Settlement/Region Discords

[I_Am_King_Midas]

There is a place for people wanting to make something themselves or have private conversations with their friends. They may not like the fact that someone not in the friend group is reading everything. Maybe they are going to share pictures of their family, talk about a real problem they have been going through in their lives and they would prefer to only be sharing that information with friends.

Sometimes people don't want to have a chaperone for their friendships. Privacy isn't always a bad thing.

except none of this should be applicable to a settlement discord and the fact it is pitched as such is telling.

a settlement is not your private friend group.

You wrote settlement/faction in your original post. Then your newest response switched to just saying settlement. And yes, a faction can be someone's friend group. These are the people you choose to login into the game and spend time with.

[Zavandar]

There is a place for people wanting to make something themselves or have private conversations with their friends. They may not like the fact that someone not in the friend group is reading everything. Maybe they are going to share pictures of their family, talk about a real problem they have been going through in their lives and they would prefer to only be sharing that information with friends.

Sometimes people don't want to have a chaperone for their friendships. Privacy isn't always a bad thing.

except none of this should be applicable to a settlement discord and the fact it is pitched as such is telling.

a settlement is not your private friend group.

You wrote settlement/faction in your original post. Then your newest response switched to just saying settlement. And yes, a faction can be someone's friend group. These are the people you choose to login into the game and spend time with.

And in my first post I also made a concession where faction discords are concerned. I still think they should have a DM presence, though. The problem is people treating settlement discords like private friend discords, which I addressed in my reply to you. You did not distinguish in your post.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

There are a few problems with the premise of this thread.

1) Good luck enforcing that.

2) I've been in over half the settlement discords on and off in my time playing here, and well over a dozen chat rooms. I've seen people explode, I've witnessed people making fun of those not around to defend themselves, and I have witnessed a conspiracy theory or two go way off the reservation. But A) these things are rare, and B) I am an individual who can make up my own mind without falling into group think, so I never saw these things as more than a passing issue that I probably couldn't describe even just a few months later. The advice given by multiple people in this thread is solid. Don't fall into group think, and walk if things get too crazy. Maybe with a quick nod to the dms on your way out.

3) The discord I thought was the most toxic for the server was actually not a private discord at all. Everyone was welcome and it was pretty well moderated when it comes to nonsense. What made it toxic was that many new people thought it was the official discord since there wasn't an official arelith discord yet, and several admins and mods liked to use their status to enforce their own opinion about x y or z on others through their illusion of power. New announcements were written up with salty snark, clearly aimed at effecting the opinion of the players in their room, and because the admins and moderators liked a style of play that geared toward lots of pvp they often would accuse you of leading new players astray for saying something as simple as "you don't need to be a min maxed pvp beast to have fun on arelith". I personally thought one of the admins on this discord was irongron for the first six months I played here, just because of the authority he spoke with. Needless to say that got awfully confusing when he would make fun of the new feature he just put in in his write up of the discords version of the announcement.

The irony of this all, and the reason I bring it up at all, is that this was all fixed by adding an official arelith discord. No longer was that discord toxic to the server, it was just a discord that had people that had strong opinions in charge of it, which is totally legit. So adding a discord was actually a solution, not the cause of a problem.

TLDR Discords not going anywhere, so just practice some individualism and make up your own mind about things. And if you see someone ranting and raving, especially if its about you, be the better person and walk away instead of the guy who just pours gasoline on the fire. This game requires a lot of time to play, and time is a serious commodity. People are bound to get mad from time to time, and I think we can all forgive that if we are at all serious about it. But the guy who makes time to play poke the bear and keeps that fire blazing beyond the initial spark? Yeah, that's the guy who's really toxic. Just food for thought.

[Seven Sons of Sin]

I was in the Guldorand settlement server years back. I was solicited to join.

There was a lot of questionable behaviour and communication. Some of it was great - some of it was very useful to "meta" into innocent guard patrols, etc.

There were some personalities that really, really loved to skirt the line of acceptable behaviour. More than one occasion I had a really bad taste in my mouth. More than one occasion where I called out the communication/conversation as being rule breaching metagaming.

Are they even policed by DMs?

If this was just a taste of what settlement discords are like, they should all burn.

edit: shout out to woodbreeze who probably should be more famous for her infamy of her betrayal/deception, both IC and through the discord settlement server. went the extra mile. now that's some great meta-roleplay right there.

[DangerDolphin]

The problem with anyone treating a faction as a friend group is that, unlike in say a WoW guild, Arelith has the additional layer of in character issues, whereby your character may be a spy, or a religious fanatic, or have some other flaw that sets them against the group working together 100% of the time.

