Sonic might be all about going fast, but SEGA’s newly launched official Discord discovered on its first night that sometimes you really do need the brakes.
The company opened the new Sonic the Hedgehog community on October 5, inviting fans to talk about the series, meet other players and find people to race against in Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds. Sonic’s official account announced the server as a new community for “all things Sonic the Hedgehog”, and fans wasted absolutely no time piling in.
Within hours, tens of thousands of users had joined and the different chatrooms were flying by so quickly that ordinary conversation became difficult to follow. Slow mode was enabled early in an attempt to calm things down, but opening night still turned into a mixture of memes, spam, excited fans and users testing exactly how far they could push the server’s rules.
Some went considerably further than that. Reports and screenshots shared after launch showed profanity, discriminatory language and other material that quickly drew the attention of moderators, while bans began rolling out across the server. At the same time, some fans complained that the automated moderation was being a little too enthusiastic. With some users reported having been caught by automatic bans accidentally.
Eventually, SEGA began taking individual chatrooms offline and restricting who could post while the moderation team tried to get on top of the traffic. The Discord itself remained available, but channels have been moving between open and restricted states as the team adjusts to the sheer number of people trying to use them at once.
It has certainly made for a louder debut than the company probably imagined, but there is quite a bit more to the project than one very busy evening. The Discord is designed as an official home for the wider Sonic community rather than one particular game, bringing fans into the same space as SEGA staff and developers, with multiple sides of the international Sonic brand involved.
SEGA also hopes to bring staff members and special guests into the community from time to time for direct interactions with fans. There is just one rather understandable request attached to that idea: “treat them kindly so we can convince them to return!”
For now, SEGA has the slightly less glamorous job of getting opening-night traffic under control. The server is still there, the fans certainly showed up, and the moderation team now has a much clearer idea of what happens when you put a massive Sonic community into one live chat all at once.
Maybe “slow mode” was always destined to lose that race.
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