Your thoughts on the discord discussion?
I know a lot if the points I made were already bought up by the official announcement and from other creators statements, but I'm gonna give my insight.
I am a mod in the discord server. I’m disclosing that because 1. Its not a secret and 2. I do have a biased view based on that alone and I will not try and say I am unbiased.
The thing it’s that there’s a lot of discussions inside the “discord discussion” and all of them have to be taken carefully.
So, I will separate the discord discussion in topic.
1.Not being allowed to give negative criticism in the Discord server
This is not true. Both the mod team and the devs are open to criticism. There have channels dedicated to game feedback, game suggestions and discord suggestions.
What the mod team tries to prevent and sometimes it can get out of hand, and if that happens, call us out, we will apologize if we deem fit and we really stepped out of out places. But when people come to the server being rude about their feedback this is not something we allow, our priority is to create a safe space within the fandom and we will not jeopardize that in favor of some people being entitled and rude when sharing these opinions.
If you do have valid negative criticism, that’s not only allowed, but encouraged, as long as it’s constructive. Yes, tell the mod team and the dev team what they did wrong and watch them time and time again try to correct their actions and make your experience as a player more enjoyable.
I take for example the whole “the chapter got delayed” discussion, going simultaneously. As soon as they got criticism, the devs heard the public, Rafael, one of the coders, himself went out of his way to say “Yes, disclosing an specific date without being sure we could deliver at the time was a mistake” And they fixed it. Now in the website you get to see the progress of the chapter and how the production is going instead of only a date that might not be reached.
And actually today both the mod team and (one of the) devs were asking for people opinion about the discord server, and yeah, we got some criticism, which is great to have, so we can do better as a community.
What personally frustates me is that no one actually came and told us how they felt or how to improve the discord, we just get complains thrown at us from the confession blog and I feel like this could have been discussed in a less harsh manner.
2.Celebrity worship culture
I think this one is an exageration. And honestly it doesn’t really make sense. To have a celebrity worship you need to think of that person as unreachable, which is exactly the opposite that DG is trying to do, we have the devs talking directly to us and being approachable.
I think someone have seen us praising the devs for the good job, that they do, and thought it was some kind of worship when actually is something server wise. The uplifting and calling people queens/kings and stanning people is not something done only to the devs, but also to several “normal” server members.
We try to be positive and praise people for the things they do well, no one there is actually perfect and have never made any mistakes on their lives uwu, but they try to make a place that makes people happy.
I think there was only one person complayning about it, but I will say a few things on the matter.
The game is in English, it makes sense the assumption that most people playing it know English (Not all, I know that, I’m part of the Brazilian fandom and a bunch of them don’t know english, I’m working with majorities here). It makes sense to make the official server for a game in English to be in English.
There are a few people in the fandom who know how hard it is to talk in english and being insecure with knowledge with that, and that’s why these people create other servers/groups, this is why we have a lot of facebook groups in the latine fandom, for example. There is a Brazilian, a Polish server and a Spanish made by fans who wanted to give people this space where they could be more comfortable. This might sound mean, but if you want a non english fandom space, you can create it.
Also, as a final argument for the english only is how hard it is to moderate these channels. You need at least one mod that knows each language, and if there’s no mod that knows that language, we can’t create a chat with that language and then we create even more of a difference between “those who have channels for their languages and those who don’t”. And even if the mod team is diverse language wise, having one person to mod an entire chat is hard, specially considering there are 30 other chats you also have to mod.
4.Discord privileges/lack of updates on other social media
Here the lines get a little blurry, because there are some good points and really bad ones.
Until recently Serena was responsible for all social media accounts of the company while she tried to do her job justice as the Vice President of Dulcet Games, while being simultaneously the main writer for Sweet Elite. As many of you know the company is expanding and wants to offer new stories by shining light on new talent. This would require a recrument process in which Serena was took part as well. These task are very time consuming and mentally straining, after all she's a human like you and me as well.
She was candid with us on why the chapter got delayed. She disclosed sensitive information when she had no obligation to do so.
This is also one of the mistakes they recognized and are now working to better themselves. With a new community manager, that we do get to meet more in the discord server, but that has been responsible for the Black Tarot love interests and the live that Andy did to talk about Black Tarot.
Also, there should be an understanding of the difference between social media and the discord server. The discord server is used for more engaged fans to interact with each other and the devs and grow the community. Social media is used to give announcements with updates and get traction. So while what is done in social media can easily be done on discord, having the same environment as the discord outside of discord is nearly impossible.
Now about exclusive content.
This is what I firmly disagree with. First of all, there’s not a significative change on how much you enjoy the game based on the spoilers. You are not loosing any content, you still get the episodes. You just don’t get extra stuff, and that’s fair.
Not only fair, but the team is actually being kind enough to offer this kind of content for free, other companies would make you pay for this kind of content, through patreon, for example.
So here are the devs, in special Serena saying “I don’t really like tumblr and I think we will be more successful on discord to generate engagement with the community” and then she sets advantages that favor the vision she wants for the company. That’s valid, its her content, she can share it however she wants, she could even not share it at all.
On the hand of “the community should choose where the community should be”
Well, do your choice. Me and many other content creators like discord better, we get more feedback and comments besides likes and ngl, it fels nice. Serena didn’t put a gun in our heads and said “only produce to discord’ we did it that ourselves, this is the community deciding where it should be, which depends for each creator.
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