World of Warcraft guilds can now talk to each other across Discord and the game. Blizzard has added Discord account linking and guild chat mirroring to both modern World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft: Forever. Messages posted in a linked Discord channel show up in guild chat, and guild chat shows up in Discord. That means raid planning, PvP recruiting or ordinary chatter with guildmates can carry on when you’re away from your PC.
Linking your account
Each player links their own account from the in-game settings. Open the Game Menu with Escape, go to Options, and look in the Social tab for the new Enable Discord Functionality option. A few extra screens follow to complete the link. Blizzard recommends signing in to Discord before you start, since Discord will also ask you to approve the connection.
Linking matters for what other people see. If a player hasn’t connected their account, their in-game messages won’t be passed on to the Discord channel.
Players can also pick which name appears in-game when they post from Discord, using the Display Name dropdown:
- Default: the game’s own choice, which is currently the last online character
- Last Online Character Name: the most recent character on your Battle.net account that’s in the guild
- Discord Global Name: your global name on Discord
Setting it up for a guild
Before a guild can be linked, whoever runs the guild’s Discord server has to give the chosen channel the right permissions: Manage Channels, View Channel and Send Messages. Once that’s done, the rest happens in World of Warcraft, and either the guild leader or an officer with the right guild permissions can handle it:
- Press J to open the Guild & Communities window and go to the Roster tab.
- Click Guild Settings in the bottom right corner.
- Pick Discord Settings from the Guild Control dropdown.
- Choose one of your Discord servers, then select a channel that has linking permissions and link it.
The settings window lists every Discord server you belong to, but you can only link channels where the permissions are set up correctly.
Guild leaders can also choose where Discord messages land. They can go straight into the normal /guild channel or into a separate /discord channel in the game, and this can be changed at any time. Messages are marked so you can tell whether they came from Discord or from inside World of Warcraft, and players can set up their chat tabs to suit how much of the Discord traffic they want to see.
Because the feature works in both modern World of Warcraft and WoW: Forever, guilds playing either version can use it. For guilds that already organize everything on Discord, the officer chat and in-game guild chat no longer need to be kept in sync by hand.
Source: World of Warcraft official news.
