bunch of dumb ideas

[jazzy]

not gonna try to respond to everything but-
 

On 8/30/2023 at 9:57 AM, Karma said:

I have actually been planning to run a community game night/discord event and hopefully just get everyone together to play some games and have some fun, maybe a few drinking games for those that choose to participate.

tinychat could happen again xd
 

On 8/30/2023 at 4:56 PM, Phoenix_ said:

Not knocking on the process, but at least from my eyes, it feels like there really hasn't been a new wave of players that stuck around since probably the start of covid. 

I think this is a main issue, literally just look at the break down of members who viewed this thread below and you can see very few people who viewed this are "new" to the community, in fact 90% already served many years in the community. i didn't cover it much but the difficulty is even though the surf/retakes/bhop servers might get people they get very little draw to discord. i'm not sure if that's just like a generational thing or not

i'm sure there's legit a ton of metrics but i just kind of look at player complaint/admin complaint/appeal bans and it's kind of obvious nobody joins here to appeal their ban at a higher rate these days. we don't even have an admin complaint in 2023, we have 3 player complaints in 2023, and 21 appeal bans. just roughly ballparking it but 2020 had 240 ban appeals. that means we have 11x less people making ban appeals. i can't really think of a more obvious sign that we do not have an influx of people coming here to even appeal their ban. and mind you the 21 appeals this year are partially inflated by goodguys appealing lol
 

On 8/30/2023 at 6:12 PM, EpicFP said:

Hot Take: They play games?

I think there's certainly people on surf/retakes/bhop playing games but they're not actually coming on here (discord,forums) so that's part of the problem imo. I know that this point has been covered earlier too
 

 

9 hours ago, delirium said:

Disagree on having AO's foot the bill on their own servers. While centralizing resources and ownership can be a burden at times it is overall a much more efficient way to manage and run an operation like this. Decentralizing leaves the door open for the people involved to do some very underhanded things if relationships sour.

It could be done two ways- you could maintain control of the servers and just have people paypal donate, or just relinquish control.

I guess I could expand more of where this idea partially came from and it was on a community I was (and still am on) a long time ago they had a forums that hosted multiple different communities and gave them board space for what they wanted. It was a mutual beneficial relationship as the communities overlapped but they still gave them their own space to do whatever they want with the server itself. I thought it was a great idea because it gave owners autonomy while giving them a backend to build stuff without worrying about shit like maintaining forums, irc, or the gameserver hw itself. When I look at SG it seems like they've kind of given more leeway in how server owners handle the server, this was more just an idea to handle some costs. I understand caution said money is no problem but I also wonder if it's necessary for him to pay $3k/yr in the first place.

As for "underhanded" you can still have backups to immutable object storage from each server box on a day/week/month backup cycle to low cost storage like wasabi ($6/1tb/mo). there really should never be a cause for concern at this point in terms of people deleting servers off boxes. the only main issue is losing an IP of a server as that can kill a favorites link, so typically that's why you'd want to maintain control of the servers themselves anyway.

Not really "omg you guys gotta do this" just something I had on my mind for many moons I thought I'd pass along
 

9 hours ago, delirium said:

allowing certain groups to run rampant and pushing other groups out due to interpersonal reasons has been the death sentence. 

i'd say this is the major issue, speaking as someone who was a dick back in the day, i think honestly there just needs to be some straightening up in the community which I know has partially happened

The best example I can give of this is I'm part of other communities where I'm willing to share more intimate details about myself, pictures of myself, etc. I would almost never, ever share anything more personal here. From what I've heard within a month or two me being back multiple people I had never met already knew details about me that I had not shared before on the forums/discord. It's fairly obvious why people do not want to interact here at times.

Just furthering this and don't want to name names here but are a couple people in this community who I share discords with are exactly the same way- far more willing to interact in the other discords and discuss many topics, their personal lives, etc. None of those details are ever shared here

edit forgot to add:
I had thought about a silly "don't say doxx" rule where if you joke about doxxing someone you can be muted/banned to curb those discussions more heavily. I'll say in the past at some places I've been there have been rules against sharing photos of people without their consent even if they had been posted by the person in that discord/forums before. It was mainly a rule to curb bullying type behavior and trolling. When BoM got perm'd here earlier this year I wasn't really a fan of people sharing his pictures because all this does is enable people and make them think it's ok to do that kind of shit as long as the people they're doing it "deserve it." well then the issue is who "deserves" to be bullied, etc.

