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Post by The City [EclipseZwolf] on Feb 15, 2018 8:54:31 GMT -8
[Sorry for lack of formatting. I'll come back later to make things pretty!]
Skype, Discord, or Something Else?
We have been using Skype for the majority of the existence of MMG/DRMMO. Several times along our journey people have proposed we change platforms, specifically to Discord. Each time it was proposed it was by one to three vocal people who wanted us to move and we even had part of a game hosted in Discord. I have rejected the plan to move us to Discord on the basis that we will lose membership in doing so as not everyone wants to move.
I am making this thread to gather opinions on moving to Discord or potentially an entirely different application. As a note, I have NO intention of preventing someone from hosting their seasons on the platform of their choice. Hosts are free to have players play through Discord, Skype, or whatever. The main question will be what platform we have the Off Topic Chat and what type of account I require people on the forum to have. And even if we do move the Off topic, people can still host in Skype if they prefer.
I am open to people who want to make suggestions here as well as those who have solid opinions for or against either platform. Also, this thread is more for personal opinions on each system. I don't need nor want a sales pitch on why Discord is a trillion times better than Skype. Even if Skype is worse in every way, if nobody wants to go through the hassle of a move I don't want to force it.
So let me know how everyone feels about this. If I get significant positive feedback I'll create a Discord server for MMG Off-topic and get a move rolling. I expect that the move would have us running on both systems for a duration as we wait for any people who were potentially away during the move to return and realize what has happened.
As for my stance. I am neutral between Skype and Discord. I have used Skype ALOT for A LONG time and haven't really bothered to use Discord, but then again, MMG is pretty much all I use Skype for nowadays as the other things I used it for have shifted to Skype for Business, a different application even if it shares part of the name. So while I am worried about the change in UI and how to do some of the things I do in Skype currently, as long as I don't have to use both applications constantly I am willing to learn Discord and move over.
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Post by John Dark Souls on Feb 17, 2018 9:55:46 GMT -8
『Back then, yeaaars ago before I even came to mmg, I mostly used ICQ to chat with people. But then I switched to skype which was basically same but better imo. I don't remember why I got to skype, I think it was mostly because of forum I came to. But I'm straying from topic. Basically, I can't think of any reason why to go to ICQ or any other chat platform other than skype or discord atm. So my post would be mostly just discord vs skype. I think I'm gonna start with describing what I experienced from both and what I think are pros and cons for both in regards to mmg and then overall opinion. Probably better to call them what I like and dislike about platforms rather than pros and cons but whatever. As a disclaimer, most of these pros and cons are based on what I think one does better than the other, so in most cases you'll probably see me put pros of one thing as cons to other and format accordingly. And the issues that I experienced with platforms are probably something that only applies to me and it is quite likely you might never experience, though I'm still putting them as cons.』
『Skype Pros:』
『Ease of use - I doubt you can find a chat program easier to use. Its super straightforward, you add friends, you make chat group, you throw friends there, boom, you have yourself a chatroom for season/off-topic.』
『Useful "Recent" Window - After I clicked Recent, I basically almost never went back to contact window, and as I'm sure most of you guys too. You can see groups and people that messaged you in past week neatly shown to you in the order of most recent message to the top along with how many messages there are. As mastermind, this is very useful when responding to PMs during seasons, just one click and you are switched to that person and can respond, and if you left them hanging for action that requires time, their icon still remains in recent to click it again.』
『Good /me Function - Yes, this is a pros for /me. I like to just write me and then have "Mad Sova does this" appear in middle of chat window when sending actions. I use it to distinguish when I am doing an actual action as char or asking mastermind something.』
『No Internet? No Problem! - I don't have any idea how it works, but, even if you don't pay for your internet, or your internet goes down for any mysterious reason, don't worry! Skype will still work and still let you chat with your fellow forum members! I swear, if there is one chat program I know that will work even if an apocalypse of any sorts happens, then its skype. But on the off-chance that your network is SO BAD that even skype doesn't work or you are somewhere without any connection at all, it will turn into time travel machine and send your messages into past as soon as you get internet connection! How cool is that?! Not done yet! And because it stores all the chat logs and stuff locally on your PC, even without internet you can still boot it up, and check the logs for something!』
