The Official PnW Discord - Community Management

[Raphael]

I'm going to keep bashing my head against this wall because I'm bored rn.

I don't think anyone is particularly shocked by the statement: The official discord absolutely sucks. The organization looks like someone who just made a brand new discord and left it for years, there is no personality/fun/roles/emojis/etc other than a bare minimum, the mods have been questionably chosen and even more questionably held accountable for bad calls, in general it sucks.

 

I think this next statement is also not controversial: The forums are dead. Gone are the days of 2015 when people will come post 50 threads a day, argue out to 50 pages of comments, and generally make the community feel alive.

 

If I were a new player, the first place I look to see how a nationsim is doing is its discord and its forums. Based on those two pieces, I'd probably not make a nation in PnW right now. Which I think is sad because I do actually enjoy this game and the community - but we're rapidly devolving into CN with little-to-no administration.

The future of games like these is on platforms like discord, as well as in the game itself with stuff like bulletins. I still think we should keep the forums around, but they will continue to be a dry place bereft of solid content just due to the nature of platforms like discord. People want to jump into the drama rather than wait six days for a reply, it's why we play a political simulator. Right now, the community is heavily decentralized - news servers are the closest thing we have to a gathering place for all players. New players, however, are completely left behind by this. How would you ever know that RON is the spot where chatter happens? You wouldn't without significant effort.

 

So there's my reasoning, here's my suggestion: Completely revamp the Official Discord for Politics and War:

• Go nuts 'hiring' on new volunteer discord mods and ensure they're reputable within the community rather than one-offs or controversial figures. Make sure they're active. Have a senior mod team that is more flexible on activity but harsher on qualifications that review decisions.
• Make it fun and inviting and most importantly - make it a space where both current and new players want to be.
  • Add a section for alliance leaders (which now get a role) to post announcements for their AA.
  • Add a section for In-Character debate
  • Add a section for OOC debate
  • Basically have sections for every major piece of the forums including game discussion, new player help and introductions, and even mod issues like ban appeals or warn appeals.
• Utilize your community which has been B E G G I N G you to use them. Have some people do "radio" shows in the voice channels, have voice channels available for people who want to vibe with a music bot, or play other video games together with randos from the community. PnW's main appeal is the socialness of the playerbase - LEAN INTO THAT.
• Host discord events like credit giveaways or the official awards show (which we did this year, good job)

 

Pls. We can have a cool central location like the forums used to be again, or we can keep using third party discord servers and disconnecting new players from the existing community.

[darkblade]

Some people are gonna think I'm on crack (which may be true) for saying this due to the complexity of it. But moving away from discord news servers and having a news section in the pnw server would be a big play. Obviously the hardest part of having this be successful would be to move audiences from popular news servers to the pnw server. Alex would have to make a deal with the heads of whatever servers he decides on going with on this project since of course they aren't gonna risk what they built on a risky project with no benefit whatsoever. But it's a great way for new players to get involved with what's going on in the game and seeing everything the game has to offer instead of the fraction they usually see. I remember when I first started back in 2020 and it wasn't until 7-9 months after I started playing that I found out about news servers and what the politics in the game were like outside the snippets of sphere politics I saw in my time while in Atlas Technologies. It would also give good examples of hard it is to run an alliance and hopefully discouraging new players from starting a nano alliance when they have no idea of what they are doing. But overall, great post Roberts.

Edited November 7, 2022 by darkblade