Is Discord Beneficial To The Gaming Community?

Prior to the invention of Discord, many players used Skype to communicate with each other. One of the big problems of Skype was that it could leak IP addresses. If you partied with someone once and had a Skype call with them, they could use DDOS denial of service attacks to take you off line during critical moments later. After Discord was invented and everything was sent through a third-party, it seems like a new era in communication between gaming communities had begun.

Discord became more than a tool to talk to people that you already knew. Discord servers were used to meet new friends and join servers and communities. Discord even expanded beyond gaming as universities are other types of communities have their own Discord servers. Is the Discord as good as it seems?

There are actually many downsides of using Discord. If you are playing a game and part of a guild in that game, you may spend more time on the third-party application discord rather than actually interacting with your guild inside the game. Some gaming developers have set up their support channels through discord rather than through the actual game. Using Discord can also take away from the immersion of a game and it can be difficult to have an authentic role-playing experience.

There are certainly many benefits to using discord. When it was originally created and provided a solution to the problem of being DDOSed. It also has many other convenient benefits. But there are two sides to every coin. Discord servers are also sometimes difficult to find. Even if you find an invite link for the Discord server you want to join, it may be expired already. Discord invites can expire after periods of time depending on how they are set up.

The value of Discord also depends on the type of community you are looking to join. Many mods for certain games such as Grand Theft Auto are only available through joining certain Discord servers. Even once you have joined the server you may have to jump through additional hoops to get the mod that you want. While in the past people used to browse forums and wiki‘s, a lot of that content has been moved to Discord but Discord is not the most convenient for all types of content. It is not indexed by Google and it can be difficult to search unlike traditional websites.

While Discord is no doubt a very successful communication platform, there are many ways that it can be improved. From the social aspect, certain discord communities are also extremely large and sending messages and then seems like you’re just talking to the void if there are already thousands of people in them. This is in contrast of some types of guilds in games where you will have a much more personal feeling if they are smaller and tight knit.

One other benefit of Discord however is that you can use it on your phone very easily. If you are playing on your computer you may not want to have extra applications running, especially if your computer does not have a very strong processor.