First off is a Welcome Page/Channel.
As it currently stands the Discord is not a welcoming or inviting place to new members. There is very little info as to who we are, what rules should be followed in the discord, what all the channels are, what the bots do, what all the groups and titles are. A simple channel that condenses all this information that is updated to stay relevant makes the place a lot less daunting and more inviting and allows users to navigate and find helpful info for the discord without having to ask for it.
This is just a quick example copy and pasting excerpts found around our community but it should look something like this:
Spoiler: show
Almost every professional or structured discord has one of these and as it currently stands all we have is a site links channel which does the opposite of what we want. Instead of welcoming new members and giving them a quick introduction into our discord an how it works it forces them back to our site... with no info about discord and what the channels are. It send them on a U Turn if they just came from the site. That is counterproductive and we need to embrace the fact someone is choosing to join our discord and give them every little bit of help to navigate it.
Second point in the big hot topic of channels. Our old system was to separate Discussions from Video Game Discussions and then to have each video game have it's own channel. What this did was enable small groups or cliches to form within certain games whilst they were popular and had high traffic, and then if they happened to die out you would be left with a dead channel that wouldn't be removed in case activity kicked up again. The changes made were in order to bring about more community interaction between these groups and also to promote further usage of the sight by posting relevant discussions that should be seen in the future and also to tidy up the place and make it easier to navigate.
Unfortunately what actually happened was a kind of unclear mix of the two. Rather than having segregated game channels like before you now have segregated game genre channels, where groups are still talking about certain games, but now no one is sure of which channel it should be in and you are either having crossover discussions about the same thing or in the worst case repeated discussion. Also discussion isn't promoted across the channels but instead users just go to the channel they THINK there game is in and talk.
This is the first big reason this thread was made so people can not only post their opinions but also suggestions, and I stress this. Suggestions about a better alternative.
For me, the goal seems clear, we want more community discussion across the board in channels and less cliches or groups sticking to one channel and not talking to the rest of the community. On top of that we want more use in the forums by posting content that will be relevant for the future or that doesn't get lost in active discussion. For me if you want that to happen you can't have game specific channels. Whether that be by title, genre, platform, whatever. Once you start putting it categories that you can sort games into you are going to have a problem, ESPECIALLY if they are not clearly defined and it depends on opinion, or if they fit into more than one channel, such as genres. So where do you find the common ground? By having channels named after the things all games share in common, because then whenever you want to talk about a specific topic it doesn't matter what game it is because most (if not all) games share that topic.
So my suggestion would be a list of the things games share;
- News/Articles - Discussion about news info on games, or articles such as reviews or hot takes or analysis of video games.
Updates/Patch - The patch bots could post here or you could have a seperate patch channel which can be referenced when discussing game updates.
Party Up - Want to party up? Ping the the usergroup or members you want, use the event commands.
Created Content - Youtube videos, Art, Let's Plays anything that has been made by the community (at large) that we want to share.
Game Clips - We post a lot of Xbox Clips so I figured to not congest channels they could go here then just ping who you want to see.
Marketplace - For all those sales that people find and various other marketplace related info.