Don’t want the back story of MG and our varied experience in numerous chat platforms? We get it. We want you to join us as quickly as possible, too. Here’s the TL;DR: We tried tons of platforms over the years – none of which worked out for one reason or another. We’re now hosting our own on the Matrix decentralized network.

Quick links on how to get started:

• Our official chat channels on Matrix, moderated, maintained, and participated by MG Staff and MG Veterans
• How to connect to MG Chat
• Matrix.org’s Documentation
• Element Documentation

MultiplayerGamers has a long history of utilizing chat rooms as a means to connect with gamers, guilds, clans, gaming groups, encourage the growth of gaming communities, and simply enjoy playing games with people.  I mean, we’re here to actually play games, not just talk about them.

This is the brief long history of our experience on the various chat platforms that dot our past, and more information on our present and future.

At the dawn of MG, we were on Internet Relay Chat on the AnotherNet chat network. From there, we belonged to various other IRC networks as they came and went. This was by far our longest running chat experience in MG history. IRC served us well from the 90s through the early 2000s. It still has a very warm place in the really old veterans of MG’s hearts.

We have always had the notion to host our own platforms, make our own rules, and command our own destiny.  To better serve our community we needed our own chat platform too. When web-based chat solutions became more viable (sort of), we hosted our own chat system on this web site. Admittedly, the technology wasn’t great. There were no moderation options, there was no pretty interface, and the web page that displayed the chat “room” did not update in real-time. We’re talking real dark ages of the web here. The system evolved over time and became better and better, but the Forums were still the hot-bed of action when it came to users engaging one another on MG.  Most of the time, live-action chat was left to in-game chat on games like Quake or via voice on Roger Wilco and Teamspeak.

Enter the age of…. Slack! Yes, we were on Slack. This lasted about a year. It was a brief time, much like these few sentences about it. It wasn’t our best move, but in many ways, it helped send us on the path that lead us to where we are today, but more on that later. There’s really not much more to say about Slack for gaming (what were we thinking?)

Hello Discord! (“Wait…what happened to Slack??” – Anonymous MG’er!, “What’s Slack?” – Another anonymous MG’er) We heard of this new fancy gaming chat service called Discord. We were shocked that it was free with no hitches (this was before Nitro existed). Discord was our home for a few years. Great times! Unfortunately, in our opinion, Discord grew too large, too quickly. As such, Discord (the company) was forced to modify their Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, Code of Conduct, and all the other mumbo-jumbo that comes with explosive growth. In a nutshell, we didn’t agree with some of the terms, and felt it was time to move on again. We wanted something that we could integrate chat with streaming, forums, and guides. So…

Guilded! We joined Guilded in June 24, 2021. It checked every mark – a decent ToS, tons of features, and our beloved Discord chatbot “mgbot” only needed minor modifications to migrate it over. Transitioning to Guilded was pretty easy. Migrating all our guides, calendar events, and so forth was very straightforward.

Well…in accordance with our history with chat systems, this didn’t end well either. Guilded (the company) was acquired by Roblox (the company) in August 2021, less than 2 months after we joined up. For nearly 3 years, Roblox more or less left Guilded alone. In fact, many much needed functions and features were added during those years. We watched cautiously, carefully, and with careful optimism as new announcements came out. Then, nails, meet coffin. Roblox announced a change to Guilded that would drive countless communities away. In order to login to Guilded, as of July 2024, you were required to open a Roblox account and login via the Roblox service.

Roblox may be a great game, but we don’t play it.

Nobody wanted this.

Well @%$^!