the game. Discord servers go down once in a while, even though Intrepid's servers are just fine. There's the whole monetization thing that might conflict with what Intrepid is doing. Who owns the chat? Who has rights to the private messages? And let's say Discord closes down with relatively short notice. Intrepid would be screwed. I just see a ton of problems with integrating Discord into the game. Much more than not doing it.

I am not trying dismiss the issue, because I agree to a large extent that people will use Discord or whatever next 3rd party app is popular. So there is definitely an element of "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" to it.

In the end, I think the best solution is release with standard (but good) ingame chat and basic phone companion options, and then over time expand and improve those options while accepting that people are using 3rd party apps in the meantime.

Btw, as for discord voice quality, Teamspeak 3 has it easily beat IMO. If Intrepid can implement a good quality voice chat, I think people will use that over Discord quite often for group play and such.

I think they would use VOIP for arenas, and I agree with you that they just will have to expand on whatever chat system they implement. I hope at least they have a guild chat that records text instead of get lost to history.

Teaming up with a certain company definitely puts your eggs in one basket, so whatever contract they would have would have to have an out built into it or a well defined agreement. Definitely a lot of legal fees involved. I'd look towards whatever agreement EVE has with Microsoft for Excel as a precedent.

In all honesty I just don't think there's a good, realistic solution to the problem. But MMOs aren't all about the communities in the 2000s. It won't make or break the game either way, but that charm we all are looking for won't be in this game if people are constantly using 3rd party apps to communicate.

Goalid

Noaani wrote: »

To me, the reason a game should have voice chat integrated in to it is because of if/when Discord does eventually sell or go public, and the entire platform changes, it will be a while (potentially years) before gamers decide on a standard platform once again.

Intrepid are far better off having it in place now, rather than having to scramble should that ever happen.

As to comments about guides and such, I honestly don't remember a time in MMO's where there weren't guides. Even back in the 90's people would write guides and post them. They may not have been as popular as they are now, but neither was the genre.

anyone that thinks there was a time in MMO's before guides and such is simply thinking back to a time before they realized there were guides and such.

I'm sure there were guides, but I don't quite remember there being as many guides as there are for New World or Lost Ark. I should have specified in the post, but it just seems to me like there has been an explosion of YouTube guides that allow for a player to play a MMO knowledgeably without having to ever talk to anyone on their server. Farming routes, meta builds, leveling guides, etc.

That's also a good point that having a good in-game communication system would be amazing if Discord monetizes and players abandon it.

Atama

Noaani wrote: »

As to comments about guides and such, I honestly don't remember a time in MMO's where there weren't guides. Even back in the 90's people would write guides and post them. They may not have been as popular as they are now, but neither was the genre.

anyone that thinks there was a time in MMO's before guides and such is simply thinking back to a time before they realized there were guides and such.

Absolutely. When I played EQ from '99 on, I was on Allakhazam constantly and other sites getting info about the game. There was a ton of it out there.

By the time MMORPGs came around, of course the World Wide Web was already a thing. And with the WWW, we had web sites. And with web sites we had guides, whether they were personal sites (remember Geocities and Angelfire?) or professionally-made huge sites that were well-organized. There was never a time that we didn't have them for MMOs.

Dygz

I stopped paying attention to in-game chat over a decade ago.
I am typically in some form of voice chat - Skype/Discord - with the people I want to speak with.
And I'm also monitoring Twitter, Twitch and other forms of social media.

In-game, I'd probably rather communicate via speech bubbles... if not some limited form of manual proximity voice chat.

Shoelid

If Intrepid Studios is trying to design a game that gets people off of discord, that's a mistake. It's simply how people play games nowadays. Back when Risk of Rain 2 launched they put the entire community on Discord, group finding, voice chat, and everything. It worked fine and probably saved them a ton of development. You said it yourself: don't fight 'em , join 'em.

Discord is probably the biggest monster Intrepid has to deal with, ironic since that's where the most active Ashes community currently is. If people become secluded to only talking in their guild discords it takes away a large amount of the chat in-game, and leaves usually the worst kind of chat in-game.

What chat is really lost to discord? You aren't losing zone/city/trade chat to discord at all. Guild chat is already private from other players. 90% of PUGs wont use discord. The different farming groups competing with each other in a dungeon won't use discord to talk to each other. There might be some discord groups for guild alliances and the top traders in an area, but those people wouldn't talk in general chat anyway. pretty much nothing is lost to Discord.

All they should do is make it so that AOC isn't dependent on Discord so that 3rd party programs aren't required for basic game functionality. It should have robust chatting features, text and voice based. Picking a fight is unnecessary.

If anything, they should automatically validate Discord links and make them easy to click on, so that people 1) know they aren't clicking an IP grabber or something and 2) they don't have to wrestle with a copy-paste process. Don't fight it, join it.

Fighting trends is how you end up with a small game with a community of bitter, balding, 35 year old men.

As for the stuff about guides. They always existed, but people didn't know about them as much back in the day, and didn't know how to find them as easily.

Dygz

AFAIK, Ashes is not trying to get people off of Discord.
Pretty sure Steven is expecting people to be on Discord and is very supportive of that.
Especially since it's already a major channel of coommunication for Ashes.

Noaani

Goalid wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

To me, the reason a game should have voice chat integrated in to it is because of if/when Discord does eventually sell or go public, and the entire platform changes, it will be a while (potentially years) before gamers decide on a standard platform once again.

Intrepid are far better off having it in place now, rather than having to scramble should that ever happen.

As to comments about guides and such, I honestly don't remember a time in MMO's where there weren't guides. Even back in the 90's people would write guides and post them. They may not have been as popular as they are now, but neither was the genre.

anyone that thinks there was a time in MMO's before guides and such is simply thinking back to a time before they realized there were guides and such.

I'm sure there were guides, but I don't quite remember there being as many guides as there are for New World or Lost Ark. I should have specified in the post, but it just seems to me like there has been an explosion of YouTube guides that allow for a player to play a MMO knowledgeably without having to ever talk to anyone on their server. Farming routes, meta builds, leveling guides, etc.

That's also a good point that having a good in-game communication system would be amazing if Discord monetizes and players abandon it.

I'm a little unsure as to what the number of guides has to do with anything.

As of right now, I have not seen a single guide for anything at all in New World - I haven't even had YouTube recommend one to me.

This is because I've never looked for one.

So, the only people seeing guides for games are people looking for guides for games. As such, it doesn't matter if there is one guide, or 50 guides. Only people looking for a guide will see it, but anyone looking for a guide will find one.

The reason there are more guides in relation to most games these days (and more of the guides are of poor quality), is because it is now possible to monetize these guides. Back when MMO's came out, people were writing guides to help others - not to try and get views or clicks. As such, guides were usually based around things players had trouble with. Someone would decide that a guide is needed, and they would put actual time and effort in to learning about the aspects around the thing they are going to write the guide about.

Then they would write it.

Then they would often spend a few hours a week for the next few months editing it to take account of new information, or of changes to the content.

These days, people will put out a guide video about a piece of content they have clearly not actually participated in at all, just because views.

If your issue was that you are over all the shit guides that are around now in relation to most games (not just MMO's), I'd 100% agree with you. However, guides in general were always there for players that looked for them.

DaffyDux

Ideally. A perfectly integrated voice-chat system.
Reality. A massive waste of time and resources when there is already an established platform that nearly every single one of your prospective players is already on.
This isn't a perfect world. Use the money to make Verra as perfect of a world as it can be.

MybroViajero

Adapt and improve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKOOn5BnEcI

I give Facepucnh as an example because I think they are doing a great job in adapting and improving Rust.

In this latest update "changed" many things that 3 months ago was unthinkable to change, the recoil, added Crosshair, graffiti, etc..

Even though it seems like a radical change that could worsen Rust's image, Facepunch adapted and improved "in a way" Rust's environment, taking some of the weight off the players and giving them more freedom.
In a game with such a toxic potential as Rust, that the developers give more "freedom" to their players is something scary but that "freedom" instead of unleashing toxicity has made players improve themselves, have more development options in Rust and have more fun.
Facepunch was able to adapt and thus improve "in a way" the Rust environment.

I think Intrepid should do something similar, if the social interactions that are so well remembered in the 2000s have several modern obstacles like discord or some social network, then Intrepid should adapt "in some way" to create that social and communicational environment that promotes wanting to talk inside AoC and not outside of it.

I don't know if using discord diminishes my ability to be immersed in an MMO but I do know that the best times I have in an MMO is when I can talk and joke with my friends in the MMO.

PenguinPaladin

DaffyDux wrote: »

Ideally. A perfectly integrated voice-chat system.
Reality. A massive waste of time and resources when there is already an established platform that nearly every single one of your prospective players is already on.
This isn't a perfect world. Use the money to make Verra as perfect of a world as it can be.

I mean if we are taking that route they shouldnt have wasted their time making a weather system... and the navel system could also just be fast travel points.... why make anything when all the money could be put to making verra as perfect as possible?

The game should be and feel complete. You should be able to enjoy it as is without any other parties involved. And it will not have a group finder. And the social aspects are very important to its overall functionality. They dont need a perfect voice chat system. But they need a working comunication system. If discord servers go down while your home node is under seige, and typing screen text is the only way you can try and organize 500 vs 500 combat, then corners have been cut.

Tragnar

for a new game an ingame voice chat is a must, because this feature alone combats toxicity in a massive way - yes you can be toxic and shout at someone, but thats what mute buttons are for

fact is many people think twice if they are about to flame someone out loud into a mic, because writing it is way more detached and if you dare to argument that voice chat can be abused and therefore it shouldnt be implemented then why stop there and just remove all chat channels entirely? If you remove communication then you can't be harassed (like those dumbos on twitter virtue signaling and then blocking replies)

superhero6785

Honestly, the 'best of both worlds' scenario is to offer decent in-game chat/voice options with official 3rd party API support. This would allow companies like Discord to become 'official partners' with license and TOS agreements in place to integrate chat systems. If some other 3rd party comes along and wants to integrate, then great! More options for players. If Discord shuts down, NBD because you can always use the in-game features.

I see this working like - in the settings you enable 'discord chat link' and any messages sent in-game show up in the discord channel, and vice-versa. Ideally, you could link each of your in-game chat channels to a corresponding Discord channel. That's my 'perfect world' scenario.

Jahlon

Ok, I just read this on my stream and I have to ask:

Can I get a 2 line TLDR? I totally lost your point in what you are asking for.

Goalid

Jahlon wrote: »

Ok, I just read this on my stream and I have to ask:

Can I get a 2 line TLDR? I totally lost your point in what you are asking for.

TLDR, MMOs had more immersive text chats before social media was fleshed out, I want Ashes to have that same immersive, community feel. But Ashes can't provide better communication services than Discord, so I'd like Intrepid to work with Discord or a competitor to have an integrated guild/node server they can use while playing the game. And for that to be accomplished after the game is released since it would be a major stretch goal.

Dygz

It won't be in-game text chat forming community bonds - there are plenty of other features for that.

CROW3

VOIP Barrens chat. 😩

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