I have a complicated relationship with changing things. I will happily fix, change, and work on all sorts of projects. Unless of course, it directly impacts me, in which case change is the absolute worst thing to ever happen and must be avoided at any cost.
I’m quite definitely not the only one this happens to. Fortunately, my close friends have been known to have good ideas, and very occasionally, I listen and act on them.
Which brings us to recently. It was suggested to me that I was no longer especially comfortable with my Discord server as a stream server. (Some of my mods can be very convincing, at least when they’re right.) I spent some time thinking about it, and yeah, they were right.
Then I actually decided to do something about it. Step 1 is finding the problem, we did that. Next up is finding some of the potential solutions, which we did in a mod-team meeting.
Wait, no. We’re trying to plot a route, but we only have the start. Next up is identifying the destination. Unfortunately, as I said in the meeting, there are two contradictory answers to this.
The first answer is fairly simple. It’s gonna be a community around what I stream. Mostly space games, D&D, charity stuff that can vary a lot more. But it would be primarily around those things.
The second answer was harder, and was also another question. Do I want a Discord stream community at all? I wasn’t sure I actively wanted one. I certainly don’t believe that every streamer has to have one. Maybe it’s just unnecessary for me to have one.
It’s possible that the second is true. But the only way to know for sure is to make a best effort at proving it wrong.
I did consider, just for a fleeting moment, inflicting fire and brimstone on my existing server, and building something new out of it through declared martial law. But seeing as how that’s a stupid-ass idea, I elected to ignore it.
There were a few other options bandied around, but eventually, we incarnated a brand new server, starting from scratch. Building up anything from zero is always tricky, but we decided to take things slowly, keep the number of channels relatively few, rely on the members to say what they wanted to see added.
I did make an interesting decision though. Everyone who joins the server is auto-assigned a role to get pinged when I go live. I’m in a number of servers which like to use @everyone. Some of them a lot. I mute most of them. Now, this is a dedicated stream server, but even so, I want to only be using that tag for major changes or news, and for charity events. This way, everyone gets that live ping, but there’s a handy button specifically to be able to opt out of them later.
So far, things are going well, I’m talking more in there, I can auto-post in-game screenshots straight to Discord. I’m sure we’ll see how it goes as time goes on, but this was the right decision for the time.
I am very bad at change, but I can get there eventually.
Anyway, to get to the most important part of this post, if you want to join my new Discord server, just click this: https://discord.gg/HXs2et32Uz
Would I really go to all the lengths of writing this post just to plug a new server? Yes. Is that actually the point of this post? Not really.