This is what we call our “members site”. It is meant to be the “house” while the Discord is meant to be the “lounge”. We intend for our discord to be huge and at some point when a discord is in the thousands, or even in the tens of thousands.. you’ll probably never get to know everyone. If you use our discord regularly and we hope that you do, someone may be a useful connection there in some fashion that could have made through gaming all along, but may be a missed opportunity if it’s never discovered much like other gaming communities. This is what this site is for. Eventually to both recommend you and give you an opportunity to see if what society deems to be “wasted gaming time” and “useless gaming friends” aren’t so much of a waste or useless at all 😉
Essentially this site serves two functions, to be at a minimum – an easy reference for members to look up gamertags but also to find out who plays what and how many people we have for various games. The second purpose is for networking beyond gaming as mentioned above with a matchmaking feature for both gaming and real life coming later as our site grows.
For the purposes of an example profile, Founder/CEO fathamburger’s profile is being volunteered to be like the “Myspace Tom” of this site 😉
https://network.balancegaming.network/members/fathamburger/
Site “Levels”, what are they? how are they useful?
At the time of writing, we’re about to announce our first giveaways and they’re meant to incentivize different levels of profile completions. When we reference “levels” in giveaways, this is what they’re referring to.
Level 1
If you’re only interested in the gaming portion and want to keep your real life fairly private, we ask for only a gaming picture avatar and your gamer tags to be eligible for giveaways and that you join or create at least one gaming group for what you’re playing to claim the level 1 tier of points.
Level 2
An actual picture, description of your skills IRL and optionally any businesses or interesting hobbies that might make you an interesting person to connect for. Definitely self promote anything like your art portfolio, game mods or other projects for. At the time of writing we haven’t added a section to also state what kinds of people you’re also looking to get to know and would be delighted to meet or run into via gaming. For example this could be other people in your industry i.e. for Fathamburger, he’s always looking to meet both other game developers, developers in general, startup or investor types.
Groups (explained)
The groups for now are a mix of both groups for specific games and genres and also “real life groups”. Not everything should be posted in them but essentially the groups are meant to be for anything that should be saved as a reference either for the equivalent of the “Balance guild” for that game or for useful long term articles and things to be shared. Essentially Discord is more like up to the minute / off the cuff “chat” while the groups are meant to be more of a long term respository
The groups can have their own officers, leaders and media libraries and really should be a starting point to post things like tutorials, guides, map images, highlight/brag/lulz clips and should be stickied appropriately in Discord vs a chain of stickies.