"Official Arelith Discord Server"

[Dr. B]

Why is this necessary? Why not just provide a link to the one that already exists? It doesn't seem to me to be important whether it is "official". What matters is that it is already established and that a bunch of players and active DMs already congregate there. It's also very professionally run and usually civil. This just makes things more confusing and awkwardly spread out.

[ImWithThisGuy]

If i had to venture a guess, it would be because the public Arelith discord is so widely used it has become directly correlated with the server itself, when it is not the case.

When people (especially new people) go to the public discord, they are going to assume all they see there is supported by the Arelith staff; That the behavior found in the discord is acceptable, even the rude comments and use of profanity. That the players who might act out on such a platform are the norm, and there is no issue with doing so..

Having an official Discord channel allows them to point people towards the proper 'Arelith Discord'. It allows them to moderate what behavior is acceptable for public view, and help the community without inhibiting their player's choice to use their server, or another. (Aka, replacing or banning the use of old discord groups.)

[Bunny]

Frankly both are over polluted with tripe already but for official announcements or communications its good to have centralized administration. The play nice theory of collaboration never lasts the tests of time.

Ive also seen others build interfaces between their discord and website for support tracking which would require centralized administration.

[Apothys]

Im really glad that the admin for Arelith decided to make an 'official' Discord.

This other discord is very unfriendly to certain factions within arelith, ive had friends banned for being a player they hate in game. Myself meme bombed for asking that the faction chat for sencliff be more about said faction and less about talking about about more lude things, which precipitated the option of being memebombed until I shut up or complained to that discords admin and then being informed by the same person that they are an admin.

Suffice to say i left after a number of attempts to become part of the group. Of course this was my own personal experience and im sure many gain enjoyment from what it offers, but for me a group dedicated to Arelith on discord with the Dms, admin, etc all present is more my cup of tea.

[Dr. B]

This other discord is very unfriendly to certain factions within arelith, ive had friends banned for being a player they hate in game.

This would be very surprising. I'm left wondering if there is more to these stories than what is told here.

When people (especially new people) go to the public discord, they are going to assume all they see there is supported by the Arelith staff; That the behavior found in the discord is acceptable, even the rude comments and use of profanity.

Expect that on the new Discord as well. Also be aware that moderators often do step in on flame wars on the unofficial Discord. Finally--and this is just an observation--I find that the forums tend to be much more toxic than Arelith 3.0, so I have no reason to think that the tone of the Official Discord will be any better than that of 3.0.

[Apothys]

This other discord is very unfriendly to certain factions within arelith, ive had friends banned for being a player they hate in game.

This would be very surprising. I'm left wondering if there is more to these stories than what is told here.

There well could be. I guess being told this by a friend could taint my view and make me assume its true, but i found it very unlikely, given my own experiences.

[Queen Titania]

Why is this necessary? Why not just provide a link to the one that already exists? It doesn't seem to me to be important whether it is "official". What matters is that it is already established and that a bunch of players and active DMs already congregate there. It's also very professionally run and usually civil. This just makes things more confusing and awkwardly spread out.

The unofficial one isn't the administrations. An actual "official" discord can be run fully by the administration by the criteria they want to set (For example, banned players aren't allowed in the official discord). This allows it to be set in the vision the administration wants, which may not be the precise style of the unofficial one.

I don't think players will have issues shifting over, or even using both if that is their preference, and most of the DM Team is on the official now.

[ImWithThisGuy]

Expect that on the new Discord as well. Also be aware that moderators often do step in on flame wars on the unofficial Discord. Finally--and this is just an observation--I find that the forums tend to be much more toxic than Arelith 3.0, so I have no reason to think that the tone of the Official Discord will be any better than that of 3.0.

I never said the moderation was bad, and I completely agree that the forums tend to be at least equally as toxic, oftentimes more. That said, I have seen direct bullying and insulting on the public discord in the past. Perhaps a larger issue is that profanity is not censored nor restricted (it seems) leaving many obscenities in the open as a breach to what would be Arelith's PG13 rule.

I would like to hope that players would act more responsibly in an 'Official Arelith' Discord, if only due to the pressence of the whole Arelith team while being held under the same rules they would be if they were actually on the servers.

I cant say how much worse it is or would be, but I do feel it is important that the team not be held responsible for troublesome individuals on a channel they neither own nor control. This way, in the Official Discord, they are at least held responsible for what they directly do or do not allow.

[sarithia]

I'm happy theres an official discord, and hope it attempts to nuke some of that toxicity. I've nearly left twice now (Arelith in general) - once this last two weeks - because of the burn out butterfly effect of toxicity that I've read in there. Kudos to the admins of the 'unofficial' for really stepping up these last two weeks and making a huge effort to contain it though that I've noticed. I still however don't feel as comfortable posting in there as I used to.

[Archnon]

I love the new discord to be honest and I am excited about it as a platform for the team to discuss upcoming changes and making announcements.

My only beef is that it is completely and totally overwhelming. Perhaps one of you discord savy youngin's can tell me how to disable certain groups. To be honest, I don't RP with say Myon, and i think seeing the Myon events page will provide ooc knowledge I don't necessarily want. Is there a way to just show particular subheadings?

[Bunny]

At the top there is a drop down for the channel

Mute it

[Anime Sword Fighter]

My only beef is that it is completely and totally overwhelming. Perhaps one of you discord savy youngin's can tell me how to disable certain groups. To be honest, I don't RP with say Myon, and i think seeing the Myon events page will provide ooc knowledge I don't necessarily want. Is there a way to just show particular subheadings?

Uhm if you mean the specific channels you can right click > mute #myon-general (or whatever). But otherwise you could just... not open them..? Maybe I don't understand what you're asking.

Edit: Bunny beat me to it.

