Twitch to start selling video games this week • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#71

Post by Zarel » Tue, Mar 28, 2017, 11:27 PM UTC

jhgg wrote: post #42

just2n wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically a generally passable VOIP client with a Slack built in, which AFAIK no other VOIP service has really done well (including Skype). The barrier to entry being low, it being free, having mostly all the features people are looking for, and this persistent communication is basically all it is. Before this, gaming communities would often set up a forum (sometimes with a really shitty chat) just for persisten…

This was a long time ago - back in alpha stages of the product. We've since made some pretty big strides to being resilient to network drops, packet loss, network roaming, etc... I was actually one of the engineers who worked on these. We've tested the client under some pretty inclimate network conditions (30% packet loss - high latency - extreme roaming [meaning your IP address keeps changing] - either due to hoppin…

I still get more problems on bad connections than other chat clients. The biggest one is probably that messages get sent twice or three times when I have a bad connection (I just had this happen yesterday). Sometimes a message goes red but it's still been sent, and clicking "Resend" makes it appear twice. Another is that while offline (on the desktop/web client), I can't look at past messages, because everything is replaced by a loading screen.

No chat client works _great_ under bad network conditions, but I think overall I tend to try to avoid using Discord more than I try to avoid others when I'm on a bad internet connection.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#72

Post by devwastaken » Tue, Mar 28, 2017, 11:28 PM UTC

goeric wrote: post #13

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumb…

>Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible.

Time. Curse has significantly better community integrations. Discord has taken a long time to deliver on its features and lacks even the most basic (text channels per voice channel for instance). Curse already has video calls, its a significanty better replacement of Skype than Discord is.

Many are migrating to Curse because streamers use it, and it makes it easy and lucrative to do so as a streamer.

Unless Discord does something unique, like client side modding support and some cooler things you can do with servers, they're going to get crushed.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#73

Post by jhgg » Tue, Mar 28, 2017, 11:40 PM UTC

jungletek wrote: post #67

Anecdotal evidence, of course, but nobody I know is using Curse, nor is it on our radar. TBF, this is probably due to a lack of interest in the group of certain games where the Curse client may already have a foothold, AND the fact that our group already has multiple established Discord instances (heavy use, most games) and a rented TeamSpeak server (for Arma 3 and the TFAR plugin for it, it does positional audio and…

Yo! We actually do support Volume + Pan in the Discord RPC - which will let developers implement positional audio. But this means that it'll have to be something that's implemented by game developers rather than how mumble does it by scanning the game's process memory to grab this info.

https://discordapp.com/gamebridge https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/topics/rpc#setuservoi...

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#74

Post by jhgg » Tue, Mar 28, 2017, 11:48 PM UTC

kahrkunne wrote: post #65

jhgg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah - there are more plans to handle more robust message retry logic. But it's a pretty hard problem to handle. Duplicate message delivery has been fixed for a while though - although there are some rare cases where it can still happen. I don't think out of order delivery is possible as the messages are processed one at a time - but if you have a specific example I'd be more than happy to take a look.

Just FYI, I've had both out of order delivery and duplicate messages happen semi-recently. Duplicates are far more rare than they were, though.

on desktop, ios or android?

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#75

Post by devwastaken » Tue, Mar 28, 2017, 11:50 PM UTC

jungletek wrote: post #67

Anecdotal evidence, of course, but nobody I know is using Curse, nor is it on our radar. TBF, this is probably due to a lack of interest in the group of certain games where the Curse client may already have a foothold, AND the fact that our group already has multiple established Discord instances (heavy use, most games) and a rented TeamSpeak server (for Arma 3 and the TFAR plugin for it, it does positional audio and…

For twitch communities, Curse is very much on the radar, and they can get very large. Curse has full integration of various features streamers use, such as giveaways. No longer do you need to setup a whole bunch of stuff yourself, you can interact with your community in an official capacity outside of just the stream.

Discord is a cool program, and I applaud them for how far they've come, but there are gaps in functionality that have been refused implementation because 'not enough votes'. Basic things, such as being able to change font sizes, or have two columns of guilds, or actually turn off the 'blocked messages' pop-up that comes in when somebody that you've blocked talks in a chat you're in. (Yes, that's a thing).

When someone has to download a mod for your program to experience it better, you're doing it wrong.

Discord still lacks features even Ventrillo had, such as text channels per voice channel. You can't just send stuff to each other, you've gotta form another group, or use a public text channel in the guild. Thats the kind of problem Discord was made to solve, yet refuses.

And, as you said, Its not near Mumble quality, and due to the convenience of the program everybody just uses open mic. I can't join a community VC without it sounding like I just joined a group Skype call. With mumble, you had to look through the options and setup your mic, and a lot more people chose PTT.

For anyone interested in fool-proof PTT, just re-bind your caps-lock key to F14 (Scroll Lock), or some other special key on your keyboard if you have extra keys.

