The Game Developer Playbook: Three Incredible Game-Focused Communities
Cody Owens·2025-03-17·via Discord Blog
At Discord, we tend to shy away from using the phrase "best practices" when explaining how to run communities. No server is the same, and there's always an idea worth replicating or riffing on to suit your needs. It can be incredibly fun to see the exciting new ideas other communities come up with, including servers you’re already in!
One of the best tools to find out what others are doing is Server Discovery. Explore what's out there, take note of what others are doing, and use their servers as inspiration for your own community!
Remember: engagement is an indicator of success, not the amount of members you have. Look beyond the featured page and search for servers based on topics similar to your server... or even a server that isn’t even gaming-related!
In Part Three of our GameDev Playbook, we'll look at three multiplayer communities that represent what we consider best-in-class server setups: Fortnite, Rocket League, and Deep Rock Galactic. Each server serves a particular set of needs for its unique community and marketing initiatives. We’ll show you some great ideas and examples of what's possible beyond just categories, channels, or permissions.
Getting Started
As always, we recommend taking a look at the following resources before diving in:
As time goes on, servers on Discord can evolve to fit a community’s needs. Below, you’ll see a more in-depth look at three fantastic examples of great official Discord servers for the following games: Fortnite, Rocket League, and Deep Rock Galactic. The below sections were written around March 2021 and have been checked for accuracy in 2025, so the servers below might look a bit different the next time you check them out yourself.
As of March 2021, Fortnite was Discord's largest public server. Even with over 750,000 server members, the server’s rate of member conversation and engagement has steadily scaled along with it at a healthy rate. Fortnite’s Community Team has experimented with their server over the years and landed on a setup that’s easy to comprehend and clear about what a new member should gain from their server.
Layout
If you squint your eyes reeeaaallly closely, this past version of Fortnite’s server layout has a lot in common with our example server from Part Two!
Their main categories break down into eight main groups — here’s how a few of them are tailored specifically for their community’s needs.
News - The News category acts as an aggregator of the many updates around Fortnite. Within the category, the #announcements channel is used for Discord-unique announcements, while other channels leverage webhooks and capture news posted from their various social channels. Try not to depend solely on automated reposting, and write unique announcements for Discord whenever possible.
LFG - TheLFG category plays a big role within the Fortnite community: It contains channels divided by the various playlists and game modes within Fortnite. Players choose the most relevant channel for the moe they want to play, post details of what sort of teammates they’d like to pair with, and jump into one of the many voice channels to squad up.
Discussion - Fortnite’s Discussion category is broken out into specific topics that are high-level enough to serve a functional purpose without new members being overwhelmed with excess channels.
Bug Info/Reporting - Fortnite's server has implemented a system to proactively identify known issues in a dedicated channel and offers a how-to guide with detailed instructions for users to post their newly-discovered issues. Bug report channels are divided by game mode, making it clear where to filter feedback. If you plan to do this, providing a template for members to submit bug reports and feedback in a consistent manner will make everyone's life easier.
Community Help - It’s a great idea to offer channels that empower members to support each other, while apps and bots can help answer the most common questions or filter feedback to your Support teams. Some of the most popular customer service providers have made their bots to extend player support on Discord, including Zendesk and Helpshift.
Using Discord as an extension of the game
The Fortnite Community team has always taken an experimental approach to their Discord server. In fact, they’ve even treated it as an extension of their game with aspects of the lore making their way to their Discord community.
Mysterious agents with redacted roles were added prior to the new season launch
One prime example: As part of Fortnite's launch of Chapter Two Season Two, Fortnite’s marketing campaign centered around the theme of “Top Secret,” and clues were hidden throughout the game and Twitter pointing to mysterious Agency factions that would likely play a role within the new season… but what role exactly?
With Discord, they thought through how the server itself could act as a persona or an extension of the game’s universe. Here’s a brief synopsis of how their game’s world played a role within their Discord community.
Day 1 - They first started with updating the server's artwork, such as their server icon and server banner, with logos featuring a handprint of the mysterious Agency.
Day 2 - A role labeled "redacted", as seen in the image above, is created. To members, the cosmetic role is seemingly assigned at random. In reality, it’s bestowed upon someone that’s close to saying something correct that's related to the upcoming Season 2.
When someone guessed the right thing about the upcoming season, the admin manually assigned the redacted role to the member without warning. A custom The Agency bot then publicly announced in a #season-theories channel telling them they've been activated.
Members with the Agency role are listed separately in the member list, creating a feeling of FOMO for other community members.
