Kaijyuu
Posts: 1047
12/4/2019
|
I use discord but I like to keep my joined server list nice and short. Not gonna join one just for patch notes.
I'm still pining for the golden days of IRC, but alas. Hopefully it or some other decentralized chat program will usurp discord and free us from company controlled platforms.
--
Be of good cheer. Our contacts have assured us that your sins are forgiven.
|
|
|
0
link
|
Siankan
Posts: 1048
12/4/2019
|
silurica wrote:
However, seeing posts like this really disheartens me. I've had a good time discussing the world and lore of Fallen London and roleplaying my characters in Discord, doing so with many people. These posts read like it's impossible to have ~serious~ conversation in Discord, so much that instead they make me wonder, "Have you really given Discord a chance...?"
That is entirely fair. I don't want to paint Discord (or anything else) as the Big Bad Wolf, and I don't mean to suggest that it's impossible to have serious conversations or serious roleplay there. (I know people who've used Discord for full D&D campaigns, which says something itself.)
The problem is not so much with the platform itself; rather, it is that
1) Failbetter's gravitational center is shifting toward Discord and away from the forum, and
2) this change has been mostly unheralded and uncommunicated.
The first is concerning, because Discord is not as conducive for maintaining a sizable body of literature in a navigable form. (Indeed, the commonest complaints I've heard about Discord generally or the FB server specifically is the difficulty of navigating anything.) The second is concerning because it makes those who haven't (for whichever reasons) decided to engage on Discord feel unceremoniously dropped. This feels particularly unfair because 1) the official forum is generally supposed to be, well, official, and 2) forum-goers represent the oldest and most established Fallen London community, with people who have been here longer than my children have been alive.
I think, in the end, communication is really the key, as it always has been. What is the difference between this year's Hallowmas (which had very little in the way of complaint) and the two before (which were marked by noticeable grumbling)? There were many, of course, too many to simplify down to, but one of the biggest was improved communication. We all knew exactly what we needed and what we were supposed to do from the first day, and consequently we skipped over the confession angst that had marked prior Hallowmasses. So here. If Failbetter's plan was always to move Discord to chief place and relegate the forums to an auxiliary role, it were best that we had been told that from day one. That way people, if they chose not to move over to Discord, would at least know what they were rejecting. As is, the general impression was that Discord was the new auxiliary endeavour, and those who didn't want to add another account on another website could expect the forum to continue its traditional role as the chief organ for Failbetter to connect with the community. That this assumption seems to have been proven wrong, without any communication to that effect, sets up the sort of feel-bad bait-and-switch moment one got last year from talking to the mayor and losing Hallowmas progress, but on a much greater scale.
Thus my reason why, whatever I think of Discord or Failbetter's announcement practices, the chief thing I really want is clear communication. You can handle most anything if you know the lay of the land, and little to nothing if you don't.
--
Prof. Sian Kan, at your service.
|
|
|
+2
link
|
Skinnyman
Posts: 2133
12/4/2019
|
phryne wrote:
We open a thread here called "Recently Shared on Discord" or something like that where those fine gentlepersons among you who follow the full gamut of FL-related communication channels (Forum, Reddit, Discord, Twitter, maybe even IRC if that still exists) keep us updated on things we would otherwise miss.
What do you think? Sounds more than deli... great!
Jolanda Swan wrote:
Plus I doubt the organized, easily-available-for-years convos here can be replicated anywhere. I am using guides and playing old ES according to help given in the forums. I feel you here! Even with the limited search engine on the forum, it does provide great knowledge!
From the Court of Cats thread I saw that there's a card to that story and it seems it wasn't well known at all! All of this because the forum's are a great way to archive things and have condensed messages in one post.
--
ESs items and quality requirements sheet. Please check if there are errors or if something is missing
Achievement list if you're feeling bored!
I am accepting Plant battles, Neath's Mysteries card, Starveling Cats and boxed cats.
