Original Post
Another "forum is dead" thread
Honestly, I've never seen the forum this dead before. I joined back in 2009, but didn't really use the forum massively until 2011. There were posts, at least, every 10 minutes in the off-topic sub-forum, but now? Last post 1 day ago, 5 days ago, 1 week ago, 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, 4 weeks ago, Feb 20, etc.
Could this be because of the reboot of wibbles back in 2016, or has the community actually diminished considerably? The 'currently active users' used to be around 200, now it's down to 70.
What happened? I mean, lots of people here only used the forum, so users supposedly getting bored of the game couldn't have had that big of an effect.
Discussion is pretty much dead now too.
Could this be because of the reboot of wibbles back in 2016, or has the community actually diminished considerably? The 'currently active users' used to be around 200, now it's down to 70.
What happened? I mean, lots of people here only used the forum, so users supposedly getting bored of the game couldn't have had that big of an effect.
Discussion is pretty much dead now too.
Originally Posted by Mallymkun
Honestly, I've never seen the forum this dead before. I joined back in 2009, but didn't really use the forum massively until 2011. There were posts, at least, every 10 minutes in the off-topic sub-forum, but now? Last post 1 day ago, 5 days ago, 1 week ago, 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago, 4 weeks ago, Feb 20, etc.
Could this be because of the reboot of wibbles back in 2016, or has the community actually diminished considerably? The 'currently active users' used to be around 200, now it's down to 70.
What happened? I mean, lots of people here only used the forum, so users supposedly getting bored of the game couldn't have had that big of an effect.
Discussion is pretty much dead now too.
The playerbase is also declining pretty fast, goes hand in hand with the forums.
Originally Posted by cowmeat
The playerbase is also declining pretty fast, goes hand in hand with the forums.
Yeah, I remember it went up considerably for a little while when Markiplier played it back in 2014, but the numbers didn't hold up (probably because the majority of newcomers were under 12 years old) and just gradually decreased since then.
Plus, you just don't get quality threads like Tori-investigations anymore.
The staff makes 0 effort to present the game to a new generation of players through advertisements. A game cannot grow if it's not being talked about, and I can guarantee nobody is talking about toribash outside these forums.
I don't give a flyin' fladoodle
Yeah, it's probably safe to say Wibbles has contributed heavily to the new inactivity of Off-Topic. Given a choice for general discussion between a moderated board and a mostly free board, people seem to prefer posting in the latter.
On the broader 'forum death' issue -
I'd be extremely interested (and I'm sure I've asked this before) to see some legit statistics on this. There's no way to identify the severity of the situation if we don't have access to the hard statistics that tells us this. What is measurable becomes manageable. Anecdotal evidence like 'I remember there being 200 currently active users on average, now there's 70', isn't good enough to paint the full picture.
If we have access to this information, we can begin to inspect. We can probably assume it'll mostly be a descending graph, but there'll surely be miniature peaks and dips within it. If we can look at a peak, date it, and associate it with a cause, then that would let us know some of the things we could be doing to increase activity.
Similarly, we can look at the dips on the graph and investigate how they came to be. We might be able to backtrack on some them (if the nature of the specific situation allows).
Same thing could be done with the ingame playerbase, though I suspect doing so will not provide us with as great insight as an analysis of the forums, though it would definitely be worth undertaking.
---
I'm assuming the higher staff are competent and they're doing all this already, behind the scenes - If they're not they need to pull their finger out..
If they are, I recommend they give the data to the rest of us as well. 200 brains working on the same problem will result in 200 different answers. Discard the bad answers as bad and incorporate the good answers into your gameplay.
I suggested something similar to this ages ago when the clan rework was being discussed by the clan staff (you can guess how that went, given the arrogant idiocy of previous clan admins). I wanted us to present our plan to the community first before marching ahead and implementing it. There were certainly things we missed, and having an extra 300 eyes on the document, offering input, would have definitely resulted in a product that the community would be more satisfied with. This isn't a 'too many cooks in the kitchen' type deal, firstly because it's not a problem that one-man is responsible for, but secondly, and more importantly (and as I've already said) we can just discard the shit answers. The shit doesn't go in the food.
Sir did a really great thing earlier this year when he opened up that community survey about match-making. I'm hoping he'll do the same thing for the clan rework when that time comes. I'm hoping he'll do the same thing for this whole forum+game death issue as well. Current thinking seems to be that all we need to do is fix the game itself (difficulty curve, tutorials, match-making) and fix how people discover the forums. If we accomplish that, then we focus on advertising and bringing people in, since they'll stick around (Rouxster, this current gameplan addresses your complaint, though admittedly not any time soon).
That gameplan may well be a great course to follow, but I absolutely still am certain that we would only profit from having the community investigate the data (in addition to just the tiny group doing that now) and offer their now-educated input on the situation. We can't help if we don't have the information. All we'd be doing is basing our input on bullshit and hearsay.
On the broader 'forum death' issue -
I'd be extremely interested (and I'm sure I've asked this before) to see some legit statistics on this. There's no way to identify the severity of the situation if we don't have access to the hard statistics that tells us this. What is measurable becomes manageable. Anecdotal evidence like 'I remember there being 200 currently active users on average, now there's 70', isn't good enough to paint the full picture.
If we have access to this information, we can begin to inspect. We can probably assume it'll mostly be a descending graph, but there'll surely be miniature peaks and dips within it. If we can look at a peak, date it, and associate it with a cause, then that would let us know some of the things we could be doing to increase activity.
Similarly, we can look at the dips on the graph and investigate how they came to be. We might be able to backtrack on some them (if the nature of the specific situation allows).
Same thing could be done with the ingame playerbase, though I suspect doing so will not provide us with as great insight as an analysis of the forums, though it would definitely be worth undertaking.
---
I'm assuming the higher staff are competent and they're doing all this already, behind the scenes - If they're not they need to pull their finger out..
If they are, I recommend they give the data to the rest of us as well. 200 brains working on the same problem will result in 200 different answers. Discard the bad answers as bad and incorporate the good answers into your gameplay.
I suggested something similar to this ages ago when the clan rework was being discussed by the clan staff (you can guess how that went, given the arrogant idiocy of previous clan admins). I wanted us to present our plan to the community first before marching ahead and implementing it. There were certainly things we missed, and having an extra 300 eyes on the document, offering input, would have definitely resulted in a product that the community would be more satisfied with. This isn't a 'too many cooks in the kitchen' type deal, firstly because it's not a problem that one-man is responsible for, but secondly, and more importantly (and as I've already said) we can just discard the shit answers. The shit doesn't go in the food.
Sir did a really great thing earlier this year when he opened up that community survey about match-making. I'm hoping he'll do the same thing for the clan rework when that time comes. I'm hoping he'll do the same thing for this whole forum+game death issue as well. Current thinking seems to be that all we need to do is fix the game itself (difficulty curve, tutorials, match-making) and fix how people discover the forums. If we accomplish that, then we focus on advertising and bringing people in, since they'll stick around (Rouxster, this current gameplan addresses your complaint, though admittedly not any time soon).
That gameplan may well be a great course to follow, but I absolutely still am certain that we would only profit from having the community investigate the data (in addition to just the tiny group doing that now) and offer their now-educated input on the situation. We can't help if we don't have the information. All we'd be doing is basing our input on bullshit and hearsay.
Last edited by Ele; Mar 29, 2017 at 05:17 PM.
