There’s no one correct way to set up your Discord server — it’s important to have a clear idea of what you want your community members to do on your server from the moment they enter. Keep this in mind as you think of the long-term role your Discord server plays within your broader development strategy.
At Discord, we tend to shy away from using the phrase “best practices” when explaining how to run communities. No server is the same, and there’s always an idea worth replicating or riffing on to suit your needs. It can be incredibly fun to see the exciting new ideas other communities come up with, including servers you may be in yourself!
One of the best tools to find out what others are doing is Server Discovery. Explore what’s out there, take note of what others are doing, and use their servers as inspiration for your own community.
Remember: engagement is an indicator of success, not the size of the community. Look beyond the featured page and search for servers based on topics similar to your server… or even a server that’s strangely unique.
In this special segment of our GameDev Playbook, we’ll look at three multiplayer communities that represent what we consider best-in-class server setups: Fortnite, Rocket League, and Deep Rock Galactic. Each server serves a particular set of needs for its unique community and marketing initiatives. You’ll discover examples and great ideas of what’s possible beyond just categories, channels, or permissions.
Getting Started
As always, we recommend taking a look at the following resources before diving in:
How Game Studios Are Using Discord Today
In Part Two of the GameDev Playbook, we touched on a few tactics fellow game servers employ and asked ourselves, “what do I want members to do on my server?”
Depending on the type of community, game, and brand your server is about, identifying the right engagement methods within your community can be more of an art than a science. Your server’s functional purpose should always be more than a simple broadcast of news and updates. It should inspire conversation, foster belonging, and serve as an extension of your game or brand.
Common Functions Employed Within Successful Game Servers
- Matchmaking/Player to Player Relationships: This can mean anything from a Looking For Group (LFG) experience to a place for players to talk about the latest news or live events. It can also be a way for members to share and offer constructive feedback on player-posted content, or coordinate in a group activity that requires the larger community’s participation. Fostering an environment where your most passionate players and fans can connect should be central to your Discord strategy.
- Player Resource: If a new member joins your community, will they achieve something within their gameplay if they visit? Is there a place to talk and trade about an open marketplace economy within your game? Are there educational resources that they can call up through a snazzy bot command to help coordinate the next raid in the LFG channel? Think through how members might be able to complement their gameplay experience through your server.
- Game Extension: Discord servers can sometimes serve as an extension of the game itself. This can include ARGs and meta-activities that create a feeling of engaging with characters from the game or getting creative with our API to create opportunities for advanced players based on their in-game skill level.
- Info Dissemination: Among everything else your server provides, you should prioritize Discord as one of your main channels for sharing news, game status, and ongoing updates with your most passionate fanbase. It’s a place for fans to talk amongst each other about the newest trailer or content drop, receive help from fellow players, and know that when something’s going to happen, your Discord server is the first place they’ll want to go to hear from or provide feedback to your team.
Game Server Highlights
Below, you’ll see a more in-depth look at three fantastic examples of great official Discord servers for the following games: Fortnite, Rocket League, and Deep Rock Galactic.
As time goes on, servers on Discord can evolve to fit a community’s needs. The below sections were written around March 2021, so the servers below might look a bit different the next time you check them out yourself.
Fortnite
At the time of writing, Fortnite is Discord’s largest public server. Even with over 750,000 server members, the server’s rate of member conversation and engagement has steadily scaled along with it at a healthy rate. The Fortnite community team has experimented with their server over the years and landed on a setup that’s easy to comprehend and clear about what a new member should gain from participating in this server. It’s a place for the Fortnite community to start conversation, forge friendships, find people to play or get creative with and find the latest news about the game.
Layout
If you squint your eyes reeeaaallly closely, this past version of Fortnite’s server layout has a lot in common with the template we used in Part Two!
Their main categories break down into eight main groups — here’s how a few of them are tailored specifically for their community’s needs.
News: The News category acts as an aggregator of the many updates around Fortnite. Within the category, the #announcements channel is used for key beats, while other channels leverage webhooks and capture news posted from their various Twitter channels. Try not to depend solely on automated reposting from other social platforms and instead post and format natively to Discord whenever possible.
LFG: The LFG category plays a big role within the Fortnite community: It contains channels divided by the various playlists and game modes within Fortnite. Players choose the most relevant channel and then post details of what sort of teammates they’d like to pair with and jump into one of the many voice channels to squad up and play.
Discussion: Fortnite’s Discussion category is broken out into specific topics while still high-level enough to serve a functional purpose without having members drowning in excess channels. Observe and experiment based on direct feedback and leverage Server Insights to analyze member habits and see which channels are most (and least) active.
Bug Info/Reporting: Fortnite’s server has implemented a system to proactively identify known issues in a dedicated channel and offers a how-to guide with detailed instructions to post newly-discovered issues for review. Bug report channels are divided by game mode, making it clear where to filter feedback. If you plan to do this, providing a template for members to submit bug reports and feedback in a consistent manner will make everyone’s life easier.
Community Help: It’s a great idea to offer channels that empower members to support each other and also align with the main objective of most game servers and the communities within them.
Bots and apps can help answer the most common questions or filter feedback to your CX/Support teams. Some of the most popular customer service providers have made their bots to extend player support on Discord, including Zendesk and Helpshift.
Using Discord as an extension of the game’s meta
The Fortnite Community team has always taken an experimental approach to their Discord server. In fact, they’ve even treated it as an extension of their game’s meta with aspects of the lore making their way to their Discord community.
One prime example: As part of Fortnite’s pre-launch campaign of Chapter Two — Season Two. Their broad marketing campaign centered around the theme of Top Secret, and clues were hidden throughout the game and Twitter pointing to mysterious Agency factions that would likely play a role within the new season… but what role exactly?
With Discord, they thought through how the server itself could act as a persona or an extension of the game’s universe. Here’s a brief synopsis of how their game’s meta played a role within their Discord community.
- Day 1 — They first started with updating the server’s visual branding, such as their server icon and server banner, with logos featuring a handprint of the mysterious Agency.
- Day 2 — A role labeled “redacted”, as seen in the image above, is created. To members, the cosmetic role is seemingly assigned at random, but in reality, it’s assigned when a server member is close to saying something correct that’s related to the upcoming season 2.
- When someone guesses the right thing about the upcoming season, the admin manually assigns the redacted role to the member. A custom The Agency bot then messages the member publicly in a #season-theories channel telling them they’ve been activated.
- Members with the Agency role are listed separately in the member list, creating a feeling of FOMO for other community members.
- Day 3 — A new teaser is posted on Twitter. Later on, a new member with an Agent role with a redacted name joins the server. At first, the member sported a fuzzy profile image but then over time, the profile image was replaced with an animated icon based on the latest clue posted that day.
- Day 4 — A new agent joins the server in a similar fashion to the first agent, starting with a fuzzy static profile image. A total of four agents join on daily cadences. Their profile images evolve when their respective teaser clues were also tweeted
- Day 4- The #general channel updates to #gener-au-l. This is in reference to the elemental name for Gold, Au which is also a nod to a background character for the upcoming season, Midas.
- Day 5 — The Agency bot proceeds to select users at random based on the number of messages sent and applies the Agency role to them. This helps ramp up the rate of users receiving the Agency role, while purposely not giving a clear indicator as to why a member received the role.
Wrapping Up
Fortnite does a great job of what we focused on in Part Two: having a clear idea of what you want your members to do on your server. Their work from Chapter Two, Season Two highlights that Discord is a canvas that is open to exploration and experimentation — don’t be afraid to mix and match elements and create something your members can really talk about.
Deep Rock Galactic
The community within Deep Rock Galactic’s server has evolved over time as the game moved from its early days of development to a full-release title. . Cooperative in nature, the Deep Rock Galactic community is centered around LFG channels, the latest news and announcements, and opportunities to provide feedback to the development team.
Since the beginning, the team behind Deep Rock Galactic has been experimental in their approach bridging their Discord community directly within the game itself using both our own GameSDK and API. Before we dive into how Discord is tightly integrated into the game itself, let’s take a look at their server setup.
Layout
By now you’ll likely see a common pattern in multiplayer communities. There is always some variation of #rules, #announcements, various discussion channels, #off-topic, #feedback, and LFG/voice channels. There’s no singular correct way to set up your server: the answer for what you want your server to stem from what you want your community to do and interact with.
Chat & LFG: Each of the nine text channels serve a particular need for the community. Within this category, they’ve created a Discord-related activity inside their game which has inspired a new area of conversation. We’ll dive into the #interplanetary-miners-union soon enough. ).
Gallery: Off-topic channels are important for any community. One aspect the Deep Rock Galactic server does particularly well is creating a #fan-art channel where members can share their creations. The community team’s favorite posts are then shared in a curated #fan-art-showcase channel for everyone to enjoy. . It’s a small detail that creates goodwill and positive sentiment within your server.
QA & Feedback: The Deep Rock Galactic server is another great example of how to guide your community towards the correct way to report bugs and gather feedback effectively. In their #jira-bug-reporter, they use webhooks to display the most recent bugs reported and offer a few discussion channels to talk through their current issues to seek advice from the broader community.
Voice Channels: The LFG channel setup within the DRG community is a more common approach and a good option to replicate if you’re unsure of how to structure your own. They have a text channel dedicated to #looking-for-group and a variety of voice channels that are limited to four people, the maximum amount of players in a game. Thanks to their great implementation of the Discord GameSDK, server members can ask to join another player’s game directly within Discord.
Anyone can implement a similar feature into their own games. Check out Discord’s Rich Presence feature to learn how to add it yourself!
Adding Discord to Deep Rock Galactic
Early on in development, the Deep Rock team launched something called the Interplanetary Miners Union (IMU). It’s a novel way to reward players in-game for joining their Discord community and earn in-game credits or crafting materials by reaching specific milestones.
We love this because it’s a perfect example of how a Discord community can play an active role within the game itself and from this, new areas of communal conversation are formed. It’s also what the #interplanetary-miners-union channel they have is about!