When a member received the role, the bot automatically announces that they've been activated
Day 3 - A new teaser is posted on Twitter. Later on, a new member with an Agent role with a redacted name joins the server. At first, the member sported a fuzzy profile image but over time, the profile image was replaced with an animated icon based on the latest clue posted that day.
The mysterious Agents join the server daily
Day 4 - A new agent joins the server in a similar fashion to the first agent, starting with a fuzzy static profile image. A total of four agents join on daily cadences. Their profile images evolve when their respective teaser clues were also tweeted
Day 5- The #general channel updates to #gener-au-l. This is in reference to the elemental name for Gold, Au which is also a nod to a new character for the upcoming season, Midas.
Day 6 - The Agency bot proceeds to select users at random based on the number of messages sent and applies the Agency role to them. This helps ramp up the rate of users receiving the Agency role, while purposely not giving a clear indicator as to why a member received the role.
Wrapping Up
Fortnite does a great job of having a clear idea of what you want your members to do on your server. Their work from Chapter Two, Season Two highlights that Discord is a canvas that is open to exploration and experimentation — don't be afraid to mix and match elements and create something your community can really buzz about.
Deep Rock Galactic's server has evolved over time as the game moved from its early days of development to a full-release title. Cooperative in nature, the Deep Rock Galactic community is centered around LFG channels, the latest news and announcements, and opportunities to provide feedback to the development team.
The team behind Deep Rock Galactic has connected their Discord community directly within the game itself using our own GameSDK and API.
Before we dive into how Discord is tightly integrated into the game itself, let's take a look at their server setup.
Layout
Communities surrounding multiplayer games tend to have some variation of #rules, #announcements, various discussion channels, #off-topic, #feedback, and LFG/voice channels. There’s no singular correct way to set up your server: the answer for what you want your server to stem from what you want your community to do and interact with.
Chat & LFG - Each of the nine text channels in this category serve a particular need for the community. They've created a Discord-related activity inside their game which has inspired a new area of conversation. We’ll dive into the #interplanetary-miners-union soon enough..
Gallery - Off-topic channels are important for any community. The Deep Rock Galactic server does particularly well with a #fan-art channel where members can share their creativity. The DRG team’s favorite posts are then shared in a curated #fan-art-showcase channel for everyone to enjoy. It's a small detail that creates goodwill and positive sentiment within your server.
QA & Feedback - The Deep Rock Galactic server is another great example of guiding your community towards the correct way to report bugs and gather feedback. In their #jira-bug-reporter channel, they use webhooks to display any bugs reported, and the category offers channels to talk through their current issues to seek advice from the broader community.
Voice Channels - The LFG channel setup within the DRG community is a more standard approach and a good option to replicate if you’re unsure of how to structure your own. They have a text channel dedicated to #looking-for-group and a variety of voice channels that are limited to four people, which is the maximum number of players that can be in a single game session. Thanks to their great implementation of the Discord GameSDK, server members can ask to join another player’s game directly within Discord.
We try to make it easy for Devs to implement similar features into their own games. Check out Discord’s Rich Presence feature to learn how to add it yourself!
Adding Discord to Deep Rock Galactic
Early in development, the Deep Rock team launched something called the Interplanetary Miners Union, a novel way to reward players with in-game credits for joining their Discord community and reaching specific crafting milestones in-game.
We love this — it's a perfect example of how a Discord community can play an active role within the game itself and from this, new areas of communal conversation are formed. It’s also what the #interplanetary-miners-union channel they have is about!
How it works from a player’s perspective
After arriving in the initial game hub (The Space Rig), the player can visit a Miner Community monitor
The monitor presents the option to pick one of three factions.
In order to join a faction, the game will invite you to their Discord server and upon joining you are automatically assigned a faction role
As you'll see in the image above, all Discord community members who have participated in the union collectively move towards overall Miner’s Union milestones which aggregate the individual faction progress. Additionally, individual factions are tasked with objectives to reach their respective milestones.
Each milestone offers a variety of unique minerals and in-game credits which help their progress within the game to upgrade weapons and armor, and all of this is possible using Discord's open API.
Wrapping Up
Deep Rock Galactic is one of our gold-standard use cases for discovering creative ways to improve their player experience, both in-game and on Discord. It's an active and vibrant community that serves the needs of its players, and their development team plays an active role in engaging. It’s truly a place where players can be at home with like-minded players.
