As the title says.

Return #offtopic. It's not fair that the entirety of the players must be punished for what a few people have done.

Nihilus has given us a reason for the removal of offtopic, stating that moderation of the area was difficult. Here is what I propose:

A Discord bot that will remove links other than guild discords in guild recruiting channel and vendetta online-related links. The bot will also have ban, mute, kick, remove relay access, embed restrict commands for moderation.

if no one is willing to step up and create the bot, I shall. I have already started working on it.

We want our Discord server to be great, and we want to help the developers/guides/moderators. Here's a solution.

While you are crying about not being able to discuss non GUILD Software / Vendetta related topics on a company owned server for the game give this a read. CCP’S MISSED OPPORTUNITY: DISCORD

There are plenty of non official Discord servers related to VO where you can peddle your tripe and non-sense. Discord is a marketing opportunity to help the game and non game related discussions greatly devalue to players finding the game via Discord. ID software and UBI Soft offical game related Discord servers do not have these types of channels for precisely this reason, just to name a couple.

If you want to discuss non VO related items make your own Discord server and invite ppl who share your desire to not discuss VO to it.

What i don't understand at all is #off-topic was FOR off-topic discussions. If someone wants to ask how to dual boot their computer, THAT isn't VO related, yet it would likely be allowed.

It's a matter from what i see, of picking and choosing what is acceptable regardless of clearly stated rules. For example:

the memes were entirely VO related, and technically are player made. So, with that being said, if those aren't allowed, and this is a "promotional server", then #player-made-creations shouldn't exist either, because "ItS nOt vO rElAtEd" God forbid that.

What I don't understand is people getting upset that they can't come to the Official VO Game discord and not discuss VO. If you want to NOT discuss VO then go somewhere else, this is not rocket science, well apparently it is to some of you

Look, this request was brought to me by several of the Discord moderators, with the argument that the Off-Topic area was creating a problem for administration, because it creates a bit of a "gray area" where bad behaviours tend to emerge, and it's much more challenging (and time consuming) to manage, with little added value to the Discord server as a whole.

The last I looked at the off-topic content, a substantial amount of it was pretty snarky and negative about the game, or the moderators, or developers. Which begs the question about how that helps "promote" the game? If anything, it seems like the opposite?

It's exactly the argument that "#off-topic was FOR off-topic discussions" that's the problem, because that brings with it a perception of "anything goes" for some people, not just discussions of.. the weather. We don't really want to be hosting discussions of intensely divisive topics. It doesn't relate to VO, it goes downhill quickly, and it burns up moderator time/energy.

We dealt with that same subject in the giant "Toxicity" discussion from earlier this year, which is why we're working on moving non-gameplay discussion off of 100.

We want to be supportive of the community, and let people interact; but if it creates more overhead for the volunteer administrators and actually degrades the the way the community would be viewed by someone new discovering it (say, the gaming press, or a new user), then.. why do we want that, exactly?

Wash: you need to be less combative when responding to feedback, and more diplomatic in general.

So basically, it's a matter of moderation. Not like discord moderators, but portion moderation. If a meme or two was posted in #player-creations every few days or so, it'd fine?.

So essentially it was a mixed effort from alot of things per say. In honesty i don't care about the memes or whatever, i'm sure you're aware that people get bored and create shit to do. No memes allowed? Well i'll be damned, i suddenly like memes!

When gameplay gets monotonous, you have to make it un-monotonous. /End.

There's just a cost-benefit analysis to anything we add. If "Off-Topic" occupies 60% of Administrator time and is only valuable to 2% of the users, the cost-benefit isn't that worthwhile.

I guess I'd rather have administrators use that time to do something to make the game less monotonous, like, I dunno, planning Events or something. That seems like it would improve the game for all, instead of just a small cross-section of people who want to post snarky meme images.

You can open a new Suggestions topic for new ideas. Please don't randomly insert them into other, totally unrelated topics.

In any case, my comment about Events is unrelated to what you're saying, as we can advertise to hundreds of thousands of past VO players and bring people in for the Event(s) specifically, because they're scheduled. That's the whole point of having a regular cadence of such things. And that would be a better use of Administrator time than examining angsty meme content in Off-topic.

I'm going to leave this thread open for further discussion the Discord off-topic channel. But let's keep it specific to that discussion please.

my bad. deleted.