How it works from the player perspective
As you’ll see in the image above, all community members who have participated in the union collectively move towards Miner’s Union milestones which aggregate the individual faction progress. Additionally, individual factions are tasked with objectives to reach their respective milestones.
Each milestone offers a variety of unique minerals and in-game credits which help their progress within the game to upgrade weapons and armor, and all of this is possible using Discord’s open API.
Wrapping Up
Deep Rock Galactic is one of our gold-standard uses cases of a great Discord community, not only for the server structure but for discovering creative ways to improve their player experience both in-game and out as well. From a community perspective, it’s an active and vibrant community that serves its player’s needs, and their development team plays an active role. It’s truly a place where players can engage and be at home with like-minded players.
Discord doesn’t need to be limited to the boundaries of your server. The Interplanetary Miners Union is a great example of creatively bridging your Discord server with your game so players have another way to achieve rewards and work together. A little creativity can help blur the line between your game and real-time community while inspiring organic conversation.
Rocket League
The Rocket League community and its development team have managed to effectively scale server engagement and retention as it sees substantial member growth. The server fulfills a number of needs for the community including LFG, info dissemination, and player resources that focus on the in-game item marketplace, item trading, and player-to-player support.
Layout
Rocket League’s server is a variation of go-to categories like #rules and #announcements, plus more focused categories like Esports and Trading. It’s a great example demonstrating that you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel in every server, but leverage common use cases to support the needs of your particular community. There are 11 main categories throughout the server, but we’ll focus on the ones unique to the Rocket League community.
Discussions: Whether that be support, trading, or esports, the server’s many Discussion channels are a great example of making it clear what type of discussion should occur in a particular channel group. It’s also easier for your mods to enforce and keep the conversations on topic and in the right places.
Support: The focus of Rocket League’s moderation team is to empower their community to support each other to mitigate common issues and act as a useful source of communication and engagement. They have a clear guide in their #help-desk channel on how to report game issues, account hacks, and issues within their server.
Community Events: One of Rocket League’s most common events taking place here are AMAs. When an upcoming AMA is announced, a new #ama-questions channel will appear. Thanks to the “View Message History” permission being revoked from everyone but Admins, anyone can submit a question but only the administrators can see all submissions made in that channel. The Admins will then filter the most thoughtful ones and share them with the guest, whose answers will be posted in #ama-answers, and tag the member who asked as credit for their participation.
Trading: The Trading section is a great use of making Discord a complimentary space to elements of your game. In this case, creating a marketplace for members to trade items they’ve collected in-game. We’ll focus on more detail in the section below.
Esports: There’s a huge esports scene around Rocket League. Only members who have an Esports or Regulars role are given speaking permissions in a Voice channel as a way to reward upstanding members who participate and mitigate against bad actors who may abuse Voice permissions.
Bot Commands: A sandbox text channel for members to call up the various commands their custom bot enables without flooding any ongoing conversations in other channels with command spam. These range from how to properly format a trading post, calling up instructions on how to report a scammer, and an assortment of other resources.
Rocket League’s Discord Trading Economy
Rocket League has an active item trading economy. If players purchase in-game cosmetics, cars, or items, they can typically trade with other players so long as they’re on the same platform and in a game party.
Items within Rocket League can’t be purchased for real currency. Instead, players barter using in-game credits or an item for item swap within the game itself. The value of these items fluctuates as they do in real life based on supply and demand.
The team at Psyonix, developers of Rocket League, embraced the trading community within their server, letting players use it as a destination to connect with traders and work to make some credits or hunt for a particular item.
This was accomplished with a rather straightforward setup that leverages a mix of trading rules, text channels, a standardized format for posting messages, and the use of Discord’s search feature. The end result allows server members to post or browse items for trade, meet up in-game, and complete the trade.
Rocket League’s Trading Rules
The above is just a small section of their rules, with this particular section offering clear guidance on how to use the server for trades. Offering clear guidance on how to post a trade not only makes it easier for community members to search within the server, but also helps the moderation team to enforce the rules effectively.
Channels for Trading Purposes
Within the example image from the “Layout” section, you’ll notice that the #trading channels are broken out by platform, helping members know more easily that the person they’re looking to trade with plays Rocket League on the same platform they do. After an item hunter finds an item they want to trade for, they can DM the seller directly and conduct the final trade in-game.
After everything is said and done, users can head to the #reputation channel to talk about the trading experience they’ve had with a particular member and recommend them to others in future trades. The server’s bot can help users look up the trading history of someone in the Discord server, and, if they complete enough successful transactions, they’re awarded a cosmetic role that represents how trustworthy a member is in the trading scene.
Wrapping Up
When new members join the Rocket League Discord server, they know from the start that it’s a great place for esports fans, to talk with other players for tips and support, finding groups to play with, and earning some in-game credits by posting trades.
The overall identity of the server has remained constant despite both their game and server’s explosive growth. They’ve found their own common ground that keeps members engaged and talking despite new members joining every week by creating a functional space that supports their player’s experience.
