Reply To: Beasts of War – OnTableTop – Phase III: Time for speculations and conspiracies

[jamescutts 7052xp 3]

Wow, fantastic update @warzan, that’s going to take a bit of reading and time to digest but it certainly sounds like exciting times for you and the team!

Specifically on Discord I strongly think it should stay, though I’d love to see experiments adjusting it. For me its where I feel most connected to the fellow CoGs and especially to the OTT team, its a group chat platform and it does something the rest of the site doesn’t I can pop in and have adhoc discussion, start a watch party, post random silly gifs etc.

I think it unfairly gets stick from some principally forum users who see it as the thing that “killed” the forums, it isn’t, its a different tool doing a different job, its also suffering from being much quieter than usual, while there’s around 80ish online members (this means they are users who have join the discord but may not be in it, they may for example be on another server) only about 10-20 are regularly contributing and some days a low as single digits.

I think the main thing for me is its a universal platform, nearly every company and even youtuber now has one, im already on there, i just toggle to the ott server and can then discuss in this community. I actually swing the other way and think it should be more utilised it can grab the younger audience pull them in and snag them. Promote it on the weekender youtube vids in the description, get people into the community and then convert them into members by letting them see the great wide content by also promoting that in discord with it linking back into the website.

Its also great for community stuff the website just cant do, John’s impromptu gundam building streams are great, and i love a good watch party with Gerry.

I do get some of its issues though, it can be a bit clique, though in fairness so can the the forums and the site and it can be hard to jump into and start as a lot of chatter is in #cog-sancturary.

There are improvements and ideas i think could be made to it,

• remove some of the redundant things like boredom feeds
• kill off things like trash-talk lets ditch the politics and keep it hobby focused.
• review the channels, looking at what other discords do, theres a lot more focus on channels for specific games or genres for example
• add in feeds from the main website, have a updates/news channel that gets posts automatedly published when OTT has new articles so people can go check them out, make it read only to encourage this. In a similar vein, it would be awesome to have the same for project updates so i can see them and again go check them out on the site.

I’ll be honest, if discord was to go or significantly change e.g. to voice only I’d probably become far less involved, OTT would just be a website i check news on and occasionally comment on things. For me Discord is a vital bit of OTT, its open there all day waiting for a notification, the website isnt, i check it 2-3 times a day.