『Quoting - Some masterminds in fights like to show that they're being fair as mastermind and quote actions people sent them with time stamps and whatnot to show opponent they indeed messaged them that and when. Or maybe you want to show person you already replied to them. Or sometimes you want to grab some messages along with who posted it and when, and just make it nicely formatted like that to see.』
『Split Window Mode - I haven't really used this much while playing or hosting, but sometimes, when you are multi-tasking hard, and want to free space on the screen, or view couple chats at once, you would be able to just click split window mode and separate main skype menu and different chats on different windows. This would allow you to resize them and place wherever you want and then have them all on screen to see and easily switch around.』
『Great New Message Notification System - When you have another window opened in fullscreen or just have skype window covered or whatnot, you still get to know exactly when new message arrives in skype, in how many chats, and if you available on screen pop-out in bottom right corner, you'd even be able to see what message by whom and in what chat in a small non-intrusive easy to see window. But even if you disable that and sounds skype makes with messages it will still work finely』
『Easy Scroll Up - Skype store quite a lot of messages in the log you can scroll up easily, before forcing PC to load more. And both the mouse scroll wheel and the column scroll are very responsive and good to use, which is nice both as player and mastermind since you can scroll up easily to see what you and player/mastermind have been through this day if you forgot for a bit. And if you want to go further than today, you can just select how far you want chat load back and it will load all the messages in for you to then be able to scroll there.』
『This Message Has Been Removed - Haha, I bet you didn't think of this as pros before, did ya? You'll see why at literally the bottom of this list.』
『Skype Cons:』
『Hard to Access - In order to start with the skype, with account creation you might get a bit confused if you accidentally create a skype account using your microsoft windows live account. But even if you don't to get start, you have to first search for one of people here on skype, add them telling who you are, or maybe post message on forum here with your skype account details and have people add you as friend. And only then can you be added to skype off-topic group or any other season groups.』
『No Dark Theme - Because I'm living somewhere in EU, most of the time the other people are active, is when its night here. So its almost always dark outside and in my room. And having super light skype window shining in my eyes all of the time is a paaaaaaaaaain period』
『Clattered Off-topic Group - Skype shows all of the people in the group in a single meh interface on top of the window under the group name saying "# participants" and when you click on that, it shows you all of them in alphabetic order. And that's pretty much it. You cannot sort it to show online people. Or you cannot sort people on groups to see relevant people apart from bunch of those "joined forum and group only to disappear forever" or people who join and chat but not participate in games. From how I think skype works, having more people in group makes it load longer, but then, we can't really remove those people and because we'd have to go through the pain of manually adding them back if they ever decide to come back.』
『Too Many Groups - Every new season, a new group is added, with all active players going off there and then talking about everything included Off-Topic there, because lets be real, it is sort of a pain switching between groups to talk in a less active Off-Topic than more active season chat. So, whenever a new season is made Off-Topic which is a completely separate group now becomes less active until season ends. But that's not all! Now, during season itself, maybe few players decide to group up, new group is created, a fight breaks out, new group is created, a boss fight or lots of people fill a single room and something starts, YET ANOTHER NEW GROUP IS CREATED. And all those groups then clutter the Recent chat window mixed in with normal player chats.』
『Hard on Your PC - I am not exactly sure if I am right, but this is the way I'm pretty sure skype works in, please correct me if wrong. Skype stores all the information on your hdd, and that means that it is always working with your hdd writing some information or the other into files, whenever you scroll up and load chat history, it loads it from your PC, whenever viewing or doing whatever, it is always working with your local files. It does it basically at all times if you have even few active chats. Which causes lots of cpu and hdd usage slowing your PC. When you go into chat with loooots of new messages, it might take more than 5 minutes for skype to load all of that and write it into it's files, it would also do it pretty chaotically so it would quite likely also lag all of other programs on PC.』
