Community Assignment (W4)

 I wanted to make my first blog post this week to talk about the community assignment that we all are doing. I decided to lurk and be an active member of two different esports teams' discord servers: G2 Esports and FNATIC. I chose League of Legends (LoL) esports teams because LoL esports is something that I keep up with weekly. The European league is more competitive and popular than the North American league, so it made sense to look at two of the top four teams.

I debated whether to observe and participate in their respective subreddits or discords, and ultimately decided on discords because from my knowledge, esports teams' subreddits are not as active. The assignment has been fun so far! One feature of Discord that I did not realize is that they will put a little symbol by your name if you are new to a discord. After a week of daily comments in the "#lol-esports" channel in the FNATIC discord, I still have that little icon (see below). I haven't had a whole lot of interaction with my comments...I wonder if my "newcomer" icon is making people wary? I also am curious as to how this goes away. Will it be gone the more I comment? The time I've been a member of the Discord?




Discord is unique in that there are separate "channels" for each interest (at least for esports teams). It makes complete sense to do this as esports teams can easily have 5+ professional teams across video games. What's interesting though is that each discord server is different. The G2 Esports server does not have a "#lol-esports" channel, but a "#league-of-legends" channel. Depending on the given day and weekend, the conversations taking place can be about the professional LoL team, users' experiences with LoL, or anything in between. FNATIC's discord server has a "#lol-esports" and a "#league-of-legends" channel. Conversations within the two channels can (and often) cross over. Nobody seems to mind it, though. While this is okay, I feel like it's harder for community members to realize who is actually following (and being like-minded) the professional team as opposed to just being a person that plays LoL. 

What are your thoughts on discord servers?


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