[Applied] Time to retire ZE?

[Bright]

ZE's been through their ups and downs. The ZE team has been doing a great job pushing out a lot of events, it just sucks that not a lot of people come to them. Maybe start thinking outside the box and see what's going to bring in people. More interactions between CA's and members, start using the sub section for ZE. If any of the ZE ATs, CAs, ET, Admin members ever need help or feedback y'all can always hit me up. I'm more than willing to help see this server get back on its feet again. 

[TheLegendaryDoge]

The scoreboard is technically wrong because after a while players get erased from the scoreboard if they are not active or have not joined the server in a while, so the "top 15" is not the real top 15 just like how i'm not really #2 on the ZE server. Also as a ZE player since early 2015 I agree the server has been on a hibernation for quite a while, and we haven't had our sweaty Sundays, etc. However, what I can say is that I love ZE, and it is still my #1 server to play on even if there aren't people, its fun to tryhard, I have had so many memories on it growing up, it has made me laugh and rage, I even got banned once for singing. No need to hate on ZE when other people have pointed out that ZE isn't the only server facing this issue.

[sWz]

11 hours ago, Kieran said:

Events do nothing for population. They are a luxury, not a solution, sorry dafty. Any success you see from them is mostly not sustainable. 

Maybe not a definitive ultimate solution, but to pretend like it hasn't worked in the past is straight up wrong. I mean, a few months back, ZE events were happening literally once a week and things were looking more than up. Even when events weren't happening, ZE still got 30-50 players on during discord @ seeding requests. As soon as a month went by with no events, ZE slowly faded and seeding jumpstarts stopped working. If it was a sudden and sharp drop, I'd agree with you, but the slow fade from that mini resurgence tells me a different story.

 

I also feel like this goes without saying, but the idea that ZE/TTT/MG should be shut down is absurd and it's annoying that it's even brought up anymore. It's clear as day that the game modes themselves aren't dead because other community's versions are doing fine.

 

 

[BoM]

12 minutes ago, ㅤDAFTㅤ said:

Maybe not a definitive ultimate solution, but to pretend like it hasn't worked in the past is straight up wrong. I mean, a few months back, ZE events were happening literally once a week and things were looking more than up. Even when events weren't happening, ZE still got 30-50 players on during discord @ seeding requests. As soon as a month went by with no events, ZE slowly faded and seeding jumpstarts stopped working. If it was a sudden and sharp drop, I'd agree with you, but the slow fade from that mini resurgence tells me a different story.

 

I also feel like this goes without saying, but the idea that ZE/TTT/MG should be shut down is absurd and it's annoying that it's even brought up anymore. It's clear as day that the game modes themselves aren't dead because other community's versions are doing fine.

 

 

^ once a week events are surprisingly effective and to think that don't work is pretty silly. They not only can jumpstart servers, but nowadays it's what a server needs to thrive. Fact is there are a lot of games that pull attention away from players that could be playing and/or hanging out here...and they all have things trying to grab the players attention. There are an obvious large combination of factors that go into making a server move in the right direction, but looking from the top and seeing all the work that gets done to improve the servers and add new things to them, at this point it really does come down to simply giving people a reason to get on ( in this instance events serve that purpose rather well).

[Kieran]

33 minutes ago, BoM said:

^ once a week events are surprisingly effective and to think that don't work is pretty silly. They not only can jumpstart servers, but nowadays it's what a server needs to thrive. Fact is there are a lot of games that pull attention away from players that could be playing and/or hanging out here...and they all have things trying to grab the players attention. There are an obvious large combination of factors that go into making a server move in the right direction, but looking from the top and seeing all the work that gets done to improve the servers and add new things to them, at this point it really does come down to simply giving people a reason to get on ( in this instance events serve that purpose rather well).

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the last time ZE experienced a lot of population around the summer months? I see there were weekly events all the way up till last month but I don't think the server was very populated. To me that resurgence looked to be more of a bunch of OG players seeding the servers for a bit and subsequently getting burnt out.

 

Regardless I think the goal should be to not having to constantly rely on events to maintain any server population. Population boosts from events have evidently not stuck with all the servers being empty now. The temporary momentum isn't transferring to long term success. I don't know much about the ZE community but I think its going to be hard to try and pull the existing ZE playerbase away from the more popular servers, if that's the goal. Building up a new ZE base might be even harder. I'm not going to speak much more about ZE as I'm really not familiar with the community and could be wrong about this stuff.

 

I was sort of going away from the topic of ZE to begin with and talking about servers in general as its a community wide issue. I don't mean to sound harsh or come off the wrong way but every attempt to grow this community has flopped in recent memory. All expansion servers and new CS servers thrived for a month or less and then died out. Now the servers that used to be our most popular are now mostly empty (with the exception of JB), even after countless management changes. It's definitely a worrisome trend which is why I brought up maybe evaluating this community's model as a whole.

 

 

[Kieran]

1 hour ago, ㅤDAFTㅤ said:

Maybe not a definitive ultimate solution, but to pretend like it hasn't worked in the past is straight up wrong.

I agree with you. Events get people on, but it hasn't shown itself to be a legitimate solution yet. We had the momentum and the events and nothing stuck.

[kit]

SG is basically dead until the summers months, like TTT pops during summer. 

[BoM]

15 minutes ago, Kieran said:

Regardless I think the goal should be to not having to constantly rely on events to maintain any server population. Population boosts from events have evidently not stuck with all the servers being empty now. The temporary momentum isn't transferring to long term success. I don't know much about the ZE community but I think its going to be hard to try and pull the existing ZE playerbase away from the more popular servers, if that's the goal. Building up a new ZE base might be even harder. I'm not going to speak much more about ZE as I'm really not familiar with the community and could be wrong about this stuff.

 

I was sort of going away from the topic of ZE to begin with and talking about servers in general as its a community wide issue. I don't mean to sound harsh or come off the wrong way but every attempt to grow this community has flopped in recent memory. All expansion servers and new CS servers thrived for a month or less and then died out. Now the servers that used to be our most popular are now mostly empty (with the exception of JB), even after countless management changes. It's definitely a worrisome trend which is why I brought up maybe evaluating this community's model as a whole.

Honestly I'll keep this short, as it's just such a broad topic we could go on forever about it...but this sort of thinking is what got us to where we are now. There is no need for some fundamental massive change in order to get people to stick around on the servers a little longer than they are inclined to currently. It comes down to much smaller changes and pushes from different parts of management to keep those changes rolling. The callback to new server expansions is grasping at nothing, because honestly its just shit we tried and it didn't work..nothing bad against the community they were long shots to begin with (minus Rust which got shot by the devs not us). As for our like 'big four', which is where anyone who really cares should be focused, yeah its concerning and we're taking steps...some big some small to both address people not playing in the servers so much and also just ways to generate activity and even growth without huge booming servers. The gaming world has shifted so much in the last few years, nobody needs statistics or historical anything to see that, and SG has always survived pretty damn well by finding ways to go with those changing waves...so we will look to continue to do just that.

[20 scrolls]

13 hours ago, Kieran said:

If its generally a CS server thing, we need to possibly look to transition to more popular and promising games. I think it could also be worth reflecting on how much gaming servers as a whole should fit into this community's future.

Want to point out that servers dying is not because of CSGO dying, because it's really not dying.

[sWz]

34 minutes ago, kit said:

SG is basically dead until the summers months, like TTT pops during summer. 

I don't subscribe to this notion of servers being dead or alive based on the time of year. 2019 and 2020 had perfectly sustained populations on most of our CSGO servers year round. Seasons might affect population, but they are not a determining factor.