Discord as a Tool for Community-Led Design
With the growing trend of gaming communities becoming increasingly involved in the development process, it is important for teams to evaluate the best tools for reaching out and communicating with their audience. Personally, I like using Discord.
For those out of the loop, Discord is a multi-platform free voice and chat app that has become increasingly popular over the recent years, bragging a highly impressive user base of 130 million registered users, with 19 million of those being DAU (daily active users) (May 2018). Communicating using a free, user-friendly, and highly interactive live platform such as Discord makes it much easier for developers to engage, support, and become a part of their game's community in an approachable and humanizing manner.
Within this post, I will discuss what I've found to be the best way we can use Discord to gather community feedback before translating that feedback into workable game designs, in addition to discussing the positives and negatives of doing so. Of course, player feedback isn’t the be-all and end-all of community-led development, and each idea should be analyzed and assessed before being invested in, as although intentions may be good, sometimes ideas do not work for the betterment of your game.
So why should we, as developers, listen to the community? Isn’t a development team’s vision of a game enough? Well, pull up your chair, get comfy and grab a cup of tea, let’s have a chat about how using social game design can have a great impact on your game!
Encouraging Feedback
At my current studio, Gumbug, competition, and community are two of the core design pillars at the forefront of our development process; we consider the two with every design decision we make. As the lead social designer and the community POC (point of contact) with the development team, it is important for me to encourage our community to feel comfortable socializing, strategizing, and sharing with one another.
There are three core principles that I believe to be the most effective when encouraging the community to express themselves on Discord:
Be receptive and acknowledge all feedback, regardless of whether you agree with it or not.
Be kind, approachable, and, most importantly, present.
Create a space solely for feedback to create a habit for new and existing users.
There are several other methods to efficiently promote community encouragement, including the introduction of an emoji voting system, which encourages community members to add emoji reactions on ideas they’d like to be added to boost their visibility (which is great for less vocal members!)., though I found the former three principles to be the most effective.
When a community is left unnurtured and uninspired, especially on a live chat platform such as Discord, players often use the platform as a way of expression – pushing the boundaries to test the consequences. This becomes especially true in larger communities when the Hawthorne effect (commonly referred to as the observer effect) comes into play. Nurturing and encouraging a positive community of players will yield you and your team the best results when it comes to feedback; take the time to listen and acknowledge what your community is telling you, as their suggestions may solve significant issues within your game.
Listening and acknowledging everyone’s feedback doesn’t mean that every feature idea and re-balance should or has to be implemented – though every idea should be considered. Acknowledgement is the stepping stone to one of the key principles of building a positive community – respect.
Respect is one of the most important fundamentals of any community: respect between players and developers and respect between players. Mutual respect is required for a community to thrive in positivity and create a safe, friendly, and approachable environment for everyone.
Creating a channel solely for game feedback and desired features is an excellent way for new and existing users to know the best location to share their views with the team. Feedback left in general chat or similar is often lost in the masses, resulting in players feeling neglected and ignored; a specified channel allows for players to chat away in the other channels whilst still retaining a single space where they know their views will be heard. Additionally, it limits the channels the development team needs to filter through for feedback, which is always an added bonus!
Aggregation & Consolidation
Once a community is comfortable giving regular feedback, it then becomes time to filter through and aggregate the most relevant and usable designs into actionable game design documentation for the game. The role of your companies designer (or you, if that’s your role!) is to speculate which suggestions are beneficial to not only the players but the game too.
Does this idea suit the game?
Is the feature beneficial, but maybe after some slight changes?
Do we have the resources and the tech to implement this feature? If not, what do we need?
How would we go about implementing this?
These are all examples of questions you should be constantly asking yourself during this process.
Listening to users can be an extremely valuable resource, but developers must also sort through the noise and have the guts to stick to their own vision and not try to satisfy everyone. The vocal community are often the minority; judge patiently and explore the possibilities of the ideas that come from the people who love the game as much as you do.
Begin injecting your community's ideas into the sprint and spreading them evenly like tasty salted butter on your morning toast. There will be times during development when usable community ideas are few and far between, but that doesn’t mean that your community needs to go without. People will often appreciate a steady flow of fun and enticing content rather than a big mashup of their ideas.
One solution to this would be to create a backlog of fleshed-out and documented community ideas for the development team to compile and discuss. Designing with the community in mind should not be a chore or a jar in the development process; instead, it should be positioned seamlessly yet consciously into a workflow.
It is important to note that these ideals and development concepts come from the mindset of working in a small, independent game studio and may not be relevant to that of a larger studio with a bigger and more persistent community. I imagine that in this instance, designers would work in conjunction with not only the producers but social and community management as well to help balance the workload and understand the comm’s persona clearly.
Conclusion
Sometimes, what a community proposes might not be the best solution, but if a player has taken the time to discuss an issue or an idea, solutions should be investigated and designs considered. Development teams can often get wrapped up during a long development process and forget to consolidate with their passive team. Stick true to the team's vision, but consider the bigger picture and the key to your success—your game community.
