Voice chat has been a rather big part of me when it came to gaming. Sure, playing games alone doesn’t necessarily require it… but a singleplayer game can still be shared with someone else or be played while someone else is also playing it… and multiplayer games are more fun with friends. Voice chat isn’t a requirement for games to be fun… but it adds value to it. And alas, we use programs like Skype, Curse, TeamSpeak3, Discord, and as of late… Guilded.
Yes, Guilded.gg has been a rising star in the gaming community now with features that make it seem like a promising competitor to Discord while other people tend to just shrug it off as a “clone”. Hence, I figured I should maybe share my thoughts on Guilded and how it fairs in the comparison or what I think of it.
Personally, I don’t think that it’s going to be a good competitor and I don’t think that people will switch from Discord to Guilded and completely abandon Discord… but that doesn’t need to be a thing anyways. I remember switching to Curse from Skype since Skype would pose a security risk and since Skype would make my internet so much worse… I remember switching to TeamSpeak because Curse did not have enough users at the time… TeamSpeak servers cost money and Discord is completely free. Eventually, my friends switched to Discord since nobody cared about stuff like “poking” or “whispering” and enjoyed text channels, screen-sharing and the general feel of it more… Also, you didn’t even need to have it installed and could just run it in your browser… in a lot of ways Discord was like Curse. Actually, I remember saying that it’s basically a clone…
With Guilded it’s the same thing really. Just earlier I had a discussion with people about it and about it being a somewhat serious competitor for Discord in some ways… not as in “it’s going to replace Discord” but more in a “Both platforms and voice chat apps, in general, will get more and more innovative about features because of Guilded” way. Competition breeds innovation. Twitch got better while Mixer was a thing. I’m sure there are more and better comparisons out there… but you catch my drift.
Guilded looks similar to Discord, just like how Discord (from what I remember) looked similar to Curse before it got scrapped by Twitch who acquired it eventually. Guilded’s main thing is probably how things are organised. You have different groups and sections. There are categories for things in your server, just like in Discord, but you can re-arrange them and set them up differently, making them less overwhelming. Messages become threads that are easier to see. Lists and events are amazing for streamers and people that have huge communities and want to plan things. There is a calendar that shows all of that information… and you basically don’t need to use any third-party-apps of sorts for that stuff… but you can do that if you want to. There is bot-support, like in Discord. There are voice channels, like in Discord. You can stream, like in Discord.
The main part about Guilded is that it’s very much directed at Guilds’ needs. If you’re in a raid with tons of people, stuff will get very disorganised in your discord call if everyone can speak. On Teamspeak, you can let the shot-callers whisper to certain groups of people. On Guilded, you have a similar thing with sub-groups within the same call and with every call being a thread of calls basically. You can have someone in the top hierarchy call shots for the raids while the groups themselves organise independently. It can work out very efficiently. Lists could be used to create crafting orders.
The calendar system adds a lot of value to the planning side of things. If I want to share announcements on my Discord Server, I’ll tag a certain role and post it somewhere. Pinning the message doesn’t make it more visible or anything like that. It basically gets swept away. Nobody checks the pinned messages in discord or the channel info. It’s hard to use and a bit counter-intuitive. A “pinned message” should always stay on top, like the pinned tweet in my profile on Twitter. Discord’s kind of weird. If I post more updates, announcements, ideas, and so on, I end up flooding the chat and removing the initial message… creating a new thread/channel for different things will make it harder to see. Categories and sub-categories, however, like in Guilded… they make it very easy to organise.
This and the previous screenshot were taken from a Twitch Streamer’s Guilded Server btw. Please check FederalGhosts (Twitch|Twitter) out!
If you want to enter a server, you have to apply. Guilds work similarly. Guilded has a nice application-system (that can be turned off) as well as unban-appeals. I like that idea. I’d like it if Discord had that.
But just because Guilded has some features that I very much like… that doesn’t mean that I’ll switch to Guilded. It’s more about stating that it’s there and that Discord is quite cool but it has fewer features and can sometimes be quite frustrating. I feel like everyone has been using Discord now and even though the shop failed, Discord is continuing to make at least some money. I think the platform could grow more if it took some of the ideas that Guilded implemented and if Discord could actually use those… or just frankly work with Guilded. You can “automagically” import Discord templates, roles, bots, channels, etc. into Guilded, which is super bold and brazen… maybe not even in a good way… but hey, it’s there. Guilded has its market and with so many streamers on Twitch (and other platforms) having Discord servers, I feel like Discord should do more to satisfy the needs of those streamers more.
- Better tools for planning.
- Better tools for organisation.
Guilded has those better tools. Guilded has nice features like comment threads that don’t clog up chat… Guilded also has a social-media-esque activity feed that you share with friends where you post “tweet”-like announcements or screenshots and files with friends of yours. Discord had something similar but it seems to be gone or just very hard to find… I’d like that honestly. Right now I don’t see a point in adding people as friends, really. Apart from privacy settings.
Obviously, Guilded isn’t perfect. It still is lacking in the userbase department and there are issues with its identity and with everything still looking like Discord… but overall, I just hope that Discord takes note and pen to hand and write all of this down to implement it themselves. Having a forum, homepage, calendar, and voice chat in one platform could be amazing for people that need those features (like raid guilds and stuff or Valheim community servers, etc.)… and people that don’t need them could still use discord like normal right now.
I won’t switch to Guilded unless Discord really doesn’t do anything… I may create a server of my own as an addition to the Discord server and see how people in my friend-group/community react to it. Will have to see.
Have you seen Guilded, yet? Have you used it already? What are your thoughts? Let me know!
Cheers!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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