[delirium]

tinychat killed their own platform 3-5 years ago by requiring subscriptions to have large rooms

 

 

13 hours ago, jazzy said:

It could be done two ways- you could maintain control of the servers and just have people paypal donate, or just relinquish control.

I guess I could expand more of where this idea partially came from and it was on a community I was (and still am on) a long time ago they had a forums that hosted multiple different communities and gave them board space for what they wanted. It was a mutual beneficial relationship as the communities overlapped but they still gave them their own space to do whatever they want with the server itself. I thought it was a great idea because it gave owners autonomy while giving them a backend to build stuff without worrying about shit like maintaining forums, irc, or the gameserver hw itself. When I look at SG it seems like they've kind of given more leeway in how server owners handle the server, this was more just an idea to handle some costs. I understand caution said money is no problem but I also wonder if it's necessary for him to pay $3k/yr in the first place.

As for "underhanded" you can still have backups to immutable object storage from each server box on a day/week/month backup cycle to low cost storage like wasabi ($6/1tb/mo). there really should never be a cause for concern at this point in terms of people deleting servers off boxes. the only main issue is losing an IP of a server as that can kill a favorites link, so typically that's why you'd want to maintain control of the servers themselves anyway.

Not really "omg you guys gotta do this" just something I had on my mind for many moons I thought I'd pass along
 

 

The clarification made is already how SG has operated since at least 2017 with AO's/SM's pretty much getting free reign on their servers without having to worry about doing any of the things you listed out. I'm not sure how others would view it, but, if I was having to pay for my own VM to host my own server there would be no point in doing it here and ultimately not gaining anything from it other than some community clout and maybe a small boost to initial population.

 

Opens the door to too many potential issues from the community's as well as the server owners perspective at the end of the day considering how volatile relationships are here.   

 

 

Quote

i'd say this is the major issue, speaking as someone who was a dick back in the day, i think honestly there just needs to be some straightening up in the community which I know has partially happened

The best example I can give of this is I'm part of other communities where I'm willing to share more intimate details about myself, pictures of myself, etc. I would almost never, ever share anything more personal here. From what I've heard within a month or two me being back multiple people I had never met already knew details about me that I had not shared before on the forums/discord. It's fairly obvious why people do not want to interact here at times.

Just furthering this and don't want to name names here but are a couple people in this community who I share discords with are exactly the same way- far more willing to interact in the other discords and discuss many topics, their personal lives, etc. None of those details are ever shared here

edit forgot to add:
I had thought about a silly "don't say doxx" rule where if you joke about doxxing someone you can be muted/banned to curb those discussions more heavily. I'll say in the past at some places I've been there have been rules against sharing photos of people without their consent even if they had been posted by the person in that discord/forums before. It was mainly a rule to curb bullying type behavior and trolling. When BoM got perm'd here earlier this year I wasn't really a fan of people sharing his pictures because all this does is enable people and make them think it's ok to do that kind of shit as long as the people they're doing it "deserve it." well then the issue is who "deserves" to be bullied, etc.

 

Yep, don't tell anyone anything you wouldn't want the entire community knowing is a good rule of thumb. Have to remember that the average demographic for people more involved in the discussions/hanging out portion of things was high school/early adults for the longest time and I'm sure you remember how gossipy those ages are.

 

People were sharing BoM's and others photos/photoshops long before he was permed. Just another example of things that come with the territory when you allow shit behaviors  to fester. Unfortunately for the community as a whole, a contingent of people that either couldn't see the writing on the wall or were being willfully ignorant allowed it to pass the point of no return. 

 

 

With all of that being said: It's refreshing to see someone who still cares enough to try. Keep up the good fight @jazzy

[Dominic]

I don't have an immense amount of time at this very moment but just touching on the rebranding / new domain thing - 100% agree. I ran rebranding by Caution not too long ago actually, and he was ok with it on the basis that it made sense, which I also agree with. There is a part of me that thinks Steam Gamers is a fitting name but also an attractive name as far as marketing goes, but I can also see the direct opposite side of that. For new domains, I ran a lot of new domains by the BDs just a few weeks ago. We'd probably want to hold off on jumping at new domains with the discussion about rebranding entirely on the table, but I agree with both statements. 

 

Really appreciate the thread man, tons of good points. I'll try to make it a point to respond to it all tomorrow, just super busy with moving into school right now. 

[Prez]

On 9/1/2023 at 9:27 PM, Dominic said:

I don't have an immense amount of time at this very moment but just touching on the rebranding / new domain thing - 100% agree. I ran rebranding by Caution not too long ago actually, and he was ok with it on the basis that it made sense, which I also agree with. There is a part of me that thinks Steam Gamers is a fitting name but also an attractive name as far as marketing goes, but I can also see the direct opposite side of that. For new domains, I ran a lot of new domains by the BDs just a few weeks ago. We'd probably want to hold off on jumping at new domains with the discussion about rebranding entirely on the table, but I agree with both statements. 

 

Really appreciate the thread man, tons of good points. I'll try to make it a point to respond to it all tomorrow, just super busy with moving into school right now. 

 

Purely curious because it was mentioned. Is there any way to get the old sg domain back? Pretty sure it has been like 8 years at this point

[Lucid]

Most games that come out these days don't allow for dedicated servers. So not being able to spin up dedicated servers on newer games hurts since a lot of people don't even play CS:S or G-,Mod anymore except for maybe once a month.

Forums for communities were all the rage in the 2005-2015 era, but most people now opt to use group finders on the official game discords.

Back pre-discord, forum communities were pretty much how you found like minded people to play with and talk on teamspeak/ventrillo, but sadly that time has mostly passed. 

I don't think there's really anything you can do to have people flooding back in, we just have to accept that the ERA of online forum communities is pretty much dead and I'm impressed steam-gamers is still around. I give ya'll props and it's refreshing to visit every now and again. 


 

[delirium]

14 hours ago, Lucid said:

Most games that come out these days don't allow for dedicated servers. So not being able to spin up dedicated servers on newer games hurts since a lot of people don't even play CS:S or G-,Mod anymore except for maybe once a month.

Forums for communities were all the rage in the 2005-2015 era, but most people now opt to use group finders on the official game discords.

Back pre-discord, forum communities were pretty much how you found like minded people to play with and talk on teamspeak/ventrillo, but sadly that time has mostly passed. 

I don't think there's really anything you can do to have people flooding back in, we just have to accept that the ERA of online forum communities is pretty much dead and I'm impressed steam-gamers is still around. I give ya'll props and it's refreshing to visit every now and again. 


 

forum traffic isnt the main issue. the CSGO servers no longer preforming on the levels they had previously is the main issue.

 

new people are not joining because there is no way for us to capture attention since the servers are effectively dead and the discord isn't far behind. 

 

community is circling the drain and without a major effort being poured into getting servers going it's just a matter of time.

 

I'm sure the leadership here wont let that happen right? bunch of smart people up there that are passionate about the community, I'm sure they're coming up with a plan to reinvigorate interest in the community right? 

 

168 players on GFL CSGO servers at 3AM EST FYI. CSGO community servers not dead.

 

 

again - 3AM EST and this is US servers only. Note that at the very least one of these servers is ran by people who used to play/manage here until shit went sideways and relationships got to a point where they couldn't be repaired. Would probably be very beneficial to still have those resources at this point but oh well. 

[delirium]

 

7PM EST update:

 

300 players (not counting HvH servers) on CSGO community servers from the first page of gametracker alone.

 

184 of those playing on servers ran and/or founded by former members here.

 

This isn't even counting several other games with dedicated servers that we've been successful in and just gave up after minor/major setbacks.

 

Community severs aren't dead; the dedication and motivation within this community is.

 

You let a couple of groups of (not even very good) trolls push away people from your servers and community over the last 2-3 years while also pushing out people who had the facilities to manage your servers and provide free content (maps, plugins, community curation) because they saw the writing on the walls and were critical of people with more imaginary clout than them.

