Moving from Discord to BlaB - is it desirable?

[Corlanthis]

You know, you could always try, I don't know, engaging with your community instead of shoving your "My way or the highway" attitude down our throats.

Food for thought.

[Kalamere]

For what it's worth, this is never what I wanted. I've done my best over the years to try and make positive improvements to the site and meet the needs of the community. I never wanted to own it, I just wanted to help. I posed a question to find out what people wanted and what they thought would be best for the future of the site, not to start a coup.

If this is what you want, then I guess I find some people interested in ownership and try to figure it out. I am sorry you took my efforts as a direct affront and move to take control. It was never my intent.

[Natolii]

And it takes this type of divisive "take" on the situation to bring me back to the site.

I left in 2015 due to a bout of Kidney Failure putting me in the hospital. In 2018, I was back in the hospital again with Kidney Failure, this time requiring Dialysis.

But that is neither here nor there.

To see the community divided over a software platform is disheartening. Unfortunately there is not going to be a one size fits all solution to the difference in opinion. However, it is personal perference and not absolutes. If people honestly care about this community, they will (and have in the past) adapt.

To see an administrator take the stance that they need to further divide the community because it has a difference of opinion is a bad position to take. Both sites feed and support each other. Instead in being divise. Use the built in tools to promote each.

I exclusively use Discord because I still play my MMOs and run guild events. The voice and mobile capabilities is what I rely on. You can post and pin announcements directing people to the other platform.

As with real life you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make them drink.

Do not continue with this ill advise stance, Amaltea.

[Katt Batten]

I tried to keep the community together, but apparently this has been impossible since day one. It hurts me to say this, but it appears that the community prefers that the duels to remain on Discord, as well as the other issues of dissatisfaction presented. We will begin the transition of ROH to Kalamere's ownership as soon as a server is available to host it.

There will no longer be a connection between the two sites, and events on RoD will not be advertised on the RDI site.

I wish you all luck.

I have been avoiding putting my two pieces in because I have seen some things lately that makes me shake my head and question things but this.. I think you are going overboard, Amaltea. I am not meaning to offend or am I trying to insult you. This is jumping the gun and you are hurting your community for it.

ROH and RDI have always fluctuated its playerbase. Sometimes they go one way, sometimes they go the other. To me? ROD has been nothing more than ROH and ROH has always had its own events both dueling and otherwise. Use to have nights at the Great Helm for meet and greets and so forth.

Discord offers to duelist that which none of the chats did before - bots. It gives them freedom to duel and not be restricted by having to find a caller, be a caller, etc. We will have more events on Blab, and discord will have its own for their duelist and fun stuff just like ROH did. It wasn't always about duels on ROH either and we still had both...

While I don't really like discord for playing purposes I don't see what the harm it is letting the duelists be there for their duels and why it is utmost important that duels be moved to blab. After all ROH usually had the duels and RDI rarely did. Both had their own events time to time and they weren't always advertised between the two. Would I like to see more players playing on Blab!? Of course. Some ARE waiting for it to be finished. It may be up and functional but there are still bugs and issues to hammer out. Blab! is going to take time to woo people to it. They can say one thing now but who knows once all the kinks are out and its been out for a few months. I mean it is barely out what? Three weeks?

People have gotten comfortable with discord. And that was my starting concern when it all started. I saw this coming a mile away. What I didn't see was your sudden abandonment of your community just because they aren't jumping on the Blab train. It will take time (and events!). Don't be part of the reason why the community separates. Jumping down their throats is no way to build trust and communication in your community.

Kal worked hard on making discord a between while you found a fix for that gawd awful prochat. He poured a lot of work in to it to keep your community base from falling apart. He has looked to assist you from day one and when I see something like "Kalamere hasn't even bothered to look at the code to try to bring the tools to Blab." I think you seem to forget that he is helping you out of kindness and want to help the community. Not because he is getting anything out of it. He doesn't have to do anything but chooses to because he wants to help and I find that comment very ill mannered.

We, as a community, asked for the admin to be more transparent. To write where everyone can read. That doesn't mean just on Facebook. Just on RDI. Just on DM. Just on ROH. It means to all of your community - all three of them (and I do pretty much consider ROH = ROD). We want to help our community stay together so please..I am asking...don't drive the wedge deeper because you are doing more harm than good and likely to lose all your player base.

My two cents. Take it as you will.

