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Re:How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice... by 013a on Monday September 10, 2018 @02:07PM (#17953695)
They used to be called Guilds, even in the user-facing client. I'd imagine a conclusion was drawn at some point that the term Guild is far too niche even inside the already niche video gaming community; its really only used in MMORPG-style games.
Re:How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice... by whymauri on Monday September 10, 2018 @02:10PM (#17953718)
Agreed. I feel like if I told a non-gamer friends to join my Discord 'guild' I'd get less yesses than if I called it a 'server'. In a way 'server'/'community' feel like much more inclusive terms.
Re:How Discord Handles Two and Half Million Concurrent Voice... by Slartie on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @04:26AM (#17958024)
And even in the niche of MMORPG games, it's just one variant of name for the (relatively) permanent groups that players usually organize themselves in. It's rather common in the fantasy/medieval-type MMORPGs where it actually has its origins, but uncommon in pretty much all other themes, especially anything scifi. Eve Online for example calls them "corporations", which is a better fit for a science fiction universe. Anarchy Online just called them "organizations", while Star Trek Online calls them "fleets".

So yes, "guild" is a really bad name for the thing pretty much anyone in the target demographic is used to call "server", whether that thing actually was a physical or logical server or not. "Guilds" also used to have a voice "server" to host their voice chat activity, but they did never equal themselves to their voice server, so even if all games out there called groups of players "guilds", it would still be a really bad choice. Someone at Discord apparently learnt on the job that "naming stuff" is one of the two hardest problems in IT ;-)