Ok, I will try to explain my opinion about it, but I have to warn you that it might be rather abstract and presented like a lecture and everything. I also have to warn you that I am very tired atm, so this might not make that much sense
Dark wrote:I know Aveox has a PvE alliance guild - Why not ask them to join?
I don't have a PvE guild. I am member of a 1st class PvE guild, nothing more. And I have already contacted my guild leader about possible joining. That's the best I can do.
Soupy wrote:once you have a core of people you can build on it, I dont think we have a core yet.
This community does have a core, and a strong one. A lot of us have been here for quite some time (Starwolf joined something like 1,5 years ago, and it was already a big community back then). The problem lies in the fact that a community needs "critical mass" to sustain itself: It needs enough (core) members to keep the ball rolling. This community doesnt have that. This is a very small community with a rock hard group at the center that is too small to do it alone. With every new game this problem becomes apparant.
Firejack wrote:We must be doing something wrong if peope fail to realise this is a community
Another big issue here is the misunderstanding of the "community" entity. This group of people say they are a community, but they behave like a clan. The difference is this: A clan plays a single game with all of it's members. They will play it until "the next big thing" appears on the game radar and then they move en masse to the new game. This is what happened here (PS - WoW - BF2 anyone?)
A community on the other hand is more loose. A community is nothing more then a framework that allows it's members to play multiple games without being restricted in any way. This in turn encourages members to keep playing the game they like under the flag of this community (and staying loyal to it). If the community is very focused on a single game (what happened here during the WoW phase) it will automatically chase off everybody that is not interested in that particular game. That's clan-behaviour.
Dark wrote:Maybe the problem that lies behind this is the TNGC's focus on Guilds.
Just Take Planetside for an example - we had two outfits in Planetside, MAP, and Starwolf, both had inherrently different playing styles, and I'm sure we're all very aware of the differences. The problem became even more inherrent in WoW, with problems such as:
Realm Type
Horde or Alliance
Type of Guild
And even other problems such as the Spanish population on Agamaggan.
A lot of you said back then that running two guilds (PvE and PvP) would be a disaster because it would split the community and the sky would fall down etc. How wrong!
If two guilds were started, they would have been smaller ofcourse, and yes, the start would have been very difficult. But small guilds will grow, and if you have two guilds, your community will grow twice as fast. So initially you would have to suffer a loss (few people to start with), but in the end you would gain twice as much (two guilds bringing in new people). Ok, I hope that wasn't too biased given my past with WoW and the TNGC...
Firejack wrote:we don't make any progress.
All of this is not new. Long before I joined the TNGC I saw a gaming community being born, called WOLFgaming (
http://www.wolfgaming.net). I happily joined (I was very inactive, but that doesnt matter). Their setup is uncanny similar to the TNGