Nitro Boost concerns and suggestions
I feel that there are many different approaches that the developers could have used. Cumulative total of months to have received boosts, cumulative total number of individual boosts over time, etc.
The currently employed method has become this manipulative popularity contest that will no doubt cause pressure on communities to keep spending to maintain perks. Not "unlock" them, but to "maintain" them.
This also means that smaller communities, no matter how loyal or how active they may be, will likely never access higher tier perks.
I think there needs to be more to be done so the smaller communities can also gain benefits, rather than causing rifts between and within communities themselves.
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i highly agree with this statement, therefore i'm feeling mildly sad about discord because it's starting to become an industrialized platform which doesn't live up to it's users, but i'm gonna hope that they know what they're doing
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I will agree that in the brief period that it's been open to all, it would appear that people are more likely to boost a partnered or verified server, both of which often times already HAVE most of the desirable perks gained from boosting. 1 -
i agree.
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Highly Disagree. We have 2 community discords 1 with level 3 perks and 1 with level 2. Took all of 2 days to achieve. These discords are not partnered or verified. You just need a solid Active community.
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@Ruzom Did you spam @everyone to get there? Are okay with it if you lose a tier or two eventually? How many people does your server have? Is it more than 50? Are you okay with being locked out of tier 3 of you're under 50?
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I was excited about this feature at first. Before I learned the boosting just fell off. My small server of just my friends will never even reach level because I'm the only person who pays for Nitro.
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As someone who beta-tested Nitro boosting since pretty much Day 1 of the feature being launched privately, it is very clear that there have been mixed reactions ever since, and here's what I have to say about it based on that perspective.
Although the feature may seem an attempt to "industrialise" or make more money off of their users, I can assure you that the feature went under heavy consideration on Discord's side with our beta testing results and feedback. They listened to everything we had to say and understood everything we were saying about the feature, and it's clear that they cared about our opinions on the matter. With the feedback, they analysed the feature from both company and user perspectives, weighing both the positives and negatives of both sides. They decided to launch this specific approach to Nitro Boosting after a lot of this consideration and testing, as well as our raw opinions of testing it first hand, whilst also listing our pros and cons of the idea as a whole of the development team to weigh into their discussions.
With the rollout methods that were touched upon by Zacatero, the feature began as specific servers only, which then a few weeks later included some special partnered servers, etc which slowly teased boosting to everyone in those servers and the Discord community as a whole before the final launch of the feature earlier this week. Although this may have drawn a lot of attention to those servers that already have the perks, it was part of the testing, not necessarily an attention or boost grab on their part. The rollout then switched to a 1% system, where servers were randomly selected based on their ID to receive the new features, as we've seen in the past. A few days later, it became a 3% system, but any server that already had Nitro Boosting enabled remained enabled and excluded from both of these percentage systems. All to receive community feedback in small batches before the feature was finally rolled out to all servers and all users across the world.
The point regarding partnered servers, and other servers with the features already unlocked, being boosted over smaller communities has been brought up multiple times since the release, however with those servers, they themselves don't have access to the upgraded emoji limits and specific upgraded audio quality, thus they work for it as well. They also want to create the same community vibe and style as seen in the non-partnered or non-verified servers that have started working towards their Level 3 boost. Although it may seem pointless or redundant to boost such servers, you're helping the server in many ways as well as contributing to the community they've created in that server overall by boosting them and showing your (continued) support for them and what they've created.
Although many smaller servers may "never" reach Level 3, it's about the community aspect more than it is being able to finally reach that third level, it draws people together over time to reach the different levels together, and there's other programs for those smaller servers to also receive the perks, such as Partnership or Verification (much more effort though compared to boosting).
Maintaining the boosting levels is part of the idea, that your community sticks with your server to help the server as a whole benefit from the features, not just boosting once and then moving on. Boosting as "maintaining" also benefits the booster over time though, as with one's boost they receive a streak and every 6 months their profile badge is upgraded which is pretty fancy ;). The whole process is boosting and achieving the levels, but then also maintaining them within your community, as Nitro Games subscribes continue their subscriptions and continue to help your community's boosting level over time.
TL;DR: A lot of time and consideration went into Nitro Boosting, both on the Employee side and the user-base side, boosting isn't just for the Level 3 perks, it's about the community and achieving it, then maintaining it together as a whole group, smaller communities can take advantage of the lower perks then finally maybe one day make to the Level 3 perks (part of the fun of it).
Hope this made some amount of sense lol.
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@JustGamer
I have to disagree about Boosting being a community achievement that you slowly build up. It's a buy-in, straight and simple. There's no community-benefit from being a Booster-supporter above the past tier level and below the next tier level.
From a financial viewpoint you want to have this discussion about buying in for a Booster level before you commit to boosting. There's no difference achieved between reaching a level and going for the next one. Thus if your community cannot agree to have 10 committed Boosters it makes no sense to have any more Boosters to that specific server other than 2 (or 0 if you don't have 2).
If every Booster attributed some benefit for the server and certain amounts would upgrade the level and provide a jump to additional benefits, it would make a lot more sense to me. But right now there's no reason to commit more Boosters to a server than the bare minimum to reach a new level.