Effectively, Discord is just used for text channels, because the very thing they advertise, VOIP, is worse than the software its supposed to be better than. Give me Mumble any day for voice, and Discord for chat.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#76

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Wed, Mar 29, 2017, 12:19 AM UTC

j_s wrote: post #53

goeric wrote: post #13

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumb…

This is happening to Discord today: http://gizmodo.com/discord-has-a-child-porn-problem-17936822... To our knowledge, the only recourse users currently have is to disallow direct messaging https://blog.discordapp.com/discord-safety-boost-2d592ea3b14... By default, Discord allows any two people who share a server to direct message each other. Unfortunately, the baddies can use this behavior to send you stuff that you…

I wonder why hasn't been a problem with stuff like IRC. At least, I've never experienced this problem, and I've been using IRC fairly regularly since 2006. Heck, for a few years I even hung out in various *chan servers. Have I just been incredibly lucky?

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#77

Post by Lazare » Wed, Mar 29, 2017, 12:21 AM UTC

bigtunacan wrote: post #57

goeric wrote: post #13

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumb…

This has not been my experience. Mine experience has been seeing total fragmentation around chat apps for awhile with Skype, Teamspeak, Curse and Discord. Now it seems most players I encounter have both Curse and Discord installed and will use the URL share feature that both have to share team invites for one or the other. With them generally being used for gaming and now the acquisition and integrations happening be…

My experience was that Ventrilo, Mumble, and Teamspeak had the market split between them, then Discord took it over. It's been months since I've heard of anyone using anything other than Discord, and I've never even heard of someone using Curse's client.

(Disclosure: My experience focuses on the WoW and to a lesser extent Overwatch communities, mostly in the Oceanic Aus/NZ region. But in those communities, Discord is utterly, crushingly dominant.)

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#78

Post by Lazare » Wed, Mar 29, 2017, 12:31 AM UTC

shuntress wrote: post #30

goeric wrote: post #13

Discord is going to be very hard to touch, even for Amazon. They should buy them as soon as possible. I know they bought Curse to try and break in, but it's just not going to be enough. Discord already has insane market-share in the community/VOIP area and there's not much even Amazon could do better that would get people to switch at this point. Really great software that consolidated people from IRC, Ventrilo, Mumb…

Slightly off topic but regarding Discord being "hard to touch" I feel like I must be missing something. My friends and I just switched from Mumble to Discord and I find Discord to be inferior in almost all regards. Discord's browser client is cool and convenient. The separate text/voice channels (as opposed to Mumble's 1 text channel per voice channel) fits our typical use case very well (people playing different gam…

Good UI, cloud based, no servers, slick UI, integrated (good) chat, invite links, solid quality, and free.

Mumble is a solid product but there's a lot more friction. First you need to host a server, and for most people that means paying for it. And then to get people to join they have to install a client, and the website can be confusing, and it's not clear which version they need to install, and it keeps prompting you to update which requires it to restart, and the client's UI is clunky, and the integrated text chat is very poor. And then when I need to join someone else's Mumble they have to tell me the host...and the port, and I've got to copy and paste it and go through Mumble's annoying UI to add another server, etc., etc.

Plus Discord's chat is good enough that it makes sense to start building small communities around it; it's also competing with Twitter group chats, Facebook groups, etc. I play World of Warcraft, and some guilds have started using Discord as their main "hub", instead of forums or whatever. And then there's the bots, and the emoji support, and so on, and so forth. Mumble competes pretty well with the core of Discord, but Discord does more than Mumble.

Ultimately, I think it's the same "why did Slack get so big when it's just IRC with some of the irritations filed off and a slightly better UI" question all over again. If you take a product people need, and make it very slightly better and really easy to adopt, then it's not surprising that it will get huge. Yes, you could technically use IRC instead of Slack, but there's a reason why a ton of companies adopted Slack but never adopted IRC.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#79

Post by Lazare » Wed, Mar 29, 2017, 12:33 AM UTC

Crespyl wrote: post #49

niftich wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord competes with Teamspeak, Mumble, Ventrilo, and Skype in the category of gaming voice chat, but it also offers an interface set up like Slack, which has gained popularity for topic-based persistent chat. It hits a sweet spot of good-enough voice & text chat that's cost-free, needs no configuration, is fully hosted with captive servers, uses decent codecs, supports inbound hyperlinks, has a slick UI, has offici…

Discord isn't about to replace TS/Mumble for your WoW raiding or large organized clans, but it spread like wildfire among my friends who play League of Legends or Dota 2, and other games with medium-small groups of players. The fact that you don't need to install or configure any client (or even have an account) to bring someone in is the biggest single thing. People come for the easy invites and stay for the (slight…

My experience has been that Discord has utterly replaced TS/Mumble/Ventrilo for WoW raiding.

I'm sure there's plenty of guilds around that are still happy with their existing setup and haven't bothered switching, but my experience is that many have switched, and new guilds are basically only picking Discord.

Re: Twitch to start selling video games this week

#80

Post by Pfhreak » Wed, Mar 29, 2017, 1:04 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #61

What's that game called, "Don't Stop Moving?" That integrated Twitch streaming so awesomely? If this news means more of that, I'm all for it, I had a blast participating in that game.

You may want to check out Ultimate Chicken Horse, that's more in the same vein.