[Candy Hart]

Old player, sort of returning. I have to admit, I pretty much don't check the forums unless directed. I have semi-returned to play (pretty much on Discord, but I've popped into RDI a couple of times too) because I was using Discord for another game and reconnected with the RP community.

That all shared, part of the reason why I don't check the forums is because when I want to read old posts the errors that occurred due to some change are such a (explicative) eyesore.

I asked in a few places if this was something that was going to be addressed and the general response was it wasn't a priority.

I also loathed the Prochat that replaced the Flash chat. It lost a lot of the effectiveness that flash chat had. I just looked at this new chat thing and... yeah. Not really inviting and I probably wouldn't use it unless asked by someone else to play there.

If the issue is people not coming to the site, why not make a category on the discord servers with only the links for the forum sites. I did think in a server I owned to post rules and no one else could post there and everything fit in a single screen.

What I don't like is this "If you're not doing it our way then we're not doing it." It's slamming a door in the face of part of your community that from what I can see has felt a lack of consideration and support.

I was a leader in a game of people and one of our top qualities was loyalty. But I felt that loyalty runs both ways, leadership is loyal to its people and the people are loyal to leadership.

My random 2 cents.

[Rix Favre]

I've been around for about 24 years, just in case that will give any weight to me speaking up.

But this is one of the worst decisions I've ever seen, and seems to have been made by an emotional reaction instead of actually listening to the community's feedback. This is definitely not what is best for either the RDI or ROH community, and it's cutting off your nose to spite your face. And in the end, my guess is this is actually going to hurt the RDI more.

The ROH chat has existed alongside the RDI chat, so why can't Discord exist alongside Blab? Especially when Discord allows so much more to be done for the duels? I don't expect this question to be answered, and Collie had already brought this point up, but it's just highlighting how terrible this decision is.

Just a note, it's funny to me to see how quickly the dueling rooms were removed from the Blab chat. But that's just another thing that leads me to believe this is a completely emotional reaction instead of one that was done rationally by listening to the people that it impacted most.

[Roni]

Honestly, I just found and caught up with this thread tonight. (Life's been busy, so whee.) Personally, I like using both discord and the blab chat. Blab is manageable and works, so I'm happy. (i'm not terrible picky about the pms)

BUT.

I'm gunna say this straight up. Reading all of this in one go has left me with clear sight of Amal not really wanting to bend, or come to ANY kind of compromise.

There are multiple people that stated that they had no issue with using Discord for dueling, and Blab for general Rp....


And your response is to just say screw EVERYTHING to do with RoH, and discord, and NOTHING is tied together any more? After droning on and on about the community being divided and not liking it.... you present us with an okay solution.... then further DIVIDE the community by making an express site announcement on RDI that the RoH was no longer associated with the RDI site....

A lot of us were willing to go back and forth between both, and use discord for duels. But because that was not the answer you were looking for, you decided to further drive the divide harder, and completely cast out the people who will not conform to what *you* want.

I've been part of the RDI community since 2009, so I really haven't been here as long as everyone else has. This is the very first time since I have joined, that I've questioned if I really have much of any drive to stay around on the RDI side of things.

Not if someone who doesn't listen to people is running things... and if I do, it's only to keep in touch with others I would not have contact with otherwise.

I love RDI and the community, but I don't like the complete lack of utter respect and disregard for others and their opinions from the person that's supposed to be in charge.

It does a really good job at making me think/feel that my opinion, doesn't really matter much, even if I DO share it. Is that really what you want in your community?

[Cianan]

I'm going to chime in along with the others.

I think separating the two like that, and RDI having nothing to do with ROH is just plain nutty.

I could post a whole thing about it, but others here have said it better than I have. I'm really baffled by the decision making that lead to this.

[Rakeesh]

This separation seems symbolic to me, which is fine. We live in an age where we are all instantly connected via numerous tools, if all we do is try. A player reached out to me on Facebook to alert me to this thread and situation -- they could have done so on Twitter or Discord or email or any other number of platforms.

If RDI folks want to play their characters on ROH, they can -- that's how personal IP works. And if they are interested in what is happening on ROH, they can inform themselves through the tools ROH presents to them (website, social media, etc). But RDI is not the answer to ROH's community problems. And neither is Discord a silver bullet for gaining new players by itself, though I do believe it is the most immediate, most correct direction to move towards.

A long time ago, we locked ourselves in our cellar and became increasingly insular as a community -- not just in sticking harder than necessary to our traditions, but also in how we experienced the RPing world outside of ROH. We gave into "Us vs Them" mentalities, tribalism, inter-community drama/politics, and we never really made the effort to re-brand ROH in such a way that it could appeal to the wider world of writer/roleplayers.

