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Ask the Devs on Discord!

Herodite

Herodite

Forum mod extraordinaire
Elvenar Team
My Dear Fiends!

Now, first and foremost this is a Discord Exclusive so only those who have joined will be able to participate, HOWEVER there's nothing stopping you from asking someone who is over there to ask something on your behalf! :D ;)

We have some exciting news for you! We are launching a new activity called Ask the Devs!

This is your chance to ask anything you want to know about the game and get answers from the people who make it.

Here's how it works​


From now to November 7, you can post your questions in the following Discord Thread.

On November 7, from 13:00 to 14:00 CET, four of our developers will join the channel and answer some of your questions. You can ask about any aspect of the game, such as features, mechanics, design, lore, etc.

We can't wait to hear from you and share some insights into Elvenar. Is there already a question you like shared by someone else? Add a thumbs up on it and a comment. This will let us know which questions will be the most popular and will help us to prioritize the answers. Don't miss this opportunity to interact with the devs and learn more about the game.

Join us and Ask the Devs!

Kind Regards

Herodite.
 
Silmaril

Silmaril

Community Manager
Elvenar Team
The reasoning behind this was simply down to the waning of the Forums, as over time fewer and fewer players have joined and more and more players simply stopped posting and engaging here. Players have also petitioned hugely to get Elvenar onto Discord as their preferred platform of choice and have refused to join the Forum for a myriad of reasons.

From my side of things, since I landed here in 2019, I have been trying to stop this trend and had changed several things on our server, not least the way the in-game news is used. As this decrease was seen, I made a point to use this fabulous tool to boost participation by advertising some of our more important announcements, competitions and at times some threads to reach all of our players and not only spread game awareness but Forum awareness.

In the same vein the support team has also become very active in this; linking tickets to the Forum whenever possible to also spread awareness to players of the discussions, announcements, new releases, competitions etc: to encourage registration.

With the arrival of Discord this means our little team is stretched providing customer service across support, Discord and the Forum. Hence we are actively recruiting to boost our numbers (I know I am shamelessly mentioning this here as I sit looking at the current applications).

Forum competitions also required players to be registered from 2019, in a bid to also encourage more than competition participation here.

At the end of 2020 we changed the Forum to allow player accounts and Forum accounts to be linked in a security measure, announcement is here since then the numbers decreased further as some ''players'' posting here had never played on the server, so could therefore not link their account.

Yes, we can see the guest numbers here, those people who pop in but have never registered to take part here; yes we understand they are getting information from here; but no we don't understand why they simply do not register to be a part of the fabulous Forum family and take part.

Currently we are seeing far more activity on Discord in the last few weeks, than we have on the Forums in over a year, yes we realise it is a new shiny thing and the novelty may wear off.

However, we are also starting to see a slight upsurge here on this Forum (I cannot speak for the others). Its not huge by any means, and it is limited to very few threads and topics. But its seen.

Whether this will be enough to make any changes to the initial announcement remains to be seen. But statistics are playing a very important role here.

I hope this helps a little, although I have been covering this for a few weeks, it has not all be laid out in one space like now.
 
m4rt1n

m4rt1n

Adept
Thank you for explaining @Silmaril

Removing the in game link to the forum hasn't helped, but also Inno need to see the demographic for Elvenar compared to their other games, my personal experience over the last 7+ years tells me most players are 35+ many are 70+ yet discord is a platform for the millennials and it's own stats show male prominence and most users under the age of 35.

Personally to me it just doesn't appear so clear and friendly and also is a 3rd party Inno have little control over. For info I am 51. :)
 
Silmaril

Silmaril

Community Manager
Elvenar Team
The link removal was was done due to the fact that Discord will be used for all official announcements now, especially given that there are far more players registered there than on the Forums already. It would have been a bad move for us to then not provide a link to the platform where these are, hence Discord replaced the Forum link from the game.

As you are probably aware we have a social media presence across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) that has helped us to provide a multiple choice of platforms for our players to engage with us. Discord is no different in this to the rest, as all are third party sites with their own guidelines that have happily worked for years.

Age groups do not necessarily come into this, as all platforms have a great mix of ages participating; no one has a set pattern where Elvenar is concerned as our players ages are extremely diverse ranging from our youngest possible players at 16 up the ages to some in their late 80's and even 90's.
 
m4rt1n

m4rt1n

Adept
Silmaril said:
The link removal was was done due to the fact that Discord will be used for all official announcements now, especially given that there are far more players registered there than on the Forums already. It would have been a bad move for us to then not provide a link to the platform where these are, hence Discord replaced the Forum link from the game.

As you are probably aware we have a social media presence across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) that has helped us to provide a multiple choice of platforms for our players to engage with us. Discord is no different in this to the rest, as all are third party sites with their own guidelines that have happily worked for years.

Age groups do not necessarily come into this, as all platforms have a great mix of ages participating; no one has a set pattern where Elvenar is concerned as our players ages are extremely diverse ranging from our youngest possible players at 16 up the ages to some in their late 80's and even 90's.
Click to expand...