 

I wonder why SG is on life support right? Certainly not decisions made out of pure spite to the detriment of the community as a whole right? Definitely not fence riding situations and reapplying Band-Aids constantly in order to keep a completely ignorant, demoralizing, and mostly useless contingent of players around because "at least they populate the servers/forums/discord" while failing to realize that enabling those groups was what would ultimately kill your community right? Unquestionably not continuing to enable staff that shows no signs of motivation/dedication/time for the community to hold decision making positions and represent your community while not even being in touch with it right?

 

Community has had the pedal pushed to the floor and cruise control enabled straight into a wall since the late 2010's. Sure, Valve isn't doing SG any favors with their mismanagement and neglect when it comes to community servers, however, SG also didn't do itself any favors by continuing to operate the way it has when it was pretty obvious to a lot of people that shit was going to hit the fan if things were not figured out. Unfortunately for those with ties to this community, shit didn't change.

 

Even as of this post only one (recently promoted) Director has had the common courtesy to address any of the points/suggestions at length or try to take initiative on. You would think that the people most invested in the success of the community would want to engage in discussions from individuals who still clearly want the community to succeed. Unless you're all PMing @jazzy unbeknownst to anyone else, it seems like even at the highest level there is an air of fatalistic nihilism for a community that all of you should be working to revive or at the very least continue to keep the life support machines plugged in if you still cared as much as you did on your grind to the positions that have been bestowed on you.

 

Not all of this is on the current team, but, it is the current teams job to clean the mess up nonetheless. Hopefully as previously stated there is a plan before the drain-circling/dead horse beating ends forever.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Caution]

Thanks for the ideas and opinions, Jazzy (and everyone else who contributed after). I’ve been reading, but have had no time to respond in depth. I’ll try and get a detailed response going tonight or tomorrow. 

[Cept For Her]

On 8/30/2023 at 1:29 AM, jazzy said:

5. Lean on Flavor of the Month (FOTM) opportunity. It looks like if you do FOTM, it pulls. I use something like Minecraft that came out a year or so ago as an example, which was hot and sexy for a few weeks, and this is going to lean into #6. But just observe trends and build out based on that. New game came out? Try to collect a couple of people to run a server and make that work, preferably someone who WANTS to do it. Once it fizzles, throw it away, that's totally ok!!!

On 8/30/2023 at 1:29 AM, jazzy said:

7. This is directed at everyone: Stop caring so much about growth, stop being a stick in the mud, stop being an asshole. Just have fun.

These two points kind of go hand in hand honestly. Growth is not going to happen so much by continuously doing in house events, and/or setting aside playing time with other community members on fun games. What that will do however, is keep people around as they will see fun activities happening on the regular that theyre welcome to participate in. 

 

Back in the 2019 era of Steam-Gamers when we were churning out community/server events left and right (we were running like 2-3 a week lol), the events were very populated and we were constantly getting new and old faces showing up to them. Black Rain had started the frequency of events by revitalizing the Events Team back then by asking everyone to shoot for making 2-3 events a month, when we had a team of about 4-6 people.

Around the september portion of that year, some new EMs were appointed and we kinda went away from the mandated 2-3 events a month quota, which didn't hurt right away, as people were still pushing out events left and right, and it allowed people some time to set up some more high quality, or complicated events. 

Somewhere down the line, less and less events kept getting made, and by this point idk what the state of the team was like as I was a year or two out of the internal discussions, but if I had to guess, I would say people holding that rank were again not being held to making/pushing out events. I mean hell, the entire Events forum got removed, and the team was shot and buried after being turned into Expansion Committee. 

 

To finally get to my point of dredging up all this past shit, in order to bring players in the community together, and maintain new members, you need to have those 5+ people that are willing to run at least a single event per month, and you need the coordination to not plan them all on the same day/weekend. Events could be as simple as a monthly movie night, GTAV sumo, playing Town of Salem, Among Us, Jackbox, anything. Hell, you could even just make an event to hop on one of the servers for an hour.