That world is out there. The people who would love to play ROH exist. There are huge RP communities on Twitter, on Discord, playing D&D or free-form roleplay by text or voice or video. Kids are getting into it with the increasing popularity of RP. And I fully believe that the ROH roleplayers' MANY years of experience (including those who have stepped away) ... well, it makes ROH uniquely qualified to be a leader in text-based roleplay and community world-building.

There's probably a good deal of pruning and fine-tuning to do, and the window of opportunity to benefit from this new wave of RP popularity is likely already starting to close, but there IS a window. And as much as I love the ROH website, it's just not designed to be in-line with the future of the internet and RP. And not just the website, but the rules, the world, the DECADES of complex stories -- there's no easy way to digest them and come on board for the young, mobile-based, modern roleplayer.

I could talk about this sorta thing forever, but I'm already going off on a huge tangent. I support change, including the changes presented in this thread by both Kalamere (double-down on Discord) and Amaltea (changing of leadership, or else letting the community's overwhelming support for Discord to be met). Intelligent, sustainable, critically considered change is necessary if ROH wants to become more than a small club of (mostly) friends hanging out and roleplaying together. I'll continue to keep my eye on what is happening -- but I can always be reached by other means, because the internet is large and full of platforms.

Thank you, Amaltea, for your many years of steering the ship and making challenging decisions that affected a very opinionated and often divided community. Thank you Kalamere for your many years of hard work at trying to keep the community together and for being a good human being.

[Sira]

deleted

[Ebon Ilnaren]

Wow. *checks date of OP, then today's date*



I really don't have anything to say here that hasn't been said already.

I've never had an issue with pure RP on Discord, but I do feel that BlaB is a superior platform for that purpose. Conversely, I agree with many others that Discord is a superb tool for dueling, given the automation factor and (a minor point, perhaps) the fact that you can have the actual duel running in one channel while the RP is happening in another, if you want, as I believe was done during the Orktoberfest dueling event. I don't know why that appeals to me, but it does.

It is possible to coordinate RP events between the two chats, as Mallory and I can both attest from our experience with the recent gubernatorial debate. That went rather well, IMO.

As for disallowing cross-promotion? I'm sorry, but that's just plain dumb.

[Arthour]

In my learned opinion, although I'm sure it doesn't matter much at this point, I don't think seperating the two sites is in anyway a good idea and I hope cooler heads will find a way of reversing this.

The forum itself serves an important role, past any mere chatprogram in that it provides a sense of stability and a solid foundation. People can post things here that *stay* here, letting you create a wolrd that you play in discord.
Aside from that, you still have to register on RoH to use all of RoD, so people still get brought over here. That on it's own can facilitate more people going to RDI. Certainly it isn't a gurantee, but then I didn't join RoH because RDI advertised it massively so I guess I don't see the difference.

It is my understanding that there are new people coming into RoD, genuine, new people not just old people with a new name. I dont see RoH losing the forums in the future becasue there's just too damn much world building on here for anyone to *want* to give up. Which would explain why Kal is looking to migrate the forums once the site is handed over to him, not kill it off.


I'd also like to say one more thing. Sira;

However, what I have been seeing over the past few weeks has been something that has made me feel like this split was coming. More and more, the divide between RDI and ROH has expanded--because of Discord. And I do not see this as a bad thing.

I whole hartedly disagree. There has always been a divide between RoH and RDI, at the very least while I've been around there has. At their core, the two sites are different, I don't know if they always have been but I've always felt there was something different here, WELL before Discord.

So taking this into consideration, after reading the responses before AND after Amal's announcement, doesn't it make sense that a true split happens

It has further been my experience that the feeling on discord is to bring the communities together, Not a wish to split. I feel like you're misrepresenting the opinions shared here with this statment. I don't think anyone here is advocating a split, they just want a chat that'll work. Kal hasn't said he won't look at Blab, he said he would and he was going to, for all we know he might actually end up making blab work better on RoH than even the flash chat system did. Who knows? We might never know now.

I wanted to see more cross-promotion, more connection, more overlap, and yet there was push back to that.

Again, I disagree here, in my experience the conversation was a want to bring the two communities closer together. This split goes against everything the players want. I seriously doubt this statment, I don't recall seeing anyone object to more cross over with RDI.


