How to Measure Discord Community Popularity with Dashscored

Online communities have different houses. At Stream Hatchet, we focus on exploring live streaming platforms where streamers and their viewers shape and reflect the popularity of various trends. But this is just one node in a vast, interconnected world of forums, servers, and other meeting places: What can game publishers and brands learn by combining live streaming insights with other communities?

Like, say, Discord.

On Discord, users with similar interests can easily find and connect with each other in a more organic way, interacting directly via voice chat. And (though we hesitate to say it) Discord has a big advantage over live streaming platforms: Shared server members often feel on equal footing with each other. So it’s no surprise that game brands and publishers want to know how their products are discussed and promoted on Discord servers.

And that’s where our guest poster today comes in: Dashscored. We’ll let their team take it from here…

Community in VRGE: A New Look at Discord – by Dashscored’s Andrew Molchany

Anticipation is a double-edged sword. Some of the fastest growing and most active servers this holiday season are around games that are expected to be released any day now. Fans are hungry for updates!

But some other games focus on lasting power: Discord associated with the game has stabilized at lower overall membership numbers, with the priority being continued community engagement over building anticipation.

Discord users usually check servers based on the topics they are interested in, but they all have different feelings. At Dashscored, we use multi-server analytics bots to dive deeper into the surface-level motivations and habits of these individuals. We recently released a new way to think about Discord communities – a multi-dimensional system based on vibe, reach, growth & engagement (hence, VRGE).

Look VRGE Leaderboard from Dashscored Here.

With our bot on your server or network of servers, you can get deep insights into your community trends.

Even without our bot, we’ve implemented a lightweight version of the VRGE framework to create leaderboards on nearly five thousand servers with public invites.

Atmosphere is everything to do with the tone and topic of the conversation, not just whether the conversation is friendly or toxic, but also if the conversation is more competitive or collaborative, heavily political left or right, feels official vs. fan driven, etc.

Reach is simply a measure of community server membership.

Growth is a measure’s trend over time, which can show patterns such as steady growth, big spikes, churn vs. churn. stability, and net decline. Most servers show different periods of rapid growth, and this metric helps moderators find and understand those key periods.

Engagement all metrics relate to how active members are, both on Discord and, if you have the Dashscored bot installed, specifically on your server channels.

Similar to TV or film ratings, Dashscored will highlight a number of categories. For example, here’s a large profile picture server that Dashscored automatically flagged as adult/nsfw.

This is obvious, but other signs indicate whether a server appears political, non-collaborative, commercial, exclusive, or narrowly focused.

Dashscored’s ‘exclusive’ flag doesn’t necessarily mean people aren’t allowed in, but rather that the servers cater to a very specific audience rather than a general crowd. For example, this Bitcoin-focused server is marked as ‘exclusive’ and ‘narrowly focused’, but it might just be what you’re looking for.

Examples of Popular Discord Communities

By playing around with leaderboards ahead of the holidays, our team identified eight interesting and sizable communities with high levels of recent growth, chat engagement, and/or friendly atmosphere. Neither Dashscored nor Stream Hatchet can prove it Actually membership experience on this server, but based on VRGE metrics, it stands out as an example of a successful Discord community today.

Popular RPG Servers tend to have high levels of engagement, and here are a few that caught our eye – some for long-standing games, and some new games:

Friendship: The new title’s official Discord (played in early access) with over 125,000 members, is not a discovery, but it is highlighted on the leaderboard by proactively creating a positive collaborative atmosphere and seeing rapid growth of engaged members. The Arc team (the game’s publisher) explicitly invites input on development as well as open discussion, group creation, and sharing of tactics.

ClicksenseRP: FiveM in Spanish (GTA V roleplay) server launched in April 2023 and now has around 11,000 members, where “gaming experiences are combined with the boundless creativity of our community.”

MapleStorySEA: With over 11,000 members and a high level of activity, the server recently reached level 9^th its birthday is in November and claims to be the largest community led Maple Stories Southeast Asia Server. In addition to resource guides, conversations, and occasional giveaways, members also show up to organize physical meetups and outings in the region. (MapleStory is one of the original side-scrolling MMORPGs).

Soul Frame: Another interesting one, this is the official Discord for the highly anticipated Digital Extremes release. This server has been around since 2022, but has recently grown rapidly to have 135,000 members, no doubt that it will grow closer to its originally anticipated release date of 2025.

DEDICATION: Ankama’s official server for their MMORPG, this 12,000-person server has been online since 2019 and continues to welcome players of all levels for general conversation, Q&A about gameplay, sharing opinions on updates, and looking for other players to group with.

Another stage of highly engaged community members is anime themed:

Vanguards Anime Trading Center: Coverage of this Discord community would not be complete without its massiveness Roblox servers, but here we are not talking about official Discord servers with millions of members. Trading Hub is a busy server with 30,000 members that emphasizes trusted moderation to keep interactions safe and prevent spammers.

Pocket Anime: This server growth (over 140,000 members) coincided with the release of the game’s Phase 2 trailer in November. There’s a fan base for open world creature collecting games and crossover buzz on YouTube and Reddit surrounding the launch of Phase 2. This one is a huge hype machine, and even server invites are being monetized. By Dashscored’s definition, that’s a bit of a turn off.

We also want to highlight a indie studios leverages Discord to build its community:

AdHoc Studios: The one-year-old Discord AdHoc now has nearly 43,000 members watching updates on AssignTheir interactive ‘superhero workplace comedy’. Discord invites members to share fan art and discuss their favorite interactive narrative games, not just AdHoc games, which helps create a community-centric atmosphere.

Further Insights into the Discord Community

If you find this kind of Discord community insight interesting, check out more of what we do at Dashscored.com: We offer in-depth multi-server analysis including engagement levels, sentiment, topic and chat summaries, the impact of events on member behavior, and more via installable bots, with a free basic tier.

From our full-service bot network, we also gathered some additional insights leading up to the holiday season that we wanted to share.

The first is funny: Call it a bug or call it a feature, but Discord continues to recognize “Wallpaper Engine” as a game, and it immediately climbs the holiday leaderboard. It was the 6th^th most played games on Dashscored supported servers in December 2025, up from 8^th in October 2025 and 17^th in November 2024.

Second, Roblox surged to the #1 most played title among Discord Activities, just came out Fortnite who was the biggest leader last year. Fortnite has more durability than Marvel Rivalswhich was #2 in December 2024 but dropped to 11^th this season (just below words at #10). It is a testament to their resilience Fortnite and also the value of ease of access as a Contention Activity.

Game studios should note that their versions of game activities provide discoverability by reaching a player’s current friends.

Closing Thoughts on Stream Hatchet

As you can see, the Dashscored team provides innovative insights into the Discord community. We would like to provide more insight into their company for anyone interested in getting in touch:

Dashscored provides analysis of high-impact fan communities via Discord. By bridging the data gap between moderation and development teams, Dashscored automates multi-server insights that make it easier to develop authentic communities and more quickly iterate on product and content updates.

Dashscored was incubated at Stride, Inc., a large educational technology company based in Virginia, to manage their Esports community and has grown to serve global clients in community gaming, indie and AAA game development, brand partnerships, membership organizations, and universities who all use Discord.

Learn more about Dashscored at: www.dashscored.com

And connect with the team on: Choose Date & Time – Calendly

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