
Show HN: Guilded – build and organize online gaming teams - iEchoic
https://www.guilded.gg/v2
======
iEchoic
We just launched a redesign and ground-up rewrite of Guilded, which makes it
easier for gamers to build and organize teams. There are also a bunch of of
new features, like fully-featured forums, customizable team dashboards, team
streams, and team rosters.

On the tech side, the frontend was all written in React 16 + MobX. Besides the
redesign and new features, there were a lot of technical goals related to the
frontend infra that we were trying to achieve, which are allowing us to move a
lot faster now.

Anyways, hope you all think it's cool, would love to hear any
questions/feedback.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
This looks really cool! This is not super related to your business, but do you
have any recommendations for how to get started with frontend dev as a
beginner? I usually do backend/infra stuff, and the frontend world is
overwhelming - particularly CSS.

Do you have any tips on the best way to learn CSS? And do you think using
React + MobX allows faster dev compared to vanilla javascript?

~~~
iEchoic
Thanks! I think the best way to get started right now is to grab the official
Facebook create-react-app package, pick something you think would be fun to
build, and just start trying to build it and googling/asking questions along
the way. The first project might suck, but that's okay. You'll pick it up
fast, and the next will be better.

React + MobX is my favorite way to build frontend apps now, and MobX does help
a lot in terms of development speed, maintainability, and performance, in my
experience. If you're brand new to frontend development, I wouldn't worry too
much about it, though - it can be best to start with the basics initially.

~~~
matdehaast
iEchoic congrats on the new design! Very slick and smooth.

Just a quick question. Are you using CRA with SSR (ie with nextjs or other
solution?) for the new site? Or is it just a large SPA served from static
html,js,css bundled?

Thanks Matt

~~~
iEchoic
Thanks! No SSR here, just an SPA (static html/js/css) served up via CDN. We do
use code splitting to load bundles progressively to keep the bundle size down.

------
kamac
I've seen it before and I think it looks slick. I have one suggestion or maybe
observation. Finding a team currently requires to manually apply by browsing
through the list. Whenever I see a team with one member inside (and that's how
many teams look loke), I don't feel like applying, because there's got to be
something off about it, right? So I don't apply. And then, there's this thing
where I would have to apply to several teams at once, which makes me kind of
uncomfortable.

Do you have any plans for automating this process? Tinder for team finding,
maybe? (:

~~~
iEchoic
Yes! This launch was focused on the foundational team tools, but making it
easier for players to find teams is already in the works. I think we can have
an experience where all the teams you see are active high-quality teams, are
tailored to you, and the process is more automated and less manual. This is
something that no gaming product has gotten right yet, in my opinion.

------
cahoodle
Looks slick as hell and I love the dark color scheme. It's always surprising
how many gamers just hate light color schemes. Good work!

~~~
iEchoic
Definitely - our first version had a lot of white, and also a lot of feedback
asking us to make it not-white.

~~~
scoggs
Sounds like a decent opportunity to provide a user option for light or dark
themes in their user settings? Maybe even a middle ground grey theme as well?

~~~
iEchoic
Yeah, agreed. I'd like to have more customization options in the future,
including themes like that. To keep the scope small enough to make this
launchable, it didn't make the cut, but we'll definitely be revisiting that.

------
kn0thing
I wrote about this Guilded update for the Initialized blog, because I'm so
enamored with this product that probably would have saved me from needing to
learn a lot of HTML two decades ago. It did serve me well, though... but I'd
have rather been playing Q2CTF

[https://medium.com/initialized-capital/if-guilded-had-
existe...](https://medium.com/initialized-capital/if-guilded-had-
existed-20-years-ago-i-may-have-never-learned-to-code-d07a9b29ffa3)

~~~
iEchoic
This post is especially awesome to me because Guilded was launched on reddit,
and a majority of our continued feedback comes either directly from reddit or
from users that found us initially through reddit.

The most fun thing about this project so far has been how all the things I
spent tons of time on just for fun (reddit, gaming) ended up showing their
worth later, like the superhero movies where the useless power ends up being
useful in a really contrived way at the end.

------
dvt
Yet another gaming community; it's very interesting how these continue to crop
up but never end up sticking around. Off the top of my head: Justgamed
(oldschool), GotFrag (oldschool), Raptr, Gamurs, Gosu, etc. etc. etc. You
probably won't tell me, but how did you get funding? I've done a few esports
projects and I even played CS professionally so I have a lot of background in
the industry (although I'm doing engineering/product nowadays). It seems that
whenever investors hear esports, they slowly back away.