TL/DR;
As I said, I think this split is a mistake, I don't think it represents what the community wants or needs, and I hope it won't carry on like this. Then again, I'm not big on the duels so maybe my thoughts don't really matter at the end of the day.

[Goldglo]

Then again, I'm not big on the duels so maybe my thoughts don't really matter at the end of the day.

Everyone's opinion matters. We're all players. Whether you enjoy dueling/want to duel or whether you don't has no bearing on whether your thoughts matter. I appreciate your taking the time to log in and post (same goes for everyone else in this thread).

--Matt

[Reiko Souma]

First, I want to make clear that I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for someone (who will remain anonymous out of respect for them) alerting me on Facebook that this had even happened.

Before I continue with my overall opinions - and beware, some of you, as there's going to be a little bit of swearing involved - I would also like to thank Kal and Amal for all of their hard work to this point. Unless we're experts, we couldn't even begin to grasp how difficult it is for code to be written and run successfully. Being a computer programming major now, I'm about to start learning this next year.

That said, I really have to ask this: What. The. Fuck?

You have your crowd that likes Discord, and you have your crowd that doesn't like Discord. I'm part of the latter in that I don't like it because of not only some of the limitations, such as font colours to attempt alleviating or preventing confusion about who's posting what - I absolutely can't stand the number of people I have met who are obnoxious about trying to push others into using Discord. Thankfully, I haven't been around for any of you to try "recommending" it to me, or even "pushing" me into using it, and please don't even think about starting now. I have neither the time, nor the patience, for it.

In any case, I don't believe I have seen anyone comment with the reminder that, like everything else in life, Discord is nothing more than a temporary fad that people consider "cool." Like MySpace, AOL (rest in power), and pretty soon Facebook in the next couple of years or so, Discord will also eventually begin to die out. Then a group of people will find another temporary fad to consider "cool," migrate over there, and the same responses from people on all sides will ensue. It will get ugly. It's inevitable. Not everybody likes change when they don't benefit, and this "us versus them" in the form of Blab versus RoD is of no exception. It's part of life.

Whilst I'm saddened by Amal cutting ties with RoD, I also have to ask, "What the ever-living Hell?" From telling people that it's time for them to come home to basically telling the same people that you're cutting ties with them (my understanding of what I just finished reading on multiple threads, including this one), would you like to know how I read that? Amaltea, with the amount of respect I've had towards you from years ago to this very moment, I read your comment about cutting ties as defeat - you're giving up without entertaining more options that are readily available to you. People want to duel on Discord? Let them. I don't like it anymore than you and others do, but have you exhausted every possible option of finding middle ground - or some form of a halfway point - with the community that you've basically alienated now?

From what I'm reading, you've not done this. If you have, and I certainly want to see some kind of absolutely solid evidence from you and others that every attempt of both sides meeting halfway in order to keep some kind of unity in your community have been exhausted to no avail, then I'll stand corrected with an apology. Until then, yesterday could very easily be considered the "Fuck Off Day," and that's absolutely nothing to be proud of when it comes to the business side of things.

Edit: The apostrophes and quotation marks have been fixed. My post should be easier to read now.

[Zack Alcar]

Haven't been big on the duels for a few years now, but either way. I see this as a massive mistake to forcefully split RoD/RoH and RDI/DM. While I did make posts on Facebook on letting people know about Blab being tested, as well as it being put up as a chat for the RDI side. It was done under the hope of letting people know that don't read the DragonMark forums to know what was going on.

No one asked me to do it. I done it so that everyone in this community would know what was going on with that situation. While I myself do prefer Blab to Discord. My stance on keeping both chats going never changed. I understood that people like Kal and everyone that enjoyed dueling worked hard to keep it going. I see no reason to make them move from Discord to Blab. RoD is RoH to me as far as I am concerned.

This split will probably have no effect on RoD/RoD as from what I have seen. They already have a solid player base and seems to be steady.

RDI/DM/Blab. As of right now, even with it still needing some work and still being very new. This forced and pointless split is harming it but cutting off players that have been loyal for years. Some going back as far as 2005 like myself.

Amaltea. I really do hope that you are reading all these posts, and see that the whole community here doesn't want this split and want both sides to be allowed to work together again. Let RoH keep Discord for dueling. It is working for them. Let RDI/DM keep Blab for role playing there. This will allow both sides to continue to grow together.

From everything I have read here. This is what the community wants. Unity.

Not one for using other peoples quotes that much, but I'll end this with one.

United we stand. Divided we fall.