[magistrasa]

Official discord is thoroughly organized, and yet has no #art channel. I give it a 2 out of 10.

[Bunny]

Its amazing how easy it is for so few number of people to sour a channel.

[Nitro]

The official discord is very messy right now to be honest. 54 public text channels is waaaaay more than is necessary and just spreads all the discussion out to an unreasonable degree and also adds clutter to scroll through to find new discussions. This could easily be trimmed down by two thirds, or even three fourths and still have all relevant channels.

I'm also confused about some choice of channels for an official discord, namely the event calendar channels. This is something that the administration has again and again adamantly argued against existing on the forum, to keep arelith as much IG and IC as possible. Is this a reversal of that? Are players who don't use discord (which by the numbers are 9/10ths of Areliths playerbase) going to get shafted by more event announcements being made public OOC'ly on the discord rather than ingame? People often say that they'll put them up IC too, but I've witnessed firsthand in several Arelith discord communities where the OOC event calendars overtook almost any ingame advertising for said events.

[Archnon]

Uhm if you mean the specific channels you can right click > mute #myon-general (or whatever). But otherwise you could just... not open them..? Maybe I don't understand what you're asking.

Thank you so much. That was perfect!!! So much neater and more direct!

[RedGiant]

You can laugh at this, but I dont discord.

There is a sense that we have to keep migrating chat platforms when we used to have a perfectly serviceable IRC chat on the web page.

There is a sense that, well, its inevitable. If we were chasing fads we wouldn't be playing a ten...fifteen year old game.

We've seen the era of IRC, Skype, 4chan, 8chan, twitch, discord, whatever.

Most of this is not necessary, and honestly, the best I've seen it work was when we used to have our own...right at the top of the page.

#dis_discord.

(That doesn't actually lead to anything, because I don't do that either.)

[Morgy]

I think it makes sense for the server to have its own official discord that can run alongside the forum.

[Dr. B]

Perhaps the spirit of my original post could be expressed thusly: why not Christen the unofficial Discord the official one?

[Babylon System is the Vampire]

Perhaps the spirit of my original post could be expressed thusly: why not Christen the unofficial Discord the official one?

The only way that would work is if the people who run 3.0 were willing to hand over control to the admin team. Do you see that happening? Arelith needed an official discord run by the admins/dms, as much as I get why some of them were resistant to the idea at first. Its just too big a part of the gaming world now, and its confusing as all get up for new players to read mechanical changes on the forum only to have them portrayed in a negative light in the announcement channel on 3.0. I'm not saying people don't have a right to an opinion or their opinions are always wrong, I'm just saying now its clear that the 3.0 is a player channel and not the official arelith discord. It took me a year to figure that out myself, and I'm pretty observant.

[Dr. B]

Perhaps the spirit of my original post could be expressed thusly: why not Christen the unofficial Discord the official one?

The only way that would work is if the people who run 3.0 were willing to hand over control to the admin team.

I don't agree that this condition is necessary. The admins do not need to control 3.0 for it to be the "official" Arelith Discord. They merely need to endorse it. They can do this very simply, for instance, by saying, "There is an Arelith Discord! Here is the link!" and provide the link to 3.0. The admins can do this while still entrusting the current mods of 3.0 to run it. Since 3.0 has, over the past several years, pretty much become Arelith's de facto Discord, it's not a stretch to just dub it the official Discord for the server.

[Diegovog]

I really like the non-official discord. But I've seen some pretty bad and demeaning comments about people even from the moderators themselves. And when I say demeaning it's the kind of comment that would put the person down for sure if they ever read it. So in that aspect I'm 100% in favor of an official discord.

That doesn't mean I'll stop using the non-official. There's some brilliant things there, especially build-related.

[Queen Titania]

Perhaps the spirit of my original post could be expressed thusly: why not Christen the unofficial Discord the official one?

The only way that would work is if the people who run 3.0 were willing to hand over control to the admin team.

I don't agree that this condition is necessary. The admins do not need to control 3.0 for it to be the "official" Arelith Discord. They merely need to endorse it. They can do this very simply, for instance, by saying, "There is an Arelith Discord! Here is the link!" and provide the link to 3.0. The admins can do this while still entrusting the current mods of 3.0 to run it. Since 3.0 has, over the past several years, pretty much become Arelith's de facto Discord, it's not a stretch to just dub it the official Discord for the server.

That wouldn't really work, and is less professional IMO.

[xanrael]

Makes sense to me if they want to advertise a Discord that it is one run by the admins.

There is no assurance that one run by players will always be managed in good faith or without favoritism. It lets a group of players moderate whose voice is heard and to a small extent the theme of the conversations. I'm not meaning to speak against the current unofficial Discord admins at all, but it could be completely different 2 years from now as people come and go.

As a hypothetical situation, I wouldn't want there to be a case where the DM/admin team is considering banning a player that happens to be a Discord admin or a good friend of one and has to ask privately "do we really want to do this with the expected fallout?"

[malcolm_mountainslayer]

One only needs to review the lore discussion the past two weeks and observe in other chats an highly suggestive 'elf' emoji to understand how the unofficial arelith discord has significantly degenerated. I too have been partially shut down, or rather had the emoji in question, spammed multiple times as a response to my question of "why do we have this".

General chat has multiple times that people there like not have to behave on said discord to profanities to and well over pg 13 jokes.

And it's one thing to drop the occasional F bomb, its another to engage the conversation with "hey everyone, let's take a moment to do nothing but swear, nothing else" *proceeds to drop series of swears* thankfully no one joined in and it was ignored, but many stuff like that occurs throughout the day never being addressed.

Arelith unofficial discord has had a lot of positives though and i actsully thought it was official for a while. And to be honest "not so cool behavior" hasn't been always the same or a super persistent force, but I can see why it is not endorsed.