Although you would hope that most friend groups will be mature enough to handle the above and still be friends once it happens, the reality is more that OOC peer pressure in these discords can strongly dissuade anyone from acting out of line. As IC is discussed out of character, and even more if the dreaded voice chat makes an appearance, the lines between them begin to blur.

Worse still, the OOC friend group is in danger of becoming a clique and discouraged from recruiting IC, or if they do, the IC only members will only form an outer circle around the tight knit inner one.

Then reaching the final level of problematic, you have factions where people run multiple characters inside of it, and all have a genetic memory supplied by the OOC discord.

Though there is certainly some justification for faction/settlement discords in that they can be useful in coordinating timezones for IC secret events and complexities like trading prices (The in game note system doesn't really have anything on googlesheets, and I see the latter used a lot), it's a very slippery slope.

[Curve]

Toxicity is only part of the problem with these discord groups between friend groups. Another is that they preclude betrayal and other forms of organic roleplay including character mistakes and misinterpretations. They allow a clarity of roleplay and single minded purpose that I find unrealistic and boring. It is good to betray your faction or settlement sometimes, but it is never good to betray your friends. These things are conflated in such groups and that is bad.

[Duchess Says]

I wish people would actually use -factions. I've tried to arrange meetings or ask questions of groups in that system and it seems most queries are ignored. I really don’t believe most players know or care it exists.

If you have a technical issue or bug in game that needs solving I have found Discord gets you a quick answer from the right people. Forum posts take days to get answers, DMs often never respond, tech or gameplay questions often get meandering “I dunno” or incorrect answers from other players. I do understand a bias against Discord on the forum but guess what— most players are on Discord and don’t lurk on the forum all day. The forum community is smaller than the Discord community so I wouldn’t take complaints here as a sign the entire playerbase wants it gone.

IG message boards are good to declare a meeting, not good at all to work out a time. “Um, I have the kids on Saturday but I have Tuesday off” level of communication doesn’t trickle down IG. Even issues like making mistakes with time zones is corrected by using Chronus which has meant fewer meetings being started an hour before the time they stated on message boards (Europeans often seem to mess up London time vs GMT)

The Official Discord is a great tool. I'm not in too many private channels but they all seem so tame and respectful I don't understand where this is even coming from (well, I do and totally believe there are bad actors out there, but I don't play with those people so don't see it). But most of all I really don't believe there is a better way to herd cats and set a time to meet IG, or a better way to get questions answered when you need them answered than Discord so I wish we could not make this a black and white issue. I'd be fine with requesting private channels be closed and communication happen monitored on the official but the server would be worse off if the official ceased to be.

[Zavandar]

I don't think anyone is advocating for closing down the official

[Royal Blood]

I think the expectation to dismiss Discord is kind of a useless fight. People will always flock to that stuff whether it's Discord or not. If the 'main' private Discords shut down new ones would be opened up. I'm not even on the 'official' discord either as I've heard that too can be toxic and annoying.

Even when I insisted on NOT using Discord FOR ANYTHING other people took it upon themselves to 'speak on my behalf' and put words in my mouth for me. So I've found it MUCH MORE valuable to be available OOC so you are not misrepresented.

The only thing that would impact the effect of discord as a larger portion of the community deciding to be nice and not use Discord in ways that hurts the IC atmosphere. Like 99% of Arelith's 'problems' there's not a good mechanical way to fix it. It relies on the integrity of its players.

Discord is only good for sharing doggos in my opinion :3

https://imgur.com/gallery/DjOCCjD

[Aniel]

Settlement discords universally suck. I have never been in one or saw one where it wasn't blatant toxicity on display. They fundamentally serve no purpose other than to conspire for in-game advantages.

There are plenty of ways to spin them as being positive and for the community's benefit, but it's just dress up. These servers are predatory in nature as their prime function is to entrench a clique; whoever owns the discord server, and the friends they choose to moderate it.

"Come on Aniel, you're not being very charitable. We just want to talk with our friends that we play the game with or about other silly things! We just want to organize our settlement a little more."

All of those things can be done in-game or via discord private messages. There's no sense in having in some cases hundreds of people in a discord server. The way this can impact player perception is incredibly harmful. Not to mention the modus operandi is private channels everywhere for the actual metagaming or shit-talking.

"But Aniel, how can our guard function if we don't have a discord text channel that only our guard can see?"

