https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GwmRbvWX_Hs/maxresdefault.jpg

(all other screenshots/ photos have been taken from the application itself) 

Communication. Communication is a key component to gaming. Without communication with your team you won't do very well. That I've learned from experience. Playing games without any sort of communication with your team is extremely frustrating.  Yes, you can always use game chat, but speaking is way easier than typing and much faster as well. Speaking doesn't interrupt you from the game. Out of the many applications I use, my favorite application to use is Discord.

Discord is a lot like Skype, but it has many other features. Which I will get into in a little. I originally didn't like discord. I was so used to Skype which when a friend of mine suggested I switch to discord I refused. Over time Skype became less popular and everyone was completely switching over to Discord. Although I didn't want to make the switch I did. I really don't regret switching at all.

At first Discord can be very intimidating with all the features and settings, but once you read through everything it starts making sense.

Discord is all about making your communication for gaming as easy as possible.

These are some of the settings you can find within discord. I’ll go over each of them in detail.

User Settings are more personalized settings to ensure account safety and to connect third party applications. Under My account you can view what sort of protection you have on your account. Personally, I use a two factor authentication just for logging in. Really to make sure some random doesn’t hack into my account.

The Account settings page looks a little like this if you do have protection precautions enabled.

Privacey and safety is where you can choose who can DM you and who is able to friend you as well as other interactions between yourself and other people.

Authorized apps is sort of irrelevant imo. It’s really for third party applications to make your discord cooler. I personally don’t have any need for this… so I don’t use it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This may be one of my favorite features. Connections! You can connect your accounts from other applications on discord so your friends on other applications can transfer and so you get special overlays for certain applications.

I personally use the spoitfy overlay because it shows that I’m listening to music within discord. It shows what I’m listening to and what point the song is at.With this you can also listen to songs with other people.

I’m going to quickly go over the next settings as they’re pretty easy to understand.

Discord nitro is a discord subscription you can get to unlock cool features like animated emojis as well as other features. [you’ll have to get it to find out more about it ;)]

Voice and video, notifications, text and images, appearance, language and windows settings are pretty standard settings for applications that allow you to send pictures, call and video chat. Voice and video allows you to go through your mic and webcam settings. Text and images allows you to choose how images will appear. If links to images will show as just links or if the image will show, etc. This also goes over how you will view emojis. Appearance allows you to change the theme of disc. You can choose from the backround to be a grey scale theme or it being the white theme. Language is self explanitory. As for window settings it allows you to choose how discord will first open and how it acts when minimized.

These next few settings are pretty cool. Overlay allows there to be a display of those who are speaking in discord in your game. So you can know who’s telling you what when in the middle of a game.

Keybinds are helpful especially in the midst of a game. You can make a keybind for just about anything. You can set a key to toggle on and off your speaking ability.

Now onto games. This is where you can connect games and allow discord to show what game you’re playing at that moment in time. I typically have this disabled only because I like having the spotify overlay. If you are playing a game the game takes priority over it showing whatsong on spotify you’re listening to.

Lastly, there’s streamer mode. This is to make the game streaming experience with discord easier. This feature helps keep your discord information such as your user tag safe.

The last bit I’ll get into are the Discord servers. These servers are like large group chats, however there’s a lot more to them. Discord does also have group chats, but the servers are widely used as a more moderated platform. Servers allow you to personalize a lot. My favorite thing about discord servers has to be the emojis. You can upload images and make them their own emoji for that server. My favorite would definitely have to be :squint:

http://rlv.zcache.com/unamused_squint_sticker-red6d17c7131643a39339a7d1f649e482_v9wth_8byvr_512.jpg

This is one of those emoji’s in any situation you can use it.

Roles are another huge part in these servers. You can create roles and choose what kind of

permissions each of the roles will have. You can also change the colors of the roles and the name.

Discord sorts everyone by their role so when you click on a player it will show all their roles.   Like this:

Last things I will go over are going to be voice channels, text channels and bots!

Voice and text channels are sections of the server whether you can just type or you can verbally talk. Depending on your perms if you join a server or when you create a server you can add new channels and you can name them just about anything.

You can also put a lock on how many people can join and who can join as well.

Now moving on to bots! Bots are a pretty cool part of discord servers each bot does something different. My favorite type of bot is the music bot. You can search for a song using the bots commands and it will play it for you in the voice chat. Another cool bot is the leveling bot. This bot tracks how much you type in chat and rewards you experience on that. It’s nice having some (not so) friendly leveling competition. There are so many other bots that do so much more. Now moving on to bots! Bots are a pretty cool part of discord servers each bot does something different. My favorite type of bot is the music bot. You can search for a song using the bots commands and it will play it for you in the voice chat. Another cool bot is the leveling bot. This bot tracks how much you type in chat and rewards you experience on that. It’s nice having some (not so) friendly leveling competition. There are so many other bots that do so much more.

There’s so much more to get into, but I’ll leave it at this. It’s up to you to check out the rest. ;)

Download link: https://discordapp.com/download