Currently you might not get much turnout doing this, but you can also see what events people are currently interested in by running them and also ASKING BEFORE taking all the time to plan and show up to coordinate such a timeline. The one thing you do need though is for someone to show up at the time you plan to do something. I saw too many times towards the end of the events era of SG that times were being planned upon, and then nobody, not even the coordinator, showed up.

 

TLDR: Get people to make events (dont matter how), and make sure people show up for those events. Have a backup coordinator or designate 2 people able to run the shit in case someone can't make it. This will help to retain new members once you figure out how to get them to show up on discord/forums.

[Caution]

On 8/29/2023 at 10:29 PM, jazzy said:

Some of these may be controversial that's aight. They're simply my opinion and stuff. I have been on the internet a long time and seen many forums and communities come and go.

 

 

1. Backup the data for JB, retakes #2, and CSS GG, and close them. They see no play from what I've seen, maybe retakes a little. gg.steam-gamers.net is the listed server FQDN on the server page and it literally is a dead DNS record. Optics matter, and if someone looks at your server page and sees 80% dead servers, it just looks dumb. Focus on a couple projects rather than spreading thin.

 

 

2. Get rid of the $250 (or however much) OVH dedi that sees almost no utilization and move to hosting each server on its own VPS on a provider like Linode/Akamai (or continue using OVH) and have the server owners pay for them. If the owners want to run a server, they can pay for the costs to run it. Whatever money (if there is money left from the haydays) Caution has left should be used for step 3. This is highly controversial and I totally stole this idea from Haggard's spin off community back in 2014.

with shared resources like sourcebans just have another server for that with iptables for whitelisting the gameservers to access or use private networking on whatever provider you're using. i partially recommend this because it's easier to size up/size down shit this way btw. also not to stroke my own dick but ten years ago im pretty sure i told you guys to buy the hw and colo somewhere and if you wouldve LISTENED TO ME THAT WOULDVE SAVED WAY MORE MONEY REEEE

 

 

3. Buy a new domain that doesn't suck and rebrand. I'm sorry to say this but the day you lost steamgamers.com was the death knell for making this work. steamgamers.com is already a tough domain to run in 2023 (yes, I know you lost it way before 2023) with the amount of whack-ass phish sites, and honestly, it just attracts weird people thinking this is a Steam general help forum. But having a .net and a hyphen makes it progressively harder to retain people, especially when your logo has no hyphen or .net in the actual logo itself, attributing to people not remembering how to actually get to the site too.

My 2c is: buy a .io or .dev domain, think of a few cool ideas, and start getting community feedback. Rely on ideas or tributes to our predecessors and positive things. Make it short and sweet and accessible and not weird.

Going back to ZombieMurder might be cool, but honestly, almost none of us were even around during that time anyway. It might be time to hit the drawing board on this and consider options, get community input, and move forward.

(obviously keep steam-gamers.net and just redirect them to the new site)
 

4. Engage groups of players instead of individual people to run servers. I think the reason TTT has somewhat worked well is because it's not just one person doing all the work. It is a couple of people, and they lean on each other to revive the server from time to time, and that is what gets the growth. I don't really know/think that TTT has paid off that well for the community in terms of return, but I think part of that is back to #3 among other things.

 

 

5. Lean on Flavor of the Month (FOTM) opportunity. It looks like if you do FOTM, it pulls. I use something like Minecraft that came out a year or so ago as an example, which was hot and sexy for a few weeks, and this is going to lean into #6. But just observe trends and build out based on that. New game came out? Try to collect a couple of people to run a server and make that work, preferably someone who WANTS to do it. Once it fizzles, throw it away, that's totally ok!!!

 

6. Stop trying to do too much everywhere all at once and just do a couple good things and be good at it

6.5. Because 6 was lame I wanted to say stop being omnipotent gods and just get rid of internal discussions about direction or server ideas, just post them publicly and talk about them publicly. Take in community input and work with it and see what sounds cool and what people might like. I literally have no fucking clue what you guys are working on and I promise you nobody is eagerly anticipating a release date on anything you present, just be transparent. If someone gives you shit in a thread don't worry because 90% of the people who would complain at you do not have any interest in seeing this place grow and are merely here to crab bucket mentality you. This plays in heavily to #5 about using flavor of the month and #4 about engaging groups of players to do stuff

 

 

7. This is directed at everyone: Stop caring so much about growth, stop being a stick in the mud, stop being an asshole. Just have fun.

 

I know the above were all suggestions to try and grow, but I actually wanted to take a second and level set with you. The reason this community is not flourishing is because it's literally not a community. A community is a group of people with common interest, who work together and share common goals. Half of the community here is literally non stop up someone's ass 24/7. And honestly, for many years SG was the epitome of that and I participated and many others did and still do

I think people forget we're here to play games because they're fun, not because it's a side hustle or grind.



Few other things that deserve no numbers:

Already doing this but just give admin to people who seem OK. You guys basically did it with elfbarf and it worked out fine.
I would quit doing perms at this point and just hand out 1yrs which should be enough time to help people get straight and stop doing whatevs. perm for illegal shit is still aight. yes, even hacking can just be a 1yr. chances are they're not hacking a whole ass year later
I have some discord ideas but dont want to write them out but tldr just simplify shit and just have general video game channel instead of 20 small ones



giving up on grammar shit now

really hot take opinions:
just get rid of BD's you guys are literally cycling them every 3 months. have the current BD's be with AO's (and TA's who have AO) and have them all just do decisions
stop with the community meetings just post on here the ideas and let people discuss. i say this because i can never make that shit lol

ill think of more shit

I’m still waiting on the other house I bought to close, so won’t be moved in with internet until this week, but not sure when I’ll be able to go back and pick up my computer. Hopefully before the end of the month. With that being said, I’ve been very limited in discussions on Discord with the rest of the BD’s, but there are a few discussions happening right now with all of this, as well as a few ideas I want to bring up as well.

 

Without purposefully trying to be too vague, your first two ideas are being talked about in Discord, and figuring out in what direction we want to go. AO’s definitely will not be required to pay for their own servers…I’d probably lose all the volunteers tomorrow if that were to happen lol. We’re talking about restructuring with the dedi in general, and figuring out if we want to go smaller or bigger to try and expand into new things. None of that should really matter to any of you guys, I’d think, as I foot the bill for it entirely anyways. 1 and 2 will probably tie into each other when we figure out what direction will work best. Expect a community meeting and / or discussion soon where this will definitely be a topic. I haven’t brought it up with the other BD’s yet, but I do want to possibly integrate having AO’s be able to approve admin apps, and then if no one wants to put their name next to an approval, we’ll kind of review it as BD’s and figure out if we should approve or reapply it.

 

I agree with you for # 3. I think that when we moved on from the .com, we weren’t anticipating Ryan wanting to hold the ownership for this long. And at some point it just sort of became the new norm. For those of you who don’t know, I added the hyphen because my attorney advised I do that to avoid a legal pissing contest between Ryan and myself, because both of us could have contested ownership of SG. I believe the latest idea with this is to open some private forms and get some ideas for us to narrow down some contenders and take it to a community decision. Of course, keeping in mind what you mentioned in your second post.

 

I agree with you on both 4 & 5. Most of that is going to come from us getting requests from players in general to revive a certain server or to try a new game. The most basic way to put this is: if we’ve got someone wanting to manage a server that is currently an AO or we can relatively justify promoting to an AO level, then we can probably make it happen. We were just talking about this the other day for a battle bit server, hypothetically.

 

I heavily, heavily agree with you on 6.5. Moving on past the ‘haters gonna hate’ fact, I have brought up an idea a few weeks ago about us posting a lot more publicly on what each BD is doing (at least monthly), as well as hosting more ‘shoot the shit’ type of meetings. That lets players see the notes that we’re posting (things we’ve done, in the process of doing, or thinking about doing over the next month or so) and allows them to reach out if they’ve got some opinions or insight to give. This isn’t meant to be all inclusive or paragraphs long, it would just be a BD keeping a notepad, more or less, of bullet points the public can read. I’m not sure yet what the best way to go about doing this would be, but it could be flexible and adapt to whatever suits the needs of transparency. I can promise we are not intentionally trying to keep things at the AO / BD level, unless they need to be for privacy reasons of some sort, it just gets easy to talk in one discord channel without a million other people being able to comment and us get lost along the way. But now that I think about it, we could probably have a public channel where we can discuss stuff as BD’s and just turn posting off for everyone else. Both would probably be a good way to go.