As far as guilded.gg is concerned, I think the social aspects just bog the
idea down. It's cool to have a discord bot that sets up scrims, you really
don't need a whole "social platform" behind it. But slick design and good
luck!

~~~
iEchoic
Thanks for the feedback. We're still exploring all of these thoughts as we
iterate and learn, so I don't have absolute answers here. Some thoughts,
though:

> Yet another gaming community; it's very interesting how these continue to
> crop up but never end up sticking around.

We'll continue to see a lot of them crop up and die. I think we'll also see a
lot of them crop up and succeed. Gaming is too big now for that _not_ to be
the case. The fundamental belief that drives this is that gaming teams will
continue to be core to online gaming well into the future, and the question of
if there will be a ubiquitous platform for their identity and team
organization is more of a "when" than an "if" question, for me. Someone will
crack that eventually, even if it's not us.

> You probably won't tell me, but how did you get funding?

Happy to share, there wasn't really any magic to it. We just explained the
vision I described above and worked really hard to make something that a lot
of people loved, and had some data to show that. I think a lot of investors
know esports are big now, will be even bigger in the future, and they see the
gap that we're trying to fill.

~~~
dvt
Thanks for the reply & good luck, I'm rooting for you guys! :D

------
jhgg
This is super awesome! Cheers from the Discord team here! :)

EDIT: One bug, it lets you try to DM invites to other bots on the server. We
don't let bots DM bots on an API level :O

~~~
iEchoic
Thank you! Our users (and our team, for that matter) love Discord as well.

About the bot DMing, that could explain some of the errors we've been seeing -
thanks for the tip. Taking a look now.

~~~
jhgg
Cheers, also check out our rich embeds stuff, which could make the bot's
messages it posts into Discord look a lot more awesome:
[https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/channel#emb...](https://discordapp.com/developers/docs/resources/channel#embed-
object)

~~~
iEchoic
Agreed - we've actually just started on these recently. Forum posts and events
now have the rich embeds; we're planning on bringing them to the rest of the
content soon.

------
rawrmaan
This looks absolutely beautiful, and I'm a huge React + MobX fan as well. If I
were still in my gaming prime, I'd be all over this. Great job!

~~~
iEchoic
Thank you! That's great to hear :)

------
firloop
Love the landing page. Just a heads up, navigating to the page breaks my
browser's back button. Otherwise, looks fantastic!

~~~
iEchoic
Oops, that was a last-minute change that didn't work out right - fixing that
right now, thanks.

Edit: should be fixed now

------
Raphmedia
Nitpick: Your LandingCTAShowcase-container is overflowing and allows the user
to scroll right.

~~~
iEchoic
Working on fixing this now, thank you.

------
herbstein
I would recommend you also support iRacing. It's probably the game where the
largest percentage of players are in a team on some level, and actively race
under that team.

~~~
iEchoic
Interesting, I haven't looked into iRacing yet. I'll definitely check this
out, thank you for the suggestion.

------
orliesaurus
Sounds great on paper, but I am in 25+ discord servers, of which many used by
official game communities on reddit, overwatch teams and league of legends -
and none are using guilded or integrate with - why is that? They seem to fit
the agenda pretty well, because of their members' needs:

\- They need organizing

\- They share a lot of media

\- They have community nights/events

\- They have tons of bots to do this or that (in a microservice fashion) that
could be phased out by one "rule'em all" bot

~~~
iEchoic
Official game communities are an interesting category that we haven't explored
or reached out to much yet. That's a great idea though, and I think it makes a
lot of sense to think about doing that more.

Our bot is in ~26k servers right now, and the vast majority are mid-sized
teams, in the 6-250 person range. I think our tools would be great for larger
communities, and I think the needs would be pretty similar - but we haven't
explored that too much yet.

~~~
orliesaurus
I see - so you're basically focusing on smaller "organizations" and "amateur
teams" I guess? Kind of like, I find 5 friends to play Overwatch, I invite
them to a new server and your bot handles all our stuff, like an
assistant/office manager in a small office? Then I think some kind of
integration with ESL/FaceIT/toornament and all these other online
leagues/tourney platforms would be dope to have...I guess.

~~~
iEchoic
Yeah, exactly. An example of something the bot does that teams really like is
that if you're an Overwatch team (for instance) it will post a daily SR news
update, showing the SR leaderboard and who gained the most SR in the last 24
hours. A lot of our features would work for both, but I think that's an
example of one that works better for actual teams.

And yeah - competitive integrations would be way cool, and are something we're
working on doing more of.

