As I returned to CM, I noticed that there seems to be a lack of communication and clarification on the role of the discord, and how to contact staff. I decided to write this post because after some digging, these issues seem to be widespread enough to avoid this being my personal complaint thread. I’m going to be very careful with the feedback rules, but it is worth noting that the reason I am making this post is in part because of personal experience.
So then. This post seeks to address the lack of non discord communication, going both ways, present on CMSS13. I am going to give examples of when this becomes an issue, and a few things that in my opinion could alleviate these issues.
Lets start with the players to staff side of things. Currently, if you need to appeal a an autoslur ban, dispute a discord staff action, or even if you just want to talk about a staff decision without reporting them, you have to contact management.
The issue is, if you don’t have access to the discord, you cannot contact management. this is particularly egregious in my second example, where it says to DM the discord manager. I think I do not need to explain the major issue here.
And all of this is without mentioning the fact that having any whitelist or staff/staff adjacent role requires discord membership (although apparently staff members can leave the CM discord iirc?) but that is a separate topic.
Now, on the other side (staff communications to players), things are not much better. The most notable example I had the unpleasant experience of falling victim to was when a certain slur starting in r was banned. Now this is a settled manner so I won’t go over it, but rather the way it was communicated.
This was announced only on the discord and in the message of the day (Which in case like me you had no idea what this was, is the tiny piece of text above the active PRs that changes roughly once per year and does not give you any sort of popup to say when it has been changed) and not on the forums in the dedicated rule changelog (which is marked as outdated, further proving my point in my opinion). I also seem to not be the only person to have fallen victim to this.
I have drawn up a quick list of solutions that I think could fix this issue. Not all of them are compatible, and some are far more radical then others, so they are not meant to be taken equally.
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Mirror all discord announcements to the forums. This is something I feel like was supposed to happen, but never did. But perhaps I can’t find it.
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Regularly update the rule changelog. Self explanatory. It being outdated is not good.
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Have staff members link their discord tags in their forum bios. Self explanatory as well.
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Change how discord bans work. This could be done either by a ban simply decerting the banee (allows them to still see #announcements and contact staff members) or by making them permamuted instead.
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Introduce a different way to contact staff. This seems a bit convoluted but I suppose why not.
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Comically radical, make the discord and the game itself intrinsically linked. banned from game banned from discord, and vice versa. This would definitely be very controversial and require a ton of effort spent reworking the rules though, so probably not the best idea.
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A very simple solution that’s quite mean, simply say that if you get banned from the discord you lose the rights to contact staff easily and to be informed rapidly of rule changes.
I am sure there are probably quite a few other possibilities that others can think of, but those are my 2 cents.
P.S: I do not currently live in an english speaking country, nor am I a regular forum user, so feel free to inform me of any spelling/grammar/formatting mistakes.