 

The troll thing got brought up a few times, and we try to handle what we can when we see it. Ultimately, a lot of us don’t know when it’s friends fucking around vs. people just being dicks. We try and intervene when we can, and we will probably need to make a decision as a community and see how we all want to go forward and figure out what sort of shit we want tolerated and what we don’t. This can be a topic at the meeting as well. 

 

 

On 9/3/2023 at 7:11 PM, Prez said:

 

Purely curious because it was mentioned. Is there any way to get the old sg domain back? Pretty sure it has been like 8 years at this point

There is not a reasonable method.

 

2 hours ago, Cept For Her said:

These two points kind of go hand in hand honestly. Growth is not going to happen so much by continuously doing in house events, and/or setting aside playing time with other community members on fun games. What that will do however, is keep people around as they will see fun activities happening on the regular that theyre welcome to participate in. 

 

Back in the 2019 era of Steam-Gamers when we were churning out community/server events left and right (we were running like 2-3 a week lol), the events were very populated and we were constantly getting new and old faces showing up to them. Black Rain had started the frequency of events by revitalizing the Events Team back then by asking everyone to shoot for making 2-3 events a month, when we had a team of about 4-6 people.

Around the september portion of that year, some new EMs were appointed and we kinda went away from the mandated 2-3 events a month quota, which didn't hurt right away, as people were still pushing out events left and right, and it allowed people some time to set up some more high quality, or complicated events. 

Somewhere down the line, less and less events kept getting made, and by this point idk what the state of the team was like as I was a year or two out of the internal discussions, but if I had to guess, I would say people holding that rank were again not being held to making/pushing out events. I mean hell, the entire Events forum got removed, and the team was shot and buried after being turned into Expansion Committee. 

 

To finally get to my point of dredging up all this past shit, in order to bring players in the community together, and maintain new members, you need to have those 5+ people that are willing to run at least a single event per month, and you need the coordination to not plan them all on the same day/weekend. Events could be as simple as a monthly movie night, GTAV sumo, playing Town of Salem, Among Us, Jackbox, anything. Hell, you could even just make an event to hop on one of the servers for an hour.

Currently you might not get much turnout doing this, but you can also see what events people are currently interested in by running them and also ASKING BEFORE taking all the time to plan and show up to coordinate such a timeline. The one thing you do need though is for someone to show up at the time you plan to do something. I saw too many times towards the end of the events era of SG that times were being planned upon, and then nobody, not even the coordinator, showed up.

 

TLDR: Get people to make events (dont matter how), and make sure people show up for those events. Have a backup coordinator or designate 2 people able to run the shit in case someone can't make it. This will help to retain new members once you figure out how to get them to show up on discord/forums.

I think there is a lot of good info contained here to keep in mind when pushing forward. I agree with everything here. 

 

 

 

 

As a few people have brought up, we’re moving into an era where forums in general are just being overtaken by Discord. We’re in talks of trying to streamline more shit to Discord, such as admin apps, notes, meetings, ideas, threads, discussions, etc. Even as BD’s, we basically don’t have forum discussions anymore. We are pretty much entirely on Discord threads at this point. While I certainly don’t want to stop posting information and handling community things on the forums, I think the priority needs to be Discord. I still want to keep the forums updated and post here, of course, but we should definitely be focusing on getting more members in Discord. So we’ll definitely be trying to move as much as we can to it; I believe Dominic or someone also had an idea of giving out or something to new people as well, which will hopefully help out some.

 

Rest assured, all of us want [NEW COMMUNITY NAME REDACTED] to succeed. We are busy in our own lives and I am extremely thankful to have the dedication of people here willing to come in and do what they can to make this place prosper. Some people are going through some pretty heavy shit right now, and still find a way to log on here and do what they can to help, and for that I am extremely grateful. I am extremely optimistic that we will find the right combination of things to do that will make us continue forward.