Throughout the years, gaming communities have made the jump from one voice chat to another, hoping to find that one program that will give its members all the features they need to operate smoothly. For a while now, Discord has been the answer for many. While Discord works perfectly, there are still some features lacking to this day that we have to make up for using bots, webhooks, and external programs. Enter Guilded, with a whole slew of features that promises to give Discord a run for its money.
I can’t say when I first discovered Guilded, but I think it might have been somewhere in my Twitter feed over the past few days. Out of curiosity, I bit. The first thing you’ll see on the Guilded website is “Drop Discord, get Guilded” – a bold statement for a new competitor! The site design is very palatable, with a dark color theme and simplistic events. Sure, why not. I gave it a download. What I didn’t expect, was that my gaming community would be so fond of it less than a few hours later, that we’d completely make the switch over from Discord to Guilded.
Features
What makes Guilded so much better than Discord, per their claim? Let’s start by going over some of the features that are already integrated.
- Calendars and Event Invites
- Tournaments
- Scheduling
- Forums
- Nested voice chats
- Streaming-specific channels
- Reply threads
- Channels with documents
- Server Groups
- Whisper
One of the main features that caught my eye was the integrated calendar. As both a tabletop gaming and PC community that spans multiple countries, we’ve struggled for years to get everyone on the same page when it comes to server-wide events. Time zones are a hassle, and people hate going to an external source to check when events are going down. I think that’s where Guilded succeeds with most of their features. Everything is kept in one central location, and can be easily accessed by swapping from channel to channel. There’s no clicking to go to an external website, and having to deal with constant pings alerting everyone in the server that an event is about to begin. All you have to do is navigate to the calendar channel, and check what time the event is going to start. Not only that, but it is set to your local time, which is extremely helpful for different time zones!
Another of my favorite features has to be the Server Groups. With Server Groups, you can set up self-assignable roles within the Guilded server that members can add themselves. After being added to the group, a new sub-sect of your community will now appear on the sidebar. It acts just like another server, with the same amazing feature and voice channels, but without all of the unnecessary legwork to keep the invitation link stashed somewhere for members to have to dig through and use. It is all connected to the main server with an impressive amount of automation that makes using the server an admin’s dream. There’s no need for a dozen bots working around the clock to keep everything managed. It’s all already integrated.
Last but definitely not least on my top favorite features, is the Whisper function. Remember from the days of Teamspeak, where you were able to keep members sectioned off into squads and whisper to certain members? The same feature has been integrated into Guilded. Our community has been making use of this with tabletop gaming the past few days, when a DM needs to whisper a secret to a specific player without the rest of the party knowing. We don’t have to grind the game to a halt, twiddle our fingers, and wait for it to be typed out. Now the game can keep progressing as if nothing had ever happened, keeping our players’ immersion that much more intact.
Try Guilded for Free
I could honestly go on and on about all of the new features that Guilded has to offer, but it wouldn’t do you any favors unless you got hands-on with it yourself. Guilded is free for Windows and Mac users and is definitely worth a glance if you’re like me and have a bunch of bots on your Discord server to automate tasks. Nested channels alone make the user’s server experience so much better, because it cleans up the dozens of channels that servers needed previously to organize and structure itself. With the additions of quality of life formatting in the text editor, as well as adding polls and gifs to comments, it’s just a no-brainer at this point. Give Guilded a try!
Nothing about this post was sponsored, I’m just an enthusiastic new user who wants to spread the good word about Guilded to as many communities as possible.