『Sometimes Dangerous - This is just an issue I encountered before when my old PC's hdd was already somewhat dying so it might not concern many that much, but, I am pretty sure skype killed my PC a few times too. How did that happen? You see, as I described above, Skype always is storing and writing something into it's database, main.db file which if you look in your appdata/roaming/skype/profile has a decent size. And because it does that, that file is very prone to fragmentation. Dangerously so. Back then, it fragmented onto something ridiculous like 100k fragments and because it was always doing something with it, it caused hdd and PC to explode and overload and kill PC. Only solution to saving PC was obviously deleting the file, which implied losing all data. Because trying to defrag it cause it to explode each time. I do think that it was mostly just because hdd was already dying, since later on it just happened again and PC died again, and I just gave up and got myself a laptop. I am not entirely sure how or why exactly it all happened, but I think it was very specific issue with my hardware setup so it is very unlikely something like that would happen to anyone else or me again, but just some food for thoughts.』
『Lack of Good Announcements - Recently Skype implemented personal mentions in groups, but I still think it just wanted to try to be a discord and failed to properly do it and it doesn't really do that much. So quite often you will see people just skip all messages and then be like "Hey guys, did I miss anything?". This also means that only way to tell if season is on or off atm, is by looking at group title which we change to display which it is. Which brings us to next point.』
『Bad Group Titles - They're just bad, lets admit it. When you look down on your taskbar, what you see is just "Skype(tm) - username", when you open skype window that's what you will also see for it's name, when you look at group name in Recent chats, it will show you what little text fits into that small side window, and then when you open the group, half of the spot where group title should be will be covered by bunch of stupid buttons which half won't even be usable cause number of participants doesn't allow you to use them. Your only way to view full group name would be to resize the window hoping your screen resolution is large enough to fit all of the title in at max width of the window or click on it and get into editing mode and move cursor around. Since we see if season is ongoing or paused by title, that means we have to put that into beginning of group name, which then makes us unable to even see what the group name is most off the time and just see [ONGOING] or [PAUSED] in recent list. Its not hard to guess if since only one season is active at a time but that's still that.』
『Names - I think this is a problem. To see names, you have to have person added, not everyone wants to add every single player. But if you don't you'll just see some skype account names which might be completely different from what person has set as user name at the moment. And since Skype uses your name globally, if you change name to season character, everyone on your friend list in skype will see that new name and might get confused who you are. Since as Eclipse said people might use skype for more than just mmg.』
『Bad Search Function - Search on skype is preeeeeeetty meh. Reasons being stuff listed above. The way skype search works, you write a word, and then skype goes digging into your huge main.db file loading all the chat history and tries finding if there is a word exactly like that in that chat and then throws you at the latest time that keyword pops at, then you could click back and it will load more chat and search more and throw at next latest one, and then it will continue until you find what you are searching for. This will take a loooooooooong time searching and if you have mistakenly written wrong word, you'd just have wasted lots of time and pc resources since skype will pretty much enter half-dead loading state while searching.』
『Hard Going More Advanced - You can do something more complex than chat with bunch of roles and chat commands for read history and whatnot, but you'd have to make specific groups for that and use text commands for that.』
『Bot Support - Tbh, I'm not even sure if you can do bots as complicated and advanced lie in discord. I know you can do them in skype too, but I have no idea how or what they'd be capable of. Maybe I shouldn't have written this as cons but ah well.』
『Bad Interface - *Flashback Start* Suddenly skype freezes, everything dies, then you start hearing the sound, the sound you have set for skype call, it continues on and on and on while skype is unresponsive, then your skype crashes or finally revives, and you see lots of "WHO IS THE PERSON THAT PRESSED CALL BUTTON?!" *flashback end*』
『Don't You Just Want to See Your Face? - Any laptop users with build cam go through this every time they want to change their avatar, skype will turn on your camera on laptop and show you your ugly face so ugly it makes you want to punch mirror each time you see it. EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE FREAKING CAMERA DISABLED IN DEVICE MANGERS#OIE(WG*DUGD*SGYDSY*G*SDIUG』
『Hey, We Are Devs, And We Hate Our Program And Users - Devs are killing skype with each new upgrade making it progressively worse just like how human evolution works.』
『Discord Pros:』
『Super Easy To Access - Just put a link in forum thread, and new player that joined the forum just has to click it once and boom, they are in discord in the MMG server ready to chat with everyone. Its really as easy as just 1 click.』
『Nice Dark Theme - Discord has nice dark theme that's easy on eyes, 'nuff said.』
『ROLES! - You can setup roles on server really easily, and everyone in server will instantly see on an easy to view and understand Members List who is admin or not by color and whatnot, who is mastermind or not, who is player in current season, who is vet player, and who is just staying to chat in off-topic and who is somebody MIA and who is ANYTHING YOU WANT THEM TO BE REALLY. And that's not all, on to next point, and then you'll see where roles really shine.』
『Different Text Channels - Where in skype you created different groups for purposes in single program called skype, here in discord you can create multiple text channels on single MMG server. New season started? Click make new text channel, boom, you have an easily accessible chat for new season, all within what is basically still 1 MMG group. AND, using roles mentioned earlier you can setup permissions for only players of the current season to participate in the chat, you can either set others or/and dead players as unable to post messages in season text channel but still able to observe, or you could just prevent all who aren't live players from accessing it altogether! Same for making groups if people team up or for boss fights. People in server without right permissions won't even be able to see the text channel exists, and by adding people one by one instead of role permissions, you can set them up as unable to view chat history and stuff like that if you want easily and when you remove them from group they won't be able to see if it still exists or if anyone is still in it by looking at roles and stuff like that.』
『Easy on PC - I am honestly unsure how discord works. You can be in TENS of servers with literally HUNDREDS of different people in them, and what will it care? It will still run super smooth, and only load some messages at the end from chat logs stored on servers when you decide to scroll up? It mostly works with internet and servers too, so your hdd will be happy doing only minimal tasks with cached content.』
『Mentions and Pinned Messages - Yeah, these mentions are good stuff. You can mention a person by their discord name, when you write @ and start typing it will open a small search menu from which you select who you want to mention (both discord name and nickname work for search, nickname will be displayed over name) and after you click them it will make the mention. Or you can mention everyone in a certain role, OR, you can literally mention EVERYONE on the server. And if you mention them, they will get big red marker that they were mentioned and be able to see where and jump straight to that message in chat, which works very nicely for announcements even if somebody muted normal messages in chats. You could also pin important messages like announcements and everyone would always be able to see all those pinned messages whenever. Even if you don't make separate text channel for announcements, you can still use all these options.』
『TITLES - When you look down at your taskbar, what you see isn't "Discord(tm) - username", it is "#[insert text channel name] - Discord". Yes, this means, even if you don't have discord window open, you still can see the name of the text channel you were on when you minimized window or switched over to another window. WHICH IN TURN MEANS, since we are judging whether game is on or off by game title, you will always see when its on or off, if you just leave discord on season text channel. And even if you don't with how easy it is to look at all the channel names and all the ways to announce I mentioned above, it won't be trouble to know when game is on or off.』
『Server Nicknames - Yesterday MadSova the normal player, today Mishy the Mascot, tomorrow Lemon the visitor of amusement park. You can change your nickname on the server and everyone on server will see that nickname first but be able to easily see account name by clicking on it, and they'd still be able to tell role from color or whatever. And since nickname is just for the server, you will still be whoever or whatever you are normally or what you set as nickname for other server. What a magic!』
『THE SEARCH IS HERE - Ah, the search function in discord, before, when it didn't exist, an undeniable part of cons, yet now, it is here, and is an amazing pros. Search in discord is wonderful. You write keyword you want to search for and click enter, and it opens you new search window where, IT INSTANTLY LISTS YOU ALL BUT ONLY THE MESSSAGES THAT HAVE THAT KEYWORD. AND WHATS MORE! IF YOU HOVER OVER A MESSAGE IT WILL SHOW YOU MESSAGE BEFORE AND IN FRONT OF IT ALLOWING TO FURTHER SEE CONTEXT AND BE ABLE TO TELL IF THATS WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR. AND THEN, YOU CAN FINALLY CLICK ON ONE YOU WANT AND IT WILL LOAD YOU THAT PART OF CHAT LOG AND THROW YOU THERE. Fast, easy, good, what else do you want?』
『Invasion of Bots - There are soooooooooo many different bots in discord you can setup it could make your head spin. And those bots could literally do anything. From hosting word games and judging, to making people in channel play Town of Salem-like mafia games right within the chat, to throwing random pictures and memes, to playing music. You could do anything with right bots!』
『Custom Emotes - EVERYONE LOVES GOOD EMOTES! SAY YOU DON'T LIKE EMOTES AND I WILL CALL YOU A FILTHY LIAR! Well, that's great, because discord allows you to make your own emotes for channels, we could make random memes from seasons into emotes and use them, or just add whatever cute/cool emotes someone likes and thinks we should add!』
『Animated Profile Pictures? - I know this is a really silly really small pros not everyone would care about. But discord lets you do it, so hey. Oh btw, when you change your picture, discord won't play with your camera on it's own, isn't that nice?』
『Devs Are Trying - There are constantly new updates to discord. When it came out there were quite a few of weird issues or missing features, like the search function I mentioned above. Devs are actually listening to what users want and seem to be working towards adding most desired functions in, improving the platform over time.』
『Discord Cons:』
『Slightly Complicated - When you start it up, you have to setup server, and text channels, and roles and all the settings and its kinda hard to setup. You only really need to do all that once per server and once per channels and probably won't have to touch that much and it gets easier as you get used to it.』
『Switching Between DMs and Servers - Discord is listing all your friends/contacts on separate window from normal servers. In order to normally go to PM or how discord calls it Direct Message, you have to click icon at top left that says Direct Messages and then it will list you direct messages in same Recent Order as skype does normally all the time. But, when somebody messages you, you see their icon pop down on left sidebar bellow the Direct Messages button and show you who messages you with how many messages, and then clicking on them will directly throw you into conversation with them, and after reading the message it will disappear from sidebar. This means that as mastermind during season DMs will randomly appear on sidebar and shift it around all the time. And if you read message from Person A but don't respond or leave them for some time switching over to another one, then unless person A messages you, to get back into conversation with them, you'd have to click on DMs button again and choose them from recent list there. This is a bit more clicking than needed and might be a bit hard dealing with until you get used to it as mastermind during more active season.』
『Horrible /me Function - "Yo? I heard you guys liked to use /me? Well sorry, we're too lazy to do anything about your messages so we'll just make anything you say after /me italic like this" That says it all :/ I just embraced my inner Klea and using // instead of /me in discord.』
『No Internet? No Discord! - Discord windows version is basically a window that shows you browser version inside. You lose internet, you lose full access to discord, you won't see any logs, you won't see any servers, you won't be able to access anything discord at all. Because discord is fully operating using your internet. What's even worse, if you lost connection or just got really bad one for a moment, but sent a message during that moment, discord will just mark it in red and say "NOPE COULDN'T SEND" and then that's it. If you want that message sent, you'd have to right click on it and click Resend. If you don't and couple of seconds passes without you doing anything, that message will be completely erased into oblivion.』
『No Quoting :/ - You just can't copy paste someone's message and expect it to show up in nice cool quote format. What you paste will be exactly what you copied, just person's messages's text and nothing more. You'd have to manually do text formatting to make it any different from normal text you say.』
『You Will See Everything Or See Nothing - Discord will force on to you the minimal amount of stuff it has to show. Like the side bar, channel and then the main channel chat window. There is no way to separate and view only the chat window. And you can't resize any of the elements. There is also minimal size of the window which in my case takes half of my freaking screen's width. So if I want discord to take less space I have to drag it away from screen. It is pretty annoying. I think Mako and Ravan didn't experience this though and could further decrease it so I think its just something to do with resolutions.』
『Message Notifications - I struggled with this for a long while and I still wasn't able to make notifications exactly what I wanted them to be. To me, perfect form of message notifications is skype. You get a new message, icon in taskbar lights in orange and shows in how many chats and stays lit until you open skype window and check those new messages. What my discord did at first, it threw me huge windows 10 notifications at the bottom right corner of the screen for every single message in channels I didn't mute, I have gbf window opened in right side of window so it always prevented me from clicking buttons at bottom and annoyed me. But then when I tried turning that off. It turned all notifications completely and I had no way of knowing when or where somebody posted a new message unless I opened discord and looked at chat manually to check if anybody posted anything there. What fixed that was re-enabling notifications and then going into windows 10 system settings and disabling the notifications popping at the bottom right, now discord icon in taskbar just normally lights up when new message pops and I can go check it. It still won't show you how many different channels or whatnot have messages on taskbar icon but oh well』
『Scrolling is Sometimes Weird - The scrolling of chat log in discord leaves much to be desired. When you scroll up with mouse wheel, everything is fine, it just load more chat log on top and you can scroll down using side scroll bar cursor to right side whenever easily. BUT! When you start using that cursor to scroll up, not only will it throw you wherever the heck it wants in the chat log, it will instantly remove all text bellow, and the amount of speed it scroll you up at is ridiculous and you literally will have no idea where you are even scrolling. To get back to bottom with new messages you'll have to click grey "You're viewing old messages, Click to jump to bottom". And then if new messages pop while you are doing this pop, you'll get blue window of "New messages, click to mark as read" at top, and its easy to confuse it with grey one at bottom and click it and instead mark messages you didn't read as read. Quite often even though new messages are piling up, the chat log will still continue going down even though you haven't read those new messages and it will be quite confusing, since you will have to scroll up but might accidentally launch yourself into chat log oblivion using scroll bar.』
『 - Can you see the title of this cons? I can't either. And so can I see any removed messages on discord. On discord when person deletes their message, it completely is erased from history. Nobody can prove in any way that there was a message like that there at any point. Except maybe screenshots, but those can be photoshopped. I'll leave it up to people to see how this can be bad. You expected me to explain why exactly This Message Has Been Removed is good? Well too bad, think yourself.』
『Conclusion:』
『Well, I think that's pretty much it. To give you overall opinion. I like Skype, because my current internet is sort of unstable and it just nice being able to message people even when my browser isn't working, while my discord would be like "NOPE NOPE NOPE, we discriminate against anyone who isn't one with the web". But on the other side white skype hurts my eyes. And every single update to skype makes it worse. Windows 10 skype is absolute trash, and I know eventually skype will discontinue version I'm currently using and make new one just like how it did with Ravan's older version which forced him to completely leave skype. I really want to like Skype more, but I just can't. Discord isn't perfect program atm, but I can see devs trying as they actually solved couple of other minor issues I had before. And I can actually how the features I mentioned above could help operate MMG more smoothly. And then I really like prospect of having unique emotes. All in all, Discord is basically a platform that allows a lot of freedom, a lot of people like it, so its obviously MUUUUUCH more popular than skype. You can see pretty much everyone and their mums and dads making discord servers for everything everywhere. Discord is a CURRENT BOOM that also has FUTURE. With Skype, I don't see said future.』
『TL;DR』
『At the current point of time, I like skype more, but Discord is improving while skype is getting worse. Discord is also undeniably infinitely more popular than skype and I'm 100% sure there were, are and will be people off-put by skype that would've and will join if we switch main base of operation to discord. So, +1 for moving to discord from me.』
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Post by Arie Camillia on Feb 17, 2018 10:57:01 GMT -8
Haven't been as active here so don't know how much you guys will want my opinion on this but here:
I usually use mobile messaging apps instead of PC versions because I rarely used my computer back then so most of what I'm going to be putting here is just my experience with mobile Skype vs mobile Discord. I'm going to be using PC more since I have an actual functioning laptop but it's definitely much more convenient if I don't have to suffer while on the go.
SKYPE IS ACTUAL TRASH ON MY PHONE AND I HATE IT
It literally doesn't let me read more than one line at a time if I turn it landscape, so I'm pretty much forced to type in the least comfortable way for me and it's much slower for me. The messages it sends has a weird delay which I think everyone has seen here if you've tried windows 10 Skype and that makes a weird delay with how things are sent to people I talk to. A lot of the time when I send a message, it will send a portion except for the last few letters and leave the entire message in the box. So I have to just delete the whole thing and continue writing which is a hassle and it happens way more often than I'd like. I get messages insanely slow compared to the past version of Skype I had on my phone. Also remember when I mentioned that I can't read landscape? If I accidentally orient my phone and cause it to switch, it takes like 3 seconds for everything to reorient to the right position. That means for the screen to fit, for the keyboard to fit, and the keyboard sometimes goes down before coming back up again. Also the messages have to like reorient themselves too. Not to mention sometimes the keyboard with go up and down randomly so I can't type at all for a few seconds. All of this alone would be fine, but it happens so often and all at once that I've just gotten used to how bad the app have become. This was a forced update on me, too so if I want to revert it I have to restore my phone to a past back up. Luckily on PC I could just download a past version of Skype so no problems have arisen there. One last thing: I've always had problems with Skype mobile notifying me, and I don't think this was only me. It's really selective with how it notifies me of a message in that I won't get a notification for hours on end sometimes, so I have to check back a lot to make sure I didn't miss anything. This means potentially I could miss important messages and not know about it.