No suppers, no second chances gain and no need to cure my menaces!
|
|
|
+2
link
|
Skinnyman
Posts: 2133
12/4/2019
|
PSGarak wrote:
- I think it would be better to have fewer official channels rather than more. I feel like the community is currently being fractured between different platforms (forums, reddit, discord), and some of those sub-communities are not large enough to sustain themselves. It also just naturally means that discussions won't have as many participants as they could. (Obviously there's nothing FBG could or should to to prevent unofficial platforms, which reddit might be one.)
- All else being equal, I think that FBG would be doing a better service to its players to use its own platforms (Blog for announcements, forums for discussion) rather than relying on third-party platforms (reddit, discord, twitter, facebook). A third-party platform means that as a player, I have to have a relationship with some other company in order to have a relationship with FBG. I don't always want to do that, and I hear a lot of other players saying they don't want to do that either. It also puts both FBG and players at the mercy of that platforms content and moderation policies, which can also have downsides. (I understand that it is not always equal. E.g. spam goes up on the forums outside of FBG's working hours, and no one's around to deal with it. Managing your own platform is a headache. I'm just trying to tell you, as a player, what the impacts are to me.)
I remember that one of FBG's staff mentioned that the forum is visited by a very small amount of the player base. As annoying as it may be, I look at this as a strategy to gain more visibility and more audience all around. From what I see around, Discord and Reddit are becoming more popular platforms; specially Discord. Mostly because if helps reach a vast number of people and that these platforms are maintained by companies dedicated to developing these products. This means that more functionality is available and a vast number of useful APIs. 
The technical part is lifted from studios/devs/anyone so they can just focus on the community management.
Don't get me wrong, I do love the forums, but as Hannah Flynn mentioned, Jitbit ain't that versatile.
Umpfff, still have some post to read so sorry if I repeat something that was already said. Surface is too demanding!
--
ESs items and quality requirements sheet. Please check if there are errors or if something is missing
Achievement list if you're feeling bored!
I am accepting Plant battles, Neath's Mysteries card, Starveling Cats and boxed cats.
No suppers, no second chances gain and no need to cure my menaces!
|
|
|
0
link
|
Jolanda Swan
Posts: 1789
12/4/2019
|
Imagine buying an old ES and needing some guidance. Or wanting to embark on any grind and needing guidance. Or wondering about the lore and needing pointers. Can you visit Discord without an account, quietly read a guide to get the info and return to the game?
Until now you could visit the forum, even without logging in, and read condensed, well thought-out guides, without the "superfluous" chat that is going on and on in newest platforms. It's like a book, (and this is a bookish game for people who like to read quietly). People often lurk without participating, or read it without logging in. All this is impossible in Discord. The flashiness and speed isn't for everyone - I assume you can do everything you can do here, but you have to be able to tolerate everything else going on, too.
Please note that nobody is saying drop Discord. Obviously, it serves a purpose for the company and lots of people like it. What we are saying is that the forums are equally necessary, and that, unfortunately, doesn't change because FB finds it hard to maintain them.
I wish I had a magic solution to the very understandable and relatable problem of being understaffed. None of our resentment means we don't know realize maintaining an online presence is hard. But I imagine FB wants to know when its oldest customers/playerbase has issues with their decisions, and why.
edited by Jolanda Swan on 12/4/2019
--
Lover of all things beautiful, secret admirer of ugly truths, fond of the Parabola Sun... and always delighted to role play.
http://fallenlondon.com/profile/Jolanda%20Swan
|
|
|
+2
link
|
Hannah Flynn
Administrator
Posts: 491
12/4/2019
|
Jolanda Swan wrote:
I'm sorry but I don't understand. You feel we need a better forum, so until then the old one is more or less abandoned even though the player base uses it?
To be as clear as possible: the point of replacing the forum software will be to make it better and more pleasant to use, to make it easier for people to find what they're looking for, and to explore whether it would be feasible to integrate the forums more closely with FL – for instance, by allowing people to use their FL login. This will be a good change, but it has nothing to do with how frequently we post on the forums.
xKiv wrote:
Oh, is that why the facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/fallenlondon /) has not been updated since ... march?