I'm not particularly versed in the different upgrade methods but Boosting is definitely a buy-in in my eyes.
An alternative would be to separate the Server Boosting from the Nitro subscription entirely and simply split the cost between the supporters. If a small community desires level 3 perks, it costs the server as a whole the same as a major server of 1000+ people.
Just separate the levels into cost tiers and split the cost between the supporters.
Personally the servers I'm participating in actively are pretty docile and is just a group of friends who occasionally hang out, chat, and play games and want to have voice communication access. However over the past year or so the quality of Discord calls and connection seems to have declined. I experience outages during most of my calls and I would gladly pay up to 5$ a month to have better quality calls.
I came to Discord looking for voice communication and chat features as that is the core features. If I have to pay for banners, emojis, fanfares and whatnot to get proper and reliable calls, I will probably start looking for an alternative product.
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I'm basically just against the whole idea of "if you pay, you get better things", this boosting thing with greater quality has clearly been made to encourage people to get nitro and make some money off of it.
But i loved discord before that stuff, i liked the way that it just gave high quality stuff without any discrimination based on payment.
Now it's drifting towards "the more money you have, the better quality you get" stuff which will divide the community a lot and make their feel closer to a company more than an individual based application.
I personally don't support this drift of modification but I personally can't do anything about that so maybe there will be another application that doesn't drift towards company methods of selling stuff0 -
they're becoming EA by trying to sell access to different perks and updates, while some people will never get the access because they can't pay
not everyone can experience these updates therefore the update is not that cool and there isn't much of a reason for it to exist1 -
if they would eventually make everything free and get supported by stuff like patreon, i wouldn't mind the update being "money-based", because to maintain the good connection they need money
but keeping these updates "exclusive" only for supporters wouldn't do any good for their name, as i said it's gonna divide us for sure and that is sad
my idea is just like twitch streamers, even if they don't get paid, they would still continue to do their artform of connecting with people, that's why they would get supported by donations so that they can keep going on0 -
@JustGamer The harder you try to spin it, the more it sounds like a paywall. I can now see why people are comparing it to EA. "Sense of accomplishment and pride" etc. It's a bit hard to ignore at this point. Nobody should think nitro boosting is "fun".
Exclusive features like higher sound quality goes beyond simple cosmetic changes, which is one of my concerns.
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@Discord I would support you and get Nitro "even after I said I never would" If you didn't lock people out of simple things like emoji limit, animated icons, upload limit, use own emoji in other servers etc. but you chose to lock us out of everything you can think of then try to charge us. The day I can fully customize my small server "that @JustGamer pretty much himself said I would never hit level 3 perks" then I might throw some cash out there to support you but since the beginning I have dealt with you guys and SLOWLY you are locking things out more and more and wanting people to pay for little things as stated earlier I won't give you a penny until you stop this nonsense AKA server boost that as showing here if I don't continue to give you money even if I did give out over $200 in gifts to help boost all in all it would be for nothing
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I am definitely of the opinion that sure, lock those better qualities behind pay walls, folks gotta pay their bills, but don't put it on the users of a server to use nitro to do it. Putting it on the users, not the server owner or a community leader of some form, inherently breeds toxicity. How? "We need better calls here, @everyone with Nitro boost our server" "Oh I already boosted someone else sorry" "Why would you do that you spend so much time here?" right from the off its an opportunity for an argument, and I have no doubt much worse is happening to try get people's boosts. Vs say if the server owner could buy a pack to get the perks for the server, different prices for different levels. Server owner doesn't have enough money? "Hey guys I'd like to get us a server improvement but I don't have the cash, would anyone like to donate so we can all get it?" Immediate opportunity for positivity, maybe some folk might even just outright buy the pack for the server as a gift.
Putting it on the users individually also makes it so they can't have any financial variations personally otherwise it will have direct impact on everyone on a server, that's stressful in itself. Don't boost if you can't guarantee keeping it? What if a smallish server wants those perks but most people are in that unstable situation? It's going to be in intense flux month by month depending on the personal stability of the users.
That's not even talking about if you have a small group of regular users and you're the only one who has or wants nitro. I also saw a reddit thread on how that individual was outright banning boosting on their server because they didn't want the possibility of the conflict it can cause.TLDR: Making server benefits individually responsible is stress inducing, not fun, likely toxicity causing and not a community project. Making server benefits a monthly, server specific buyable pack, would be a much better solution to this.
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I completely agree with this. I find it weird that if you don't constantly pay Discord you can't support your communities. 0 -
you aren't wrong about that statement, discord indeed could do better than that, but my opinion, i stated why i completely hated the idea in general, i don't mean to cause hate nor discriminate other people against their opinions about this, i just want to talk about this and to just get it out of my chest about my opinion of this thing... i dislike the idea, because sometimes it would drive people nuts and force people to keep wasting their money on "online" stuff when it's not even real... plus i have a feeling staff may or may not be using the nitro money for the platform...
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@hey it's rj
made a good point, we don't even know where the money goes1 -
yet certain people doesn't want to listen and automatically think discord does good for us, but they actually don't, as they are getting ripped off by them...
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