What to do About a Chat Server?

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We have links for a Discord chat server on our new website. You might have arrived at this post by following one of them. Those links don’t take you to a chat server because we haven’t decided what chat server to point them at yet.

Help us decide.

What do you want out of a Vassal chat server? There are several existing ones we could use, or we could start a new one. Let us know what you think.

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A post was split to a new topic: Age of Renaissance module wanted

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The Vassal PBEM Discord chat server currently fulfils most of my Vassal game-related chat needs, but it would be nice to have a Discord for module design questions. I wouldn’t be averse to having gaming chat too, but the two servers would crossover a lot then.

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We currently have a Vassal-Dev server we use for development discussions. It has a General channel that anyone can join. We can easily expand this and add additional special interest channels like ‘Module Design’, ‘New User Questions’ etc. Discord makes it easy to ignore channels you are not interested in.

What we don’t want to do is push users on to a special interest server like Vassal PBEM if they are not interested in that traffic. The PBEM Discord looks great as it is, the admins have their hands full handling that niche.

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my view, opinion and advice is:

  • I think having a discord chat is good in general so that new people can discover Vassal and “know” they can get “real-time help” from the community if they need
  • forums are good but I think the “new generations” is not really used to them, butthey are very used to the chat and channels approach of discord
  • many of us use discord not as a “turn by turn” tool but as a “lets play together now a boardgame”. That being said, we are already connecting to a discord server in order to do voice communication while playing. Having this as part of the vassal “offer” (aka discord server where they can easily jump into a voice chat) would make things easier, specially when looking for new people to play with
  • having a server where multiple designers and modders are gathered it’s good and will help answer lot’s of questions and share tips anas tricks that sometimes get lost in forum
  • I would love to contribute with ideas and experiences for Vassal 4.0 (if that is still on the table) and discord would be a good place to discuss and share those.

In the end, Discord helped to create communities in a new improved way. Dong get me wrong, I still use forums a lot, but I use discord even more and on daily bases and it would make it easier to reach out to the community.

I really believe that Vassal is very easily the best "boardgame tabletop simulator (well it’s missing a couple of things to make that happen but…) and depending on the approach that is taken for Vassal 4.0 instead of 1 person working on it, suddenly we can have hundreds (with proper supervision, of course). However, this will only ever happen if there is a community.

Discord can help to achieve that.

(hope my 5 cents help)

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I agree : having a Discord for module design questions would be very nice !

:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Please, where is the Vassal PBEM Discord server anyway, and how is it joined?

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Click the link to join: Vassal PBEM

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So I could imagine the top-level “Chat” link could go to a page that offered you the choice of:

(1) Vassal Dev server (for existing design & general threads)
(2) Vassal PBEM server (for people who want to find games)

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So is there a place to go that you can see what everyone is playing now? The old one had that so you could see if someone was waiting to play a game. thanks!

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@sduke What are you referring to? We didn’t remove a chat server when we updated the site. This is about adding one.

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I am pretty sure I remember something like that. (Not that I would use it because I only play PBEM.) However looking at the user guide I wonder if what @sduke is referring to is from within the VASSAL UI. I am looking at page 9 of the userguide: https://obj.vassalengine.org/images/8/8c/Userguide.pdf

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I don’t see anything relevant on page 9—that page is about Peer-to-Peer connections.

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when I used to go to the vassal.org site I could select ‘what is everyone playing’ or something like that at the top, next to the modules tab. I don’t see that option to see what is currently being played live.

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That’s the Server status: https://vassalengine.org/status.php

It hasn’t changed location, and is linked from the bottom of the front page like it always was.

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where do I go to sign in?

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For the Discord server, go here: Vassal-Dev

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This evening we reorganized the Discord server we’ve had in use for a while, in preparation for making it more widely known.

The Chat nav links here on our site now go to our Discord. Come try it out!

In a few days, I’ll post a news item about this, and we’ll also pin a topic noting it or add it to something already pinned.

Thanks everyone who offered suggestions for what we should do.

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Vassal PBEM does not work for me.

  1. Its poorly organized. Having channels for individual games not helpful.
  2. I hate PBEM. I play live. Having a place where folks can organize for games, share trick, give feedback to one another on module play would be good. The best would be some kind of integration between vassal, BGG and discord would be great. Folks could request a game with their calendar. Automatching folks who are interested in the same game and have similar calendars would be nirvana.