Significant changes to the Forums and eGO Discord boost player involvement.

[Hero]

Introduction

After a lengthy meeting involving various Members and CMs, we've discussed some ideas which we believe can help create a better gaming environment for all of the eGO community, whether it is for non-members, members, or LE. These suggestions would involve changing the Forums, as well as changing the Discord. Everyone in the meeting would love to continue these discussions within the Discord further, preferably in threads, and we would also like to involve more people, admin or not, to be able to capitalize on as many opinions as possible to be able to effective make changes and take decisions which benefit the most amount of people, with minimal or no negative feedback.


Forum Changes
We would like to see changes made to the forums, in particular with regards to the Home Page, where we believe many issues arrive which can discourage players and members from getting more involved with the community. Currently, opening the home page only brings you to the Breaking News posts, which does not help direct players into getting more involved with the community. We are not saying to remove these posts, but instead move them further down the page.
The ideas we are suggesting are:

• Including the Discord Server in the Home Page to immediately direct new players to the Discord, in order for them to get involved immediately with our community, via a much better communication platform than the forums.​
• Including our Servers in the Home Page, in order to make accessing and finding them much easier for the average player, who would need to go searching for them.​
• Side menu of the Calendar on the Home Page, for making events easier to find for the average player.​
• Get Involved section on the Home Page, to encourage players to discover more from the community, whether it means climbing the ranks, joining a specialty team etc., this would help direct players to find opportunity in the community if they are interested.​

Discord Changes
We would like significant changes to be made to the Discord Server in order to boost the player experience for the average player, as well as improve the experience as an admin or member to be able to contribute their own personal ideas to the Discord if they find an issue arising.
The ideas we are suggesting are:

• Introducing Suggestion Threads specifically in the Admin Channels to allow for admins to speak with each other and Leadership when they want to implement new suggestions and ideas which they believe would be beneficial. (We would like this ASAP)
• Improved information channels in the Discord, most importantly for providing links and IPs to our servers to simplify the process of finding the server IPs and join links when wanting to play on them.
• Adding threads to announcements for people to discuss directly from the announcement message, whether it is congratulating people on a promotion, or talking about server releases, or events etc.
• Admin & Member Round Tables for unfiltered, no authority conversation and discussion for talking about the state of the community, servers, and what suggestions and ideas people can come up with to help improve the gaming environment at eGO.
• Suggestions Channel/Forum on the Discord to allow for non-members and members alike to provide their suggestions on the Discord, rather than on the Forums, where the average player would most likely be looking if they wanted support and to provide their opinions on whatever is going on in the community. Suggestions could be voted on by admins whether they agree or not, I can provide an example of this to any Leadership if they'd like to see my example. (One good example of the Discord Forum is in the ClearRP Discord).
  

Please contact me through Discord, preferably in the Admin Chat, if you'd like to hear more about each suggestion in detail. Please also reply to this suggestion with more suggestions related to these, or if there is anything you believe I missed.
Nappin :]

 

[AndrewW]

Hero,

Thank you for the write-up. I don't want to discourage discussion here, but I do want to keep this suggestion static until we (leadership) has had a chance to discuss it amongst ourselves. To our community members, please refrain from adding additional requests or commenting on this thread. I will lock it if necessary.

Like I said, my goal is not to discourage discussion but to keep things as simple as possible. Admins, if you want to discuss this with other admins please do so in the Discord in the admins channel.

Leadership: I'm planning a meeting with the CMs right now for some aspects, and we'll start making plans to discuss these in the coming days/week.

I also don't want to delay these things but I do want all leadership to have their opinion heard. Thank you, admins, for speaking up and having a great discussion about these things. You are the blood of our community.

~Andrew

 

[redchance]

I don't agree with everything suggested by Hero, but a facelift is absolutely a good idea. Replying just for support of the suggestion.

 

[Ledzo]

Good post

 

[Nappin]

this was a wonderful conversation. thank you to all who attended.

 

[AndrewW]

Forum Changes
We would like to see changes made to the forums, in particular with regards to the Home Page, where we believe many issues arrive which can discourage players and members from getting more involved with the community. Currently, opening the home page only brings you to the Breaking News posts, which does not help direct players into getting more involved with the community. We are not saying to remove these posts, but instead move them further down the page.
The ideas we are suggesting are:

• Including the Discord Server in the Home Page to immediately direct new players to the Discord, in order for them to get involved immediately with our community, via a much better communication platform than the forums.​
• Including our Servers in the Home Page, in order to make accessing and finding them much easier for the average player, who would need to go searching for them.​
• Side menu of the Calendar on the Home Page, for making events easier to find for the average player.​
• Get Involved section on the Home Page, to encourage players to discover more from the community, whether it means climbing the ranks, joining a specialty team etc., this would help direct players to find opportunity in the community if they are interested.​

Regarding all the suggestions posed here, I am actively working with media to get a pleasing design and layout for the home page. I will incorporate all the suggestions listed here.

Introducing Suggestion Threads specifically in the Admin Channels to allow for admins to speak with each other and Leadership when they want to implement new suggestions and ideas which they believe would be beneficial. (We would like this ASAP)

Suggestions Channel/Forum on the Discord to allow for non-members and members alike to provide their suggestions on the Discord, rather than on the Forums, where the average player would most likely be looking if they wanted support and to provide their opinions on whatever is going on in the community. Suggestions could be voted on by admins whether they agree or not, I can provide an example of this to any Leadership if they'd like to see my example. (One good example of the Discord Forum is in the ClearRP Discord).

The main concern with this is that leadership doesn't look at Discord like they do the forums. If legitimately good suggestions are posted in Discord, they will get lost among the other stuff. I consulted GTA leadership about their forum in Discord for suggestions and they are not happy with how it has been working for them. So, at this time a global suggestions section won't be added to Discord. HOWEVER, please continue to discuss as you wish and post summaries of your discussions here so we can collaborate as we are now.

Improved information channels in the Discord, most importantly for providing links and IPs to our servers to simplify the process of finding the server IPs and join links when wanting to play on them.

There is already the status channels for each game that display the IP, name, and other information about our servers. Additionally, after the homepage refresh, we would prefer to just redirect traffic that would otherwise be in Discord to the information on the website.

Adding threads to announcements for people to discuss directly from the announcement message, whether it is congratulating people on a promotion, or talking about server releases, or events etc.

For the promotions portion, this functionality is supposed to exist already in the Discord, but it has come to our attention that it's not. I'm not personally sure why, but it's something the tech team needs to work on. As for announcements, would simply creating a thread on relevant posts in the global announcements channel suffice?

Admin & Member Round Tables for unfiltered, no authority conversation and discussion for talking about the state of the community, servers, and what suggestions and ideas people can come up with to help improve the gaming environment at eGO.

This is welcome to occur. Ideally, leadership would be present simply to moderate the discussion (ensure it's not just smashing leadership for no reason), and to answer questions. It will need to be coordinated with leadership on who will host roundtables in the future. Leadership reading this, if you are interested please reach out to me.

Sorry for the delay in response, I did speak with CMs the same day to get feedback and have since been coordinating to get other steps laid out (as well as getting TF2 ready so that's a big part of it). Please continue to discuss changes you would like to see and we (leadership) will discuss them thoroughly. As I've said several times, you guys are the player base, you know what people want to see, so we rely on your feedback. Please keep the suggestions coming.