You could use message boards! Things that can be interacted with in-game. Things that actually encourage intrigue instead of ironclad discord meetings. Why not have characters talk out what to do instead of arranging a strategy beforehand? It's a roleplay server where presumably we should be encouraging tension and intrigue. If it must be private for ANY reason, then it shouldn't exist and should only be in-game.



tl;dr settlement discords suck

[garrbear758]

Aniel (as usual) said what I wanted to but better.

[Party in the forest at midnight]

I dislike how private discords are used to advertise for public/settlement events, with no notice of them anywhere in game. This isn't a snipe at any one specific discord group either- I've seen several different groups do it. Or you have to join a discord to learn when the event is, the IG poster advertising it doesn't say when it is.

I challenge people to use the main server more. Talk about things going on. Post screenshots of things you're doing. Have a faction? Show off the cool things you do. Think the new city should have more people doing stuff? Take screenshots of things and show the cool things going on.

[Royal Blood]

Settlement discords universally suck. I have never been in one or saw one where it wasn't blatant toxicity on display. They fundamentally serve no purpose other than to conspire for in-game advantages.

There are plenty of ways to spin them as being positive and for the community's benefit, but it's just dress up. These servers are predatory in nature as their prime function is to entrench a clique; whoever owns the discord server, and the friends they choose to moderate it.

"Come on Aniel, you're not being very charitable. We just want to talk with our friends that we play the game with or about other silly things! We just want to organize our settlement a little more."

All of those things can be done in-game or via discord private messages. There's no sense in having in some cases hundreds of people in a discord server. The way this can impact player perception is incredibly harmful. Not to mention the modus operandi is private channels everywhere for the actual metagaming or shit-talking.

"But Aniel, how can our guard function if we don't have a discord text channel that only our guard can see?"

You could use message boards! Things that can be interacted with in-game. Things that actually encourage intrigue instead of ironclad discord meetings. Why not have characters talk out what to do instead of arranging a strategy beforehand? It's a roleplay server where presumably we should be encouraging tension and intrigue. If it must be private for ANY reason, then it shouldn't exist and should only be in-game.



tl;dr settlement discords suck

It is totally plausible to do this without Discord I just wanted to agree. Yeah Discord IS nice but ALWAYS with IC notices. I've also done no Discord and tbf I had much, much higher event participation when I advertised IC heavier rather than just posting an IC notice and sending a msg on Discord.

You miss SO MUCH by just running things through Discord. And you disallow so many people from getting involved.

[Ork]

While discord might not be going anywhere, it doesn't mean we should avoid discussing these hard conversations. Everyone is responsible for themselves, but I hope culturally Arelith aims to reduce and avoid settlement/faction discords. Private friends' discords can be an echo chamber, but I don't see them as innately bad.

What is bad is when collusion towards narrative goals is achieved both overtly or subconsciously. It's boring. It rewards the status quo. It disincentives antagonism.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

Private friends' discords can be an echo chamber, but I don't see them as innately bad.

Weird, I would have thought these to be the worst of the bunch. Not that I would tell anyone not to do it, because who am I or any of us really to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time. I just feel like a group of friends are more likely to take each other at their word when it comes to their side of things, whereas a faction discord is born out of ic (in my experience at least) first and therefore has a wider variety of personality types.

[Ninjimmy]

I mean... I'm in a few faction/settlement discords and all I do in them is sh*tpost and talk to players I like, so I'm not seeing why they need curtailing.

But they do represent Arelith's age old problem of the Prisoners Dilemma.

If both prisoners play along everyone has more fun.
But if you attack first/meta via discord/use an advantage to force a win, then you get to win!

Personally, I think the lack of taking an L is like... 90% of the problems the server seems to have boiled down to a single issue.

[Definately Not A Mimic]

It keeps being repeated that you can just do everything in the official and that is true, sorta. Only want to mention two points:

Trying to talk in the official discord to ask a question can sometimes lead to silence, can sometimes be answered, and it can sometimes be vanished and swallowed into the void of random chatter that is just flowing along about whatever thing someone brought up such as food, games, shows, whatever. If you want a better chance at an answer then asking in a consolidated chat is, sometimes, easier.

The other point, I get that the rules should be the same from official to settlement, but if you have a questions or planning or a reminder that you want to send out, say it is all posted in game, totally on board, but it is something that someone outside the settlement wouldn't know a thing about? That rambled but the point is, there are at times something you wouldn't want to post where person from settlement A can see when you're in settlement C even if it is posted in the game.

I've personally belonged to a few settlement discords, only one have I ever stayed in even while playing somewhere else, and it is heavily monitored by the people who created it (before the official discord existed). It is open to anyone who asks to join, for a link, to dms, and I have not witnessed sh*! posting or meta in this group. It is pretty frustrating listening to people stress and say that /all/ groups do this. They really don't. There are good people about.

edited for language

[Seven Sons of Sin]

1.