So why as my thread here says https://en.forum.elvenar.com/index.php?threads/reinstate-the-in-game-forum-link.18319/ can we not have a link also to the forum, I am not anti Discord, just out to try and get as many players involved as possible on their preferred platform. There I also suggest Inno add the links for FB, TwiX Instagram and YT on the PC version. There is no reason whatsoever in my opinion that announcements cannot be made on multiple platforms, just a very simple copy/paste.
 
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Silmaril

Silmaril

Community Manager
Elvenar Team
The information on the post is not quite correct, on the browser log-in screen, if you scroll down you can find the links to our social media channels.

From the in-game cogwheel settings (bottom right) if you click onto the question mark (?) you enter the support suite. The ''How can we help?'' section there has a dedicated section for the Forum, including full links, how to register and more click here to head over. Our ''Did you know'' post recently added this to be more pertinent also here, to help visibility as we see not many players read our ''How can we help?'' section.

Currently the directive is for announcements to only be made via Discord as our main communication channel. This is partially due to the varying formatting that would be involved as the platforms differ greatly and also due to not duplicating information from a point of view of workload and player confusion, as we are transitioning all announcements to Discord as per the original information when we introduced the Discord channel.

Please also bear in mind that all community management roles are part time and our wonderful moderators are volunteer players who are also very much part time too. I think this can be forgotten at times.
 
m4rt1n

m4rt1n

Adept
I know that many volunteers give up their free time to help and greatly appreciate them all. I have had similar roles for many years in the past with another gaming company so know how much is involved.

The company line seems to have become a lot harsher towards the forum in the last day or two, and I really hope the volunteer staff are not in any trouble. That would not be fair at all.

Hiding away in settings behind 2 cogwheels is on the PC version only, on the app all is clear there.

I know we play the game Inno provides as I know how companies work with the use of "free" staff and it always ends in tears. A type of exploitation of the kind hearted. :(
 
m4rt1n

m4rt1n

Adept
kimkimkim said:
hmmmm.....where.....this is my biggest issue about the whole thing.....I'm a daily forum user and in all the 5 years I have been on here, not once have I seen someone mention using Discord instead of the Forum
Click to expand...

Me too, apparently it was the most asked on support for years. o_O:oops::eek:

That said the times I did see it on the forum a lot mentioned in suggestions was to use Discord instead of the fellowship in game chat.
 
Hekata

Hekata

Artisan
Well, I didn't think my little cheeky post would spark such a reaction :D

Thanks for explaining @Silmaril. I am aware of those reasons, you have mentioned them before indeed. As I said, my comment was more in the line should I go poke the devs with a sensitive question that's not even strictly game related ;) Which I'm not going to do because I don't want to fuel activity on Discord in anyway.

I do have one question to which you may have an answer. You said that there are more registered players there than on the forums. So are the total numbers of all players registered on Discord being compared to all the players registered on all the forums?

Might be worth noting (someone has sated this before in another thread) that just because people have discord (a lot of players had an account there before Elvenar made their server, me included) doesn't mean that they will actively use it to discuss things there.

I'm really surprised that stats say there is more activity there than here: I do check on discord every now and then and I had the opposite impression (and so did @m4rt1n and another player on the Beta forum). The only thing that's more active are the global chats but that's really just people saying hello, or giving some short comments, nothing very interesting there and hard to follow anyway. Is that the kind of activity Inno is looking for?
Silmaril said:
However, we are also starting to see a slight upsurge here on this Forum (I cannot speak for the others). Its not huge by any means, and it is limited to very few threads and topics. But its seen.
Click to expand...
There have been 11 threads used in the last 24 hours and 22 in the last week. How many threads are we supposed to participate on weekly bases for it to count? I've been using the forum for a very long tme now and I remember the days when there were a lot more active people on the forum (but also a lot more active players in the game I think) but I don't remember ever having more than a dozen active threads at the same time.

We do understand that most of you are part time or volunteers, and we really appreciate what you do for the game and the forum. We also know that it wasn't the CM's or mods decision to move to discord. If we're arguing with you it's simply because the devs don't come around to talk to us. Ofc now they are going to Discord... Maybe if they had done that for the forum, more people would have registered :)
 
Hekata

Hekata

Artisan
kimkimkim said:
hmmmm.....where.....this is my biggest issue about the whole thing.....I'm a daily forum user and in all the 5 years I have been on here, not once have I seen someone mention using Discord instead of the Forum
Click to expand...
I remember seeing maybe a couple of posts asking for a global chat. Not sure if Discord was even mentioned there. But those players asking for a global chat never ever suggested it should be instead of the forums, rather another way to communicate.

You know, one thing that really bugs me now, is that they are moving the forum to a chat platform but at the same time won't do a thing about the very poor chat in the game not to mention the antiquated messaging system... :mad:
 
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