Hello everyone,
A lot of you might be wondering how we came to the conclusion to require Discord for the League, starting this season. Here's that story.
Midway through Season 26, we greatly expanded the presence of the League in Discord by giving every division their own dedicated channel for discussing availability and setting a time to play. Since then, even with the growth of the League, over 90% of the players each season joined and participated in scheduling there.
Naturally, we wondered for a while whether we should require a Discord account. We explored this as a moderator team six months ago, when we were first opening signups for Season 29. We voted, but there wasn't a majority interested in adding that requirement at that time.
Gradually, though, the chorus of voices from the players grew. Many people told us that it was much more difficult to schedule with the one player in their division who wasn't on Discord, and they just wished that everyone could be on Discord. Having seen enough examples of those players dropping out, we as a moderator team grew more and more on board with it.
At our last beginning-of-season moderators' meeting, then, we decided to require Discord for all future seasons. Two months later, we're finally here. The cost seems fairly light: Only one player expressed that they would not be able to return because of the Discord requirement, and another requested that Discord not be a requirement but created an account and returned anyways. While we'd love it if every change had zero negative consequences, we think the good outweighs the bad in this case.
In addition to making sure everyone is reachable via Discord, the requirement allows us to migrate more of our materials over there. We have officially retired the Scheduling forum and moved all of the information posted there to Discord.
As you might be wondering, we still require a forum account in addition to a Discord account. That might change, but not for another couple of seasons at least. In the meantime, think of the forum messaging as a backup to Discord messaging -- when someone isn't responding, a simple ping through a forum PM could send them an e-mail and get them back on Discord, where the real-time communication about scheduling can take place.
Finally, we have had quite a bit of moderator turnover this season. Asking for new moderators for the first time in three seasons, we got an overwhelming amount of interest, which we're grateful for. From that interest, we're excited to have GreyEK, IrrationalE, Lemonspawn, and singletee on our team now. They've already started getting involved by onboarding the new players and updating our rules to reflect the Discord requirement.
We needed new moderators to cover the departure of Anders, who is stepping down as a moderator, and myself, as I won't be moderating any individual divisions in the coming season -- I'll just remain on in the role of Administrative/Lead Moderator. Meanwhile, the time has finally come for assemble me, Deadlock39 and drsteelhammer to step down in a more permanent fashion. We wish them all the best and thank them for the hours and days they poured into moderating the League over many seasons.
This leaves us with a fantastic team of 10 moderators: Burning Skull, Gazbag, gloures, GreyEK, IrrationalE, Lemonspawn, Seprix, singletee, tracer, and volfied. A greater number of moderators allows each of them to spend more individualized attention on each of their divisions. I'm excited to see what this next season holds for us.
SamE
Author
Topic: Season 31 - Newsletter: The First Discord-Primary Season (Read 1203 times)