... there are at times something you wouldn't want to post where person from settlement A can see when you're in settlement C even if it is posted in the game.

Hey, do you mind providing some examples of what these instances might look like? I'm sure you're thinking of some innocent, benevolent, RP-fostering scenarios?

Because otherwise, I am of the strong belief your post actually frames the precise problem.

2.

You miss SO MUCH by just running things through Discord. And you disallow so many people from getting involved.

I can't believe this even has to be said. Discord is basically becoming roleplay through the forums, which jjjerm was like always 110% against. And now the policy has seemingly laxed, where we have to remind people that it's probably a good idea to actually do stuff in game, and not coordinate over an out-of-game application.

Either the DMs are not being equipped with strong enough support from the devs, or I just don't know. The headache of the modern age?

[chops1916]

Personally, I think the lack of taking an L is like... 90% of the problems the server seems to have boiled down to a single issue.

I agree. Taking losses is character development and let's face it. You really can't lose on Arelith. It's not like anyone can actually kill your character or enslave them etc without it being agreed to beforehand. At worst, you are killed and respawn.

[Definately Not A Mimic]

Off the top of my head the first thing I thought of is a reminder, hey, don't forget meeting at 21:00 to discuss X event about Y.
Well, yes, this is posted in game, say a barracks or district hall or what have you, but side settlements don't need to know about X event or that's when the secret meeting time is. Because, yes, you can not remind people, but you also busy people who don't remember things. Also on that, if you post where anyone from any group sees, what's to stop them then meta gaming such to scry, interrupt, go attack a location that will have minimal people, what have you.

[Ork]

So... the advantage is to avoid another faction from interacting with you. Got it

[Cybren]

except none of this should be applicable to a settlement discord and the fact it is pitched as such is telling.

a settlement is not your private friend group.

You wrote settlement/faction in your original post. Then your newest response switched to just saying settlement. And yes, a faction can be someone's friend group. These are the people you choose to login into the game and spend time with.

And in my first post I also made a concession where faction discords are concerned. I still think they should have a DM presence, though. The problem is people treating settlement discords like private friend discords, which I addressed in my reply to you. You did not distinguish in your post.

Fairly certain the mods on official have repeatedly said they will set up private channels for factions to use, but no one has taken them up on it

[DangerDolphin]

I can't believe this even has to be said. Discord is basically becoming roleplay through the forums, which jjjerm was like always 110% against. And now the policy has seemingly laxed, where we have to remind people that it's probably a good idea to actually do stuff in game, and not coordinate over an out-of-game application.

Either the DMs are not being equipped with strong enough support from the devs, or I just don't know. The headache of the modern age?

Kind of a weird post. I'm not sure who jjjerm is but public forum roleplay for everyone to see would be much better than private discords. Even private forum roleplay would be better as all the DMs could read it.

As to policing private discords, there's ultimately nothing that can be done other than asking them to shut down and ostracising anyone caught using them, which is a top level decision. Even then, it will still happen in small groups with secret aliases, group chats and relayed private messages.

[xanrael]

The problem with anyone treating a faction as a friend group is that, unlike in say a WoW guild, Arelith has the additional layer of in character issues, whereby your character may be a spy, or a religious fanatic, or have some other flaw that sets them against the group working together 100% of the time.

Although you would hope that most friend groups will be mature enough to handle the above and still be friends once it happens, the reality is more that OOC peer pressure in these discords can strongly dissuade anyone from acting out of line. As IC is discussed out of character, and even more if the dreaded voice chat makes an appearance, the lines between them begin to blur.

This has been my issue with private Discords. If there is info there that the participants would be ticked that a lurker/spy gained and used against the group in game, then probably there are some issues with how the Discord is operating.

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

1.

... there are at times something you wouldn't want to post where person from settlement A can see when you're in settlement C even if it is posted in the game.

Hey, do you mind providing some examples of what these instances might look like? I'm sure you're thinking of some innocent, benevolent, RP-fostering scenarios?

I think I get what he is saying. Its one thing to post a poster about an event or something on say the docks of sencliff. Anyone who might want to come mess with that are welcome to do the ig work and come and read it. But you also might not want to advertise that on a discord where the people who might want to come and disrupt said event can just do what they do normally...read discord, and all of a sudden know its a thing. But you also might want to remind your faction full of pot heads, new parents, and otherwise busy people on a private discord over and over again to make sure they remember sunday at 12 or something.

Could be I got what he meant wrong though.