It has been around a week so I wanna open up the discussion regarding a migration over to Discord again with the new experience in mind
I've rushed over this, but here are my pros and cons;
Accessibility has made this a much better experience
The major benefit personally so far is being able to be more in touch with the community, considering i'm usually only able to be online during "off hours" when using the steam chat, but nearly anytime using discord. There's a lot of users here I struggle to talk to or interact this and the mobile experience and @ mentions has radically improved that. The major criticism here is that its a personal issue and not a justification for every user to move just to suit my personal needs, which is true, but i'm arguing that the platform's accessibility is superior to steam chat's and the benefits of that accessibility in being able to communicate to specific users.
Using a singular chat platform is much more convenient than something with a chatroom component
The chat interface is much better to me
- I feel I can get more information much faster due to the organisation of messages and interface, however having to scroll upwards makes it more difficult when there's a large wall of text, this is a pretty big turn off
- Previews of images and links is a huge fucking bonus to me, I dislike having to open a web browser and patiently wait for an image to download each time someone posts something they need help with when mapping or a meme
- Being able to enter chatrooms and read context makes the flow of conversation much easier than having to hear abridged events
- On a personal note - Going in and out multiple rooms and channels is very fluid, I feel it opens me to more communities than sticking to steam, as there's going to be more and more communities and chatrooms I want to be a part of that use discord, and having each community in one place would be more streamlined to keep track of. Communities are likely to use discord and not steam making it easy to keep it all in one place. However I think its not something that isn't easily manageable (having two chat-rooms programs open) and although a good argument for (as convenience is always good), shouldn't be a major one.
Chat ghosts and disconnects are major benefits
No more chat ghosts is a surprisingly big bonus to no longer have to deal with, as well as looking back at messages if i'd disconnected or reconnected which has always been a prevalent problem. When there's new users who don't get any responses all of a sudden, i'd wager its a pretty large discouragement and difficult to explain.
I actually dislike channels
My opinion though flipped almost entirely on text channels, I actually am unsure if I want them at all, they feel as though they're an inconvenience when used to split up topics, or as a quiet-er area because it makes the conversations more difficult to have. I may want channels if i'm wanting to talk with a few users on certain topics like programming, but that has always existed on steam (private group messaging) and its current application feels like a way to make conversation more difficult and incoherent to keep track of in multiple places under the same roof, its definitely not the major benefit I thought it would be. Maybe scenarios will change opinions.
So the cons? The major question I have is how does this help us as mappers?
This is pretty much the core of my argument against discord. Discord wont make us communicate more to each other, if people are posting memes in one chat room they're going to post memes in discord. If they're going to ignore feedback in one they'll ignore feedback in the other.
But the major one, are we sacrificing game-day/imp quality for community quality, the first being much more important?
Shift+Tab is important for receiving feedback
Shift+Tab is huge for me personally when testing a map, my map gets ran, and the next map is running, I shift+tab into the steam chat and post a message asking questions, with discord i doubt I would get as many responses due to people not wanting to close/open their program constantly. I've struggled so far with this outside of testing, and can feel it becoming an issue in the same manner for testers.
Joining/Leaving is important for imps to be visible and ease of entry
Joining/Leaving games is important, I know that we can easily get links towards major servers in chat, but people will always be more likely to join imps or gamedays if it is considerably easier and feels like a natural flow instead of forceful. Most people are only aware an imp is going on when they enter chat and see 5 big green "In TF2" icons and can check their game info to be of the server and will take their own initiative to carry out those tasks and join, but the initiative may be lost for having to load tf2maps.net or a server browser themselves and check.
In summary really
Discord's major strength is that its superior as a Chatroom, however steam's chatroom's strength lies in its contextual capability in a tf2mapping feedback loop.
The debate is more importantly if Discord will improve the map development process, as I think its role as a superior chat client is certain outside of testing, however its questionable weather it could cause a degrade in feedback quality that outweighs solving these inconveniences. I personally think that discord will make for better maps because it'll improve the quality of conversations about mapping due to the platform's superiority. The quality /during testing/ is a concern that is outweighed by the prior benefits, if it leads to people talking about their maps outside of testing more often as a result, then that'll be fantastic, and filling imps isn't something of a concern these days.