Facebook used to be a good way for us to communicate with players. Over time, though, Facebook made changes that made it less and less effective. It would hardly share any of our news to our players, even if they'd shown a lot of interest in our posts. The only way to overcome this was to pay them increasingly large sums of money to boost the posts. Since we only have one dedicated comms person and we can't fully cover every possible channel anyway, it no longer made sense for us to maintain the Facebook page.
It's pretty normal to give elevated attention to something while it's being launched, to help get it off the ground. (Like we've done with Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, down the years, or like the in-character Twitter accounts from our early time on Twitter.) The forums are our most established space, and they're still important to us – as evidenced by the fact that we post Exceptional Stories, teasers and seasonal event news here, and that we're planning to spend time improving the software.
edited by h4nchan on 12/4/2019
--
Wields the news canon, aboard the hype train.
|
|
|
+7
link
|
Jolanda Swan
Posts: 1789
12/4/2019
|
This is somehow comforting to hear - and so is the fact that the new small changes were posted here too, today.
I hope that if a new space is found for the forums, the old content will move wholesale there. Again, they are like an encyclopedia, much more precious than the wiki IMHO.
--
Lover of all things beautiful, secret admirer of ugly truths, fond of the Parabola Sun... and always delighted to role play.
http://fallenlondon.com/profile/Jolanda%20Swan
|
|
|
+3
link
|
SéamusFBG
Posts: 2
12/4/2019
|
Hey folks,
For those of you with a favourite login page portrait, it's possible to bookmark it like so:
https://www.fallenlondon.com/login?hero=boatman
You can replace "boatman" with (for the time being) "aunt", "edward", and "ambassador", according to your preferences.
I'll just note that this won't work without the "www" (the redirect to WWW removes the query string so you'll get a random image).
edited by SéamusFBG on 12/4/2019
|
|
|
+5
link
|
Siankan
Posts: 1048
12/4/2019
|
Thank you for that. I think it clears much of the air.
Hannah Flynn wrote:
Facebook used to be a good way for us to communicate with players. Over time, though, Facebook made changes that made it less and less effective. It would hardly share any of our news to our players, even if they'd shown a lot of interest in our posts. The only way to overcome this was to pay them increasingly large sums of money to boost the posts. Since we only have one dedicated comms person and we can't fully cover every possible channel anyway, it no longer made sense for us to maintain the Facebook page.
Heavens, yes! Facebook is slowly grinding itself into useless except as an advertisement platform. Requiescat in sigillis ardere.
--
Prof. Sian Kan, at your service.
|
|
|
0
link
|
Lady Karnstein
Posts: 278
12/5/2019
|
Yes Thanks so much for the feedback!
--
Lady Caroline Karnstein, The Moral Hedonist (Description)
Infamous writer, artist, and courtesan. Unrepentant Invert. Hesperidean.
Paramount Presence, Correspondent, Nocturnal. Poet Laureate of the Neath, Ambassador to Arbor
|
|
|
+1
link
|
Skinnyman
Posts: 2133
12/5/2019
|
SéamusFBG wrote:
I'll just note that this won't work without the "www" (the redirect to WWW removes the query string so you'll get a random image). From Azure IIS to AWS? Azure is getting more and more annoying, more expensive, less documented, slower, but nothing improves. Can't you just ditch it and/or use Cloudflare and/or Forge to handle all these issue?
I find this combo just amazing!
--
ESs items and quality requirements sheet. Please check if there are errors or if something is missing
Achievement list if you're feeling bored!
I am accepting Plant battles, Neath's Mysteries card, Starveling Cats and boxed cats.
No suppers, no second chances gain and no need to cure my menaces!
|
|
|
0
link
|
Tuxi
Posts: 17
12/5/2019
|
I'm definitely looking forwards to new forum software. The main reason I'm not on here much (even as a lurker) is the lack of a functioning unread threads feature – repeatedly going to something saying "hey this is new" and seeing nothing new gets tiring.
(As long as it's not exchanged for something like Discourse. Even the severely lacking Jitbit is better than that.)
--
The Gentle Intermediary
|
|
|
0
link
|