------
Djvacto
So, I went in and tested it out, and it seems like certain games can't be
added. Do you manually choose which games to support? If so, what do you do
when a group/user wants to add a game that isn't in there? It seems like if
someone sees one of their games isn't supported, if it's their primary game,
they might just not use the service.

Are you looking into a way to let users add "Custom" games, or request support
for a game?

~~~
iEchoic
Yeah, we manually choose games to support right now. It was a goal from the
beginning to make it feel like you're immersed into your game's environment as
soon as you create a team, which requires us to have metadata and assets for
the given games. We do get feedback from users requesting games, and we have
analytics on what people type into the game suggestions box, so we tend to
pick up games that we're missing pretty quickly. I can see adding "custom"
games in the future (similar to how Twitch eventually opened up to IRL-style
streams), but probably not soon.

It's a bit of a tradeoff: like you mentioned, this does cause some users to
leave when they see that their game isn't available. On the other hand, it
does allow us to focus on building a really good experience for the games we
support.

~~~
2474
Could you allow users to submit a game? If a user is interesting enough in
using your system and having your game in the system, perhaps they would be
willing to do the work to gather all the required information.

Obviously it would need review by your team, for various reasons, but it might
be a viable way to get new games in the system faster, without being too much
of a burden to the team.

~~~
iEchoic
I do think there will be a lot of interesting cases where we can crowdsource
information (particularly around information like popular team comps, hero
names, list-type things like that), and will be exploring those more for sure.
The toughest part of that work is the image assets since they need to be done
in a particular way, but it might be interesting to see how possible it is
with some human-based Scale-like API.

~~~
2474
I wonder if there would be incentive for game development studios to use
Guilded?

I can imagine studios like Riot, Blizzard, or Epic signing up for a 'Studio'
account. Part of what comes with that role is the ability to add their own
games. So now you have a trusted source that could reliably do the game
addition work for you.

The incentive for them is a great opportunity to interact with their user base
and help foster a tight-knit community. I haven't thought about the details
too much but seems like an interesting idea.

Im interesting in what your thoughts would be around that idea?

------
plopz
Very cool, seems like a nicer version of enjin.

Something I noticed, I use the middle mouse to scroll and the page let me
scroll to the right into a giant empty space.

~~~
iEchoic
Grrrr, I've had 1-2 other people mention this so far, but we can't seem to
repro it. Mind posting or emailing me (in profile) the device/browser you're
on or anything else that might help us track it down? That'd be really
helpful. Thank you :)

~~~
plopz
Im using chrome 65 on windows 7 in a window of 1090x878

~~~
iEchoic
Will try to repro there now, thanks a lot.

~~~
plopz
If I delete the LandingCTAShowcase-container LandingCTAShowcase-container-
desktop element the problem is fixed. Looks like its the carousel of images
that are very wide and dont seem to be clipped.

~~~
iEchoic
This is the kind of feedback we only get on HN :) thanks a lot, will fix this.

------
fixmycode
looks fantastic! I would love a version of this but for board game groups, but
right now, I will organize my Civilization group with it

~~~
iEchoic
We've been getting quite a few requests for board game groups lately. I hadn't
considered that initially, but I think that's a pretty natural extension that
I could see us adding soon. Thanks :)

------
etrautmann
This strikes me as one of those ideas that seems so obvious in retrospect but
I hadn't thought of. Looks gorgeous, nice work!

~~~
iEchoic
I appreciate it, thank you :)

------
_raoulcousins
I don't really want to look at this at work. Is it only strictly for video
games? Teams are big in Magic: the Gathering (yes, Magic Online is technically
a video game but for most it's a testing and preparation tool for paper Magic
tournaments).

~~~
iEchoic
I've played on a MtG team before, good times. It's only for video games now,
but I think Magic is something we can/should definitely add.

------
rboling91
This looks awesome! I'm looking forward to using Guilded to find teammates for
AoE!

~~~
iEchoic
Thank you! AoE was my first online game ever, and still my favorite RTS of all
time (sorry Starcraft, I love you too), so it was especially fun to add that
one.

------
originalsimba
Only a tiny number of games represented. The idea is cool but to really shine
it should not require official support of specific games, and the officially
supported list should be a lot longer. Where's Day of Infamy? Rainbow Six? RTS
games? I'm assuming this list will grow with time. If you add new games every
day I think that would reflect positively on your product.

To be honest, a guild which is serious about itself would be much better
served by their own custom website in my opinion. I'm just trying to gently
say is there really a practical use for (yet another) of these websites?