The Interplanetary Miners Union is a great example of creatively bridging your Discord server with your game so players have another way to achieve rewards and work together. A little creativity can help blur the line between your game and real-time community while inspiring organic conversation.
In December 2023, item trading was removed in Rocket League. However, you can still read how the server was structured to support trading below.
The Rocket League community and its development team have effectively scaled server engagement and retention as it sees substantial member growth. The server fulfills a number of needs for the community, including LFG, sharing news and information, and offering resources that focus on the in-game item marketplace, item trading, and player-to-player support.
Layout
Rocket League's server has the usual go-to categories, like #rules and #announcements, and categories tailored to their game, such as Esports and Trading. It's a great example demonstrating that you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel in every server, but leverage common use cases to support the needs of your particular community.
Discussions — The server’s many Discussion channels are a great example of making it clear what type of discussion should occur in a particular channel group. With a focused set of channels, it’s also easier for your moderators to help keep the conversations on-topic and in the right places.
Support — The focus of Rocket League’s moderation team is to empower their community to support each other, mitigate common issues, and act as a useful source of communication and engagement. They have a clear guide in their #help-desk channel on how to report game issues, account hacks, and issues within their server.
Community Events — One of Rocket League’s most common events taking place here are AMAs. When an upcoming AMA is announced, a new #ama-questions channel will appear. Thanks to the ability to “View Message History” permission being revoked from everyone but Admins, anyone can submit a question but only the administrators can see all submissions made in that channel. Admins will then filter the most thoughtful ones and share them with the guest, whose answers will be posted in #ama-answers. Whoever submitted the question will be credited for their participation.
Trading — The Trading section is a great use of making Discord a complimentary space to elements of your game. In this case, creating a marketplace for members to trade items they've collected in-game. We'll get into more detail on how their Trading section works soon.
Esports — There’s a huge esports scene around Rocket League. Only members with an Esports or Regulars role are granted speaking permissions in a Voice channel as a way to reward upstanding members who participate and mitigate against bad actors who may abuse Voice permissions.
Bot Commands - A text channel for members to call up the various commands their custom app enables without flooding any ongoing conversations in other channels with app command spam. These range from how to properly format a trading post, calling up instructions on how to report a scammer, and an assortment of other resources.
Rocket League's Legacy Trading Economy
Rocket League used to have an active item trading economy. If players purchased in-game cosmetics, cars, or items, they were able to trade with other players so long as they’re on the same platform and in a game party.
When trading was available, items within Rocket League weren’t able to be purchased for real currency. Instead, players used to barter using in-game credits or an item for item swap within the game itself. The value of these items fluctuated as they do in real life, based on supply and demand.
Note: If you're a Rocket League player, we’re painfully aware that none of these items can be traded.
The team at Psyonix, developers of Rocket League, embraced the trading community within their server, letting players use it as a destination to connect with traders and work to make some credits or hunt for a particular item.
This was accomplished with a rather straightforward setup that leveraged a mix of trading rules, text channels, a standardized format for posting messages, and the use of Discord's search feature.
The end result allowed server members to post or browse items for trade, meet up in-game, and complete the trade.
Rocket League’s Legacy Trading Rules
The above was just a small section of their trading rules, with this particular section offering clear guidance on how to use their server for trades. Offering clear guidance on how to post a trade not only made it easier for community members to search within the server, but also helped the moderation team to enforce the rules effectively.
Channels for Trading Purposes
Within the example image from the “Layout” section, you’ll notice that the #trading channels were broken out by platform, helping members know more easily that the person they’re looking to trade with plays Rocket League on the same platform they do. After an item hunter found an item they wanted to trade for, they could DM the seller directly and conduct the final trade in-game.
An example of a trading post in the original trade channels
After everything was said and done, users would head to the #reputation channel to talk about the trading experience they’ve had with a particular member and recommend them to others in future trades (+rep!). The server’s bot would help users look up the trading history of someone in the Discord server, and, if they completed enough successful transactions, they were awarded a cosmetic role that represented how trustworthy a member was in the trading scene.
The reputation channel used to be where members can post a bot command awarding rep to a fellow member or search their rep status.
Wrapping Up
When new members used to join the Rocket League Discord server, they knew from the start that it’s a great place for esports fans, to talk with other players for tips and support, finding groups to play with, and earning some in-game credits by posting trades.
The overall identity of the Rocket League server has remained constant, despite both their game and server's explosive growth (and the removal of trading in 2023). They've found their own common ground that keeps members engaged, despite new members joining every week by creating a functional space that supports their player's experience.
