NoQ wrote:making a concerted effort to change the community's behavior
Are you ready to provide even a rough estimate for the amount of effort? Is it something that can be achieved, say, by writing a forum post? An advertisement on the official website? A post in any social network group? A video on youtube? How much effort would such propaganda campaign take in order to reach its target audience? Does any of the places mentioned above actually contain a significant percentage of the target audience? Does a large part of the target audience speak English?
There's a lot of propaganda i ever wanted to make: stop kicking noobs, stop faking ranks, stop cheating, play classic-style maps, arrange games in the chat. I've put quite a bit of effort into some of those, and succeeded in none. I'd have had a look at success stories for similar situations.
I agree, its not easy. It might be good to start a separate thread about this... The main goal is to grow the community, things like not kicking new players are a vital piece of that larger goal. A lot of existing players use the forums and IRC, so as far as trying to herd the proverbial herd of cats, those are logical places to start. But how do we reach more people to swell the ranks?
I am glad you mentioned social media. If we want to reach the most people possible, which we obviously do, I think it would be smart to make better usage of social media. Social media is a great tool to expose people to the game. I looked up Warzone 2100 on facebook and found the
Warzone 2100 Facebook page. Lets do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, just to get a very rough idea of how many people we could reach.
The Warzone FB page has 2147 people liking it. This means that every time it sends out a message, some amount of those people will see that message, lets say a conservative number of 1500 of the 2147 people see that message. If we can get even a small percentage of those people to like/comment it will expose lots of their friends to the game, lets say 5% of the 1500, and assume each of those people has 200 friends. Lets also assume that based on the FB algorithms for what to display on news feeds only 25% of those friends see their friend liking/commenting on the WZ2100 message. 1500 people in group * .05 like/comment rate= 75 people like/commenting -> 75 people like/commenting * 200 friends per person =15000 friends -> 15000 *.25 Facebook news feed share rate=3750 people. Even if this calculation is off by an order of magnitude its still a large amount of people. Looking at the 8 posts since 2013, they all have at least 50 likes, some more then 100, and people commenting on them.
My point is that the Facebook page is key to attracting new players, even just a monthly message about anything really will help. The page has not sent out a message since June 25 2014!
There is another Facebook thing, not really sure what it would be considered, but it has 3371 people liking it.
Here I think it displays when people share things related to Warzone on Facebook.
There is a public group that has 334 people
Here.
There is a very active Russian community on vk, it would be good to include them as well.
If we were to have large groups of new players flooding game lobbies it would cause some changes. "Pro' players maybe more likely to arrange games in IRC, and/or use a common PW among experienced players. Right now there are only a few new players here and there, so you can open a lobby and only the regulars and a few noobs will typically join. Its just easier to kick out the few noobs then to use a PW.