How are you finding PA without the in-game chat? Do you think we still need it? Or is just Discord good enough as a replacement with full rich presence and the ability to join and spectate games? Or maybe having both would be better? There are advantages to both systems of course. For example, Discord provides voice chat in addition to text chat and it has a client application that easily runs in the background. Link to that PA Discord is https://discord.gg/DT9AKK2 by the way. If Rich Presence gets added into PA in the future, one would be able to join and spectate games. Though that currently isn't available yet. In-game community chat on the other hand is available to all new users automatically and is integrated with the game so that matchmaking is really easy. Also it has a much wider reach of course because most players will be logged in automatically thus it's a good place to make announcements and such. The stats from the in-game chat show it had almost 370,000 users / ~600 messages per day (link) vs Discord's just over 1500 users and ~60-80 messages per day. Additionally, most players in the in-game community chat will be running PA and thus will be actively engaged with Planetary Annihilation and looking to play games. Anyway, what do you think?
(Captain obvious post) The in-game community chat brought life to the game, when you launched the game you could automatically see people talking about it (units, mods, strats, etc), looking for games, talking about past games, etc. I feel like it was especially great for new users: you get the game, you see there are a lot of players online, even if your PA friends list is empty. On top of that, it was great to fix some users' issues (technical or with the games/units/mods). Then (maybe it's a power user use case), seeing everyone's statuses (in the chat, not the friends list) was really useful to convince me to host games, for instance: not a lot of PA friends online but seeing a few good players with the "viewing game browser" status would convince me to host a team game. It was also very useful for ranked games to see who was in the queue, etc. Another great feature was the rank display, it made balancing games a lot easier (more fun for everyone). I also really miss the statuses in the friends list (which came with the chat mod I believe), for the same reasons listed above ("I have 20 friends online but are they actually here or afk, are they in a game, is it over and they're just watching the replay?"). That's actually the feature I miss the most. Now regarding actual chat vs discord. As you said, they complement each other. The game chat was great while I had PA launched, I could read it while waiting in the lobby and potentially answer questions. Discord is more async and since there are different channels you can keep track of the discussions easily (and discord is lightweight so you can keep it open). There's also the discovery thing, PAMM was announced everywhere: forums, discord, steam discussions yet a lot of players haven't heard of it yet. Not everyone is on discord but everyone was in the community chat (not everyone was reading it but still). A player already into PA and pretty involved will end up on the PA discord but the built in chat was a good way to get new players hooked.
It’s worth noting that the presence stuff, if supported after the migration, is a relatively leightweight part of the community chat mod. Its reimplementation is not mechanically tied to community chat. Once you account for that, I am personally feeling a stronger pull away from community chat. A lot of time went into its moderation, and that time was neccessary, given the platform was used by a lot of new players just wanting to be noisy or complain. The place that the community will really miss out is the lack of ready and waiting technical support, although that was largely down to the people that were putting their time into community chat. I wonder if maybe a better support and discover solution would be integrating the forums (ideally after a better botspam solution was found than currently is used). With the forums, Uber are already committed to its moderation, meaning the community does not need rely on having moderators to manage the system to protect its place in the game. Sure, the forums as it stands are quiet, but if the game were pushing new users in that direction that situation could change, especially with an in-game client. Just a thought had while on a train, am likely missing a glaring problem.
The problem with any new chat option, it will not be installed automatically. The first problem that should be addressed is spreading the knowledge about PAMM to people that don't use the forums or discord actively. Creating a mod that would put a message in chat with a working link to the forum post would be the best solution for now in my opinion.
haven´t used discord yet but i wouldn´t be against using it .. in-gamechat while i am not a quick typer is still a given for me to use
Hmmm..... I'm a 'hunt & peck' typer so I'm usually 3 conversations behind. Yet I seldom use Discord because I'm a pretty quiet person too. Not familiar with "rich presence". I did enjoy the rank displays and player status of the PA chat. I have a single screen so the Discord chat would require a bit alt-tabbing. How would we drive people to Discord? So I guess I lean primarily to the in game chat and have the periodic auto-posts notifying users of PAMM similar to the notifications of Twitch streamers. We could also have the link to the Community Discord put into rotation. Use the in game chat to help build the community.
True, but I don't know that Uber would be against this in principle. Unless I grossly misunderstand the situation (which has happened more than once), if mikeyh decided to make his mods available, they would resume auto-loading at startup. But the bigger issue may be how to do this while remaining compliant with GDPR
Limited retention time, informing users that they will expose their personal information when they post something, batch delete&export functions for your own chat messages, online & ingame status privat by default. Not impossible at all, just requires quite some work so set it up correctly.
The rich presence for Discord is like this: https://discordapp.com/rich-presence As far as I understand it just adds some art and provides you with buttons to join or spectate games. Also some status text can be provided. Aren't the forums moderated by the community too anyway? I think it's only @wpmarshall these days. And we are sure making his life miserable with some of our threads. Anyway, any solution with chat (Discord or in-game) needs moderation of course. The in-game community chat already had the capability of muting players that were breaking the rules. I think Discord has something similar, but I'm not sure. It definitely has moderators though.
Of course any solution needs moderation, the concern is in spreading that resource too thin. If people are already starting support queries in places, there might be solutions that don’t increase that workload as much as a whole new medium.
I dont want discord. Just don't want. And I would like to have rich present back. And I would like to have direct mod support. Nowadays its all so.... I don't know... Things got annoying and unnessesary complicated... Is 1v1 still broken? And where are the displayed ranks?...
You might have a couple of terms misunderstood there. However, while I don’t disagree with your intentions, don’t derail this thread into a wider issue. Genuine conversation about how best to reimplement community features is worth keeping in one place, but general sadness about other current issues should be in its own thread. We know there’s a lot going on right now, but directionless shouting won’t help anything. The game needs a quick way of advertising games, and we need to work out what format is best suited to that.
Neat! Community Chat returns! https://forums.uberent.com/threads/...nity-chat-and-legion-expansion-support.73003/
