We just got an announcement recently, about an incredibly poor choice by the Guilded overlords, Roblox Corporate. Even though I’m a Partner with them, myself, and the vast majority of Guilded Partners are extremely unhappy with this change. I will be quoting content from their latest blog post.
Let me say this, I don’t blame Guilded directly. I blame Roblox. They think by forcing me to create an account (which I can’t, the username I gave to my cousin), they’ll get me to play that horrid game that’s full of toxicity and poor moderation. No, it won’t. I guess I’ll be losing 3-4 years of history, and my first major Partnership with another company. It’s not Guilded’s fault, it’s Roblox’s.
Not to mention … if you get banned on Roblox, for whatever reason, even if it is a mistake on their part, you’ll be banned on Guilded too! Global ban from the platform, from what I understand. That is not acceptable. I can understand server-by-server bans for breaking TOS or their rules, but a global ban across the whole of Guilded for something on Roblox, even if a mistake? We can’t trust that.
Their first paragraph states:
Beginning July 15 2024, all Guilded accounts will require a Roblox account connection in order to maintain access to Guilded’s services. Email login will no longer be supported. Starting today, all new Guilded accounts will require a Roblox account.
They Didn’t Discuss With Their Partners
They never tried contacting us Partners (or even the GilGang [their version of HypeSquad]) to see what we thought of these changes. Honestly, they should have given Partners a heads-up before publicizing this change. Let us discuss it with the staff to get input from their active Partners. Of which the vast majority would have said “NO. Don’t force Roblox login. Optional is fine, but not forced.” or something similar.
Before any sort of huge, major change that would affect a vast majority, or in this case, all of its users, they should honestly contact their Partners, get lots of valid input, and then take the input from their Partners to Corporate, so that way they can get input from their biggest and most active users of the platform. They didn’t do that in this case.
Guilded Used To Be a Great Discord Alternative
This is no longer the case. I’m likely to lose my Partner status with them, but honestly, they did it to themselves. Guilded used to be an amazing alternative to Discord, offering free emotes, large uploads, custom URLs without needing Partner or Lv 3 Boost, and more.
Why did they choose to slow down their development cycle, and alienate both their developers and users? It started earlier this year, or a bit before the end of last year, when the Bot API was slowing down with updates, and a few of the major bot developers have either paused development completely on their bots or have shut them down.
One major bot, Parrot, was one of those bot developers that paused development, except for crucial security patches. They were considering rebuilding their Discord bot to Guilded again, but with this announcement, they decided not to:
“What’s Changing & Why”
We’ll start this off with a direct quote from their blog post:
Guilded’s mission is to build the best communication platform for your communities. In pursuit of this, we’re taking steps toward more deeply integrating with the Roblox platform. By connecting Guilded and Roblox accounts, we’re able to lay a foundation that will allow us to serve Guilded’s current users with more robust infrastructure and access to new capabilities – from improved spam and raid prevention, to advanced localization tools, and more – while also introducing new opportunities for Roblox communities to engage and grow on Guilded.
We’re excited about the amazing opportunities this connection will help us unlock, but we understand that this may be inconvenient for our users who have not yet connected or created a Roblox account. For this reason, we’re giving users until July 15 to claim their Guilded account with a Roblox account before this change goes into effect.
Here are my thoughts on this part of their post: How can it be the “best communication platform for your communities.” if you turn something that used to be optional, and then start forcing it on everyone? Especially if the platform is known to have some moderation and toxicity issues? Let us know why you say that, please.
Furthermore, “We’re excited about the amazing opportunities this connection will help us unlock,” is utter crap. That does not make any sense; at all. It is very likely to do the complete opposite, instead.
Guilded’s Own Users Are Unhappy
I have gathered some quotes from various Guilded users who are extremely unhappy with this announcement they’ve made.
While I do love Guilded and it was where I first joined Mesozoic Haven fully, I do not like the direction they are going by not letting partners voice their opinions on big changes like this. Cause you should not need a Roblox account to even use a different platform! If your account is banned on Roblox, you can just say good bye to your Guilded account as well.
Discord execs would like to thank Guilded for boosting their end of year earnings.
I’m not saying that they won’t say that, but they probably won’t name them directly, Codeize.