TL;DR - Skype mobile is really bad and would be a major hassle for me to deal with. In the past I would've done things on the go sometimes because I could just play over my phone albeit slower, but I doubt I can play it as well if I tried over this because of how clunky everything is.
Here are my thoughts on Discord for the limited duration I have used it on mobile and PC:
In the time I used it, it had literally no delay with the things I sent. It was like the old version of Skype. It doesn't orient sideways and I'm honestly willing to give that up for something that can actually send my messages without a weird animation that MICROSOFT WANTS TO SPRINKLE ON TO BE HIP AND COOL WITH THE TIMES. I probably won't be using the call feature on it that much, but from my experience with Discord calls before, IT HAS ****ING PUSH TO TALK which can be a godsend sometimes. Although the catch with this is, for a while Discord's audio kept messing up so the other person wouldn't hear me and vice versa. After redownloading it seemed to fix itself but I'm not sure for the long-term. It's organization doesn't seem that bad to me to be frank. It has different tabs for me to see who's online and stuff which Skype had to implement in a later update, mind you. Yes I could not see people's statuses from my recents tabs for a while until they updated it. On the topic of notifications, Discord actually lets me know if someone messages me, so I don't have to worry about missing anything if I'm checking other stuff on my phone. Anyways..
TL;DR - I have no objections to using Discord because it just seems simpler and isn't as stupidly clunky as mobile Skype. It would definitely make it easier for me if I'm not home to use my computer to do stuff and the game suddenly unpauses. If the majority wants to stay on Skype, it's definitely much more of a hassle, but I can deal with it. I'm leaning Discord here.
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Post by The City [EclipseZwolf] on Feb 19, 2018 12:44:48 GMT -8
So pretty much everyone is either pro discord or neutral.
I IMed a bunch of people who have not posted here and they all gave similar responses. C, though he posted above that he is ok with a move as he is willing suffer through it, does not like Discord.
Not going to close this off quite yet since we haven't heard back from alot of people(though most of the active people here and in chat have replied) but since it appears we will likely be moving to Discord I am going to start asking questions about how we should recreate what we have on Skype over on Discord.
Discord Setup:
So I have been fiddling around in Discord to try and get things sorted out on how we can do things as C's complaint about how crazy the level of sub-boards and chats can become. Especially some of the issues with how Air handled movement in Season The Last where he had us leaving and joining Chat Channels to move between rooms. In my opinion what we do is make this as simple as possible so we don't make this ridiculous. If a host wants to use Discord in ridiculous ways they can make their own Discord server and do it there.
Here is my thought:
1 MMG Discord Server Which Contains
2 Chats
- Current Game
- Off-Topic
Permissions: 4 Ranks
-Administrator(Myself, Sea, Sova, people who help manage things. Have global control over the MMG server)
-Mastermind(The current game's host. Has control over the Current Game Chat)
-Player(Any person who is currently signed up and or playing the Current Season. Can post in the Current Season chat)
-Member(Any person who has joined MMG, but is not playing the current game. Can post in Off topic and view the Current season, but not post in it.)
Notes:
-No Voice Chats. These click to join things are useful if you want to talk to people, which 95% of the people in MMG don't want to do. I would delete all of these as I find it extremely annoying to accidentally click one and having to hunt down a hang up button.
-Direct Messages for Player Actions. Generating chats for individual players is excessive. It will flood things and make it way too confusing in my opinion. Yes we have to switch tabs to get from the Server to direct messages, but its a trade off in going to Discord.
-No Fight Chat. In most cases we shouldn't need a gigantic group fight chat. If people want to have boss fights they can generate their own separate server for it so people can join it and leave after it happens. One and done.
-Potential MiniGame chat: Don't want to flood Discord with these, but potentially we could have a minigame running in Discord and just copy the chat log down into a minigame thread on Proboards when we are done. Kind a minimal thing, but might be a better way to have really silly minigames, say word games or something.
-Viewers. with the chat permissions we can have people who can watch games unfold without directly participating. I think that would be kind of fun since the season chat log is kinda fun to read through.
-Forum Mode. Not sure I NEED to mention this, but I don't intend to start having people HOST everything in Discord like Air tried to do. The Forum will operate unchanged from how it does currently.
Let me know if you guys think something like this would work or if you think this is too complex or too simple. Or if you have ideas on how we should handle the move itself, barring a sudden flood of opinions to stay on skype, so we can start planning.
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