Why you want to get on Discord now.
“Isn’t telling people they need to be on Discord like telling people they need air to breath?”
- anonymous Tournament Organizer
If only it were that simple. Given the number of times at Bravous we have had to explain Discord to our clients, I thought I would put this together. As more and more non-gamers come to esports — this brief primer may help you. This won’t be a tutorial on the application, virtually any gamer can help you and there are many many great tutorials on YouTube like this one here and here, in this article, I want to share with you as a professional the case for Discord. In my experience when I know why I need to use something, it helps motivate me to do the work necessary to learn to use it.
If you are like me you probably feel borderline overwhelmed with communication apps. There’s Slack (who just sold to SalesForce), WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn Messenger, Google is beefing up Meet, and throw in Microsoft Teams… and well you get the picture. There seems to be an endless list of “message” clients to use and it’s hard to know where to pay attention.
Why on earth would you want to learn another platform that seems to do the same thing as every other platform?
Because sometimes, the right tool for the job is the only tool for the job worth using.
Built By Gamers For Gaming
That headline is enough to convince gamers to use Discord (if they need any convincing at all). Usually, gamers end up on Discord because that’s where the other gamers are.
If you are like Bravous, however, and you are bringing a new community of gamers into esports, or forming a new community you may find yourself needing to set up a community server. If you are net using Discord, getting involved in esports is your ticket to learn. While gamers often believe choosing Discord is painfully obvious, I can tell you that there is still a wide swath of people new to esports who do not understand Discord and are turned off by yes… its appearance. Most busy professionals would prefer to go with what they know. That, in my experience, would be a mistake.
Over the last 10 months, the team at Bravous has run esport events on virtually every platform you can imagine. From Zoom, Google Meet, BlueJeans, and Teams — we feel like we have tried them all. Yet, the platform we keep coming back to every time, and the one we recommend every time is Discord. Despite our recommendation, however, we are frequently asked to use something else.
Perhaps by example, I can help you see why we prefer Discord.
Imagine an Esports Tournament
Probably the best way to look at this is to think of the following story. You want to hold a Mario Kart Tournament. If you are holding the tournament online, you will definitely want Discord. If you are holding one in person, it might be as obvious, but it is still worthwhile to have a Discord server.
How will people connect with your event?
Marketing is the art of telling people you have something they want. Discord helps your marketing by making it easier for people to connect to your event. How? By providing a simple and elegant way to generate a link you can share via social media or email. Any way you can share a link, you can let people join your Discord server.- this means they connect to your event Before the event. This type of connection allows you to share information, generate engagement (they have joined something), and now you can start the process all marketers dream of: Moving from broadcast to conversation. When people join your server you can actually talk to them.
While you can do something similar with Slack, in my experience, it is not as elegant. Why? Because I have not found a way for Slack to create a structured new member experience the way we can with Discord. What’s more, Slack can take time to generate a sharable link. I once had to wait 48 hours before we got a link from slack we could share with our Harley Group. We generate Discord server links as soon as we create the server.
Once they are on the server… now what?
I mentioned a structured user experience. It could be said that WhatsApp supports a rudimentary way of promoting messaging groups. I once joined a WhatsApp group chat for language learners. It was chaos. Russian spammers joined the link every few minutes blasting inappropriate content into the one and only feed. It was hard to connect with other people who just wanted to practice cross-language communication.
Discord in contrast gives you powerful tools to establish roles for new members. These roles allow you to stage what the user sees and when. You can effectively script a new user experience, doling out bits of useful information a little at a time. This also allows you to “test” new users. If they can’t follow the directions necessary to be promoted to a higher user level, they may not be right for your community. They may not even be a member of your community!
Almost everything in Discord can be hidden so new members are not overwhelmed when they first connect. Further, existing members appreciate being shielded from the outbursts of unproven new members who may, or may not be who they say they are.
When your new users join the server, you can configure the user permissions in a way so new people have to accept your community guidelines before they start to interact with other members. They can get in the building, but they will be stuck in the lobby until they have agreed to play by community rules. This makes it much easier for your Moderators to enforce rules later.
You can organize it
Discord and Slack share the most common structure of allowing administrators to create channels of communication dedicated to specific topics. These channels can be private to a few individuals, or open to everyone on the server. This organization tends to eliminate platforms like WhatsApp. Zoom in contrast is like a video phone. The connection only exists for the duration of the call. There is no persistence with the video call clients and no way to leave standing messages for users.
The ability to create channels with clearly marked, dedicated functions like score reporting, and friend code sharing is crucial to running a good tournament. Your Mario Kart competitors will not be able to play in your tournament if they can’t join a game lobby. They won’t be able to join a game lobby unless they have friended their Nintendo Switches with the other players. Having a channel dedicated to this purpose is huge practical advantage.
Voice — where Discord stands apart
Having a simple place to send people, the ability to gate their access to your community until they have accepted guidelines, and organized communication is very important. Where Discord has no equal however is the realm of voice communication. While other platforms offer some mechanism to make a call, Discord supports people simply jumping into a voice channel and chatting away. The elegance of their solution makes Discord the go-to tool for gamers. What’s more, you can have multiple voice channels available on a server. You know where the conversation is. The voice quality is fantastic, and the number of participants who can be in a channel at once has been 50 for a while. The audio quality and response rates even with multiple people all talking simultaneously is impressive. It can really feel like you are sitting in a room full of gamers even when everyone is miles apart.
While there are many communities and teams that do not require microphones, Voice Channel communication is crucial for our teams running tournaments. It can be so much faster to talk out an issue, “in private” between tournament organizers than to keep firing back text messages. (We configure our servers to include staff only voice and text channels not visible to the general population). What’s more, because of the way channels work, anyone with access can join in without waiting for an invite. They do not need to keep asking for permission. (User controls make sure no one can crash your call who isn’t supposed to be there).
Finally, this might be obvious but it is worth noting but the reality of video games is that during a match, players want to focus on the game, not a video chat. Voice is the most useful mode of communication during play.
Of all the reasons to go to Discord — group voice chat is the hands-down winner.
Summary
I can relate to how irritating it can be to learn new software — especially when I perfectly good solution is already at my fingertips. I once posted on my door, “I don’t want to learn it. I just want to know it.” The simple fact is you are better off biting the bullet sooner rather than later and becoming comfortable using Discord.
I did not mention the tremendous number of useful Bots, or integrations available for Discord. Nor did I touch on the cosmetic differences between Slack and Discord. With a little research, you will find a bewildering number of add ons and plugins to tune your server to your liking and your community needs.
Discord has become the server platform for esports because:
- Zoom has no persistence, no structured channel communication. It is a video phone call and it is brilliant at that, but it is not a community communication hub.
- Slack, that genius tool of business is really an email replacement.
- Only Discord (so far) provides a robust integration of persistent and real-time communication tools for both text and voice.
The ability to configure a server to meet the needs of a tournament, or a community, coupled with the powerful voice chat features make Discord the must-have solution for esports. If you are not on discord, why not start right now? Head over to discord.gg then you can join the Bravous Community Discord and see what all the fun is about.