I’ve been using this godsend of a platform for over 3 years, every chance I get a question in a stream about it, I stop what Im doing to explain the amazing benefits of all it encompasses vs Discord. You see a very well-known game dev sent me a side message with a virus once on Discord, which cost me over $450.00 in fake charges, I don’t normally click things but this person was a valid person to receive a message from. So I found this amazing platform and it’s security and gave my community of over 12 years of streaming a great home. We’re older, we play a **** ton of Star Citizen and we don’t like all the ****.
I enjoy the 10 different options a channel can become, such as… the calendar, and announcements, the ability to give each game we play a section that also has categorized and organized sections. Great voice ability, beautiful large picture and video clip uploads…. all of these things make this platform MILES better than any Discord, Teamspeak or Ventrilo I’ve ever used. It became a home to people who DON’T PLAY ROBLOX or give ZERO about it due to its ability to attract the wrong kind of person and crowd. It’s just not for us old folgies.
But NOW I feel like it’s Mixer all over again, great concept, but it’s being killed off due to poor decisions by management. If this is HOW you want to get rid of those of us who don’t play Roblox, this is obviously what you want and how you’re going to do it. You missed the boat on monetization, so it can’t afford, IMO, to support itself. It’s always been almoooost perfect but not quite. I realize you also don’t give ZERO about any of our pleas, or comments, or requests to readdress this decision. SO we’ll move our community back to a platform I hate through no choice of my own. It was a great ride, and I wish you all the best……. but management and the person creating this decision, I hope you step on a Lego and they can never remove it from your foot.
A very nice, detailed post. Thanks Ging3rbomb! It sums up my favorite parts of Guilded, which are now unfortunately coming to an end now.
Here’s a quote for you,
Roblox sucks.
Could you please consider reversing this change, before it becomes permanent, and a negative part of your history?
FAQ From Their Blog
Q — Will Guilded no longer be supporting communities that are not focused on Roblox?
A — Guilded’s mission remains the same: to build the best communication platform for you and your communities. Guilded will continue to serve gamers, developers, content creators, and interest groups of all stripes.
Q: Can I opt out of connecting a Roblox account to my Guilded account?
A — A Roblox account will be required in order to access your Guilded account beginning July 15. If you choose not to connect with Roblox, you will no longer be able to log in and access your account. However, you can restore access if you choose to connect and claim at a later date.
Q — What happens if I cannot access my Roblox account?
A — Access to your Roblox account will be required in order to log into your Guilded account. If you experience issues accessing your Roblox account, please refer to this Roblox Help Center section.
Q — How will this affect the 2FA I have on my Guilded account?
A — If you have 2FA enabled on your Guilded account, you will be prompted to enter an authentication code in order to connect your Roblox account. Completing this step will disable the 2FA on your Guilded account, and Guilded will defer to your Roblox account security settings. Guilded 2FA will no longer be supported. For more information on Roblox 2-Step Verification, please visit this Roblox Help Center article.
Leaving Guilded?
Are you leaving Guilded, like me? Check out this site for some helpful info! It has a timer on when the ‘death’ date will happen, along with a link to Guilded Scrubber. A way to remove your content from the public view. I would run that right before deleting your account.
Concluding Thoughts
I honestly hope that Roblox Corporate reverses this change. I’m not very hopeful, since you know big corporations seldom change once they make a decision. Once they make it, the chances of reversal are usually less than 1%, in my experience. There are some rare instances, like when the community won against Studio Wildcard & ARK Survival Ascended’s horrible changes they were making to server hosting. We won that battle, but that was a highly unlikely one to win.
Since the reversal of this Corporate decision isn’t likely to happen, we want to take a moment to warmly invite you to our Mesozoic Haven Discord server! The same community we had on Guilded, but on Discord! We hope to have some game servers up within a few months once my debts are down a bit more.
We warmly welcome you to join us on Discord, and on Kenson’s live streams, weekly on Mon, Wed, Fri @ 5 PM CST!
We don’t bite … much!
We’d love to have you come and join the pack today, on both Discord & Live!
Hearing this news has been devastating to say the least. I preferred Guilded to Discord since it offers so many more features and best of all it was all free too. I suppose it was going to be inevitable at some point since Roblox owns Guilded. It’s really sad to… Read more »
I completely agree. Roblox shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place, IMO. Guilded should’ve gone public, or found a better investment source.
It would have been better that Roblox Corporate addressed the toxic community situation first before making an attempt to make some inactive players get on the game. It is not how things should be done, and just like you said, I hope that this decision is reversed as soon as… Read more »
Yea, they could’ve definitely handled the situation better. Unfortunately, the chances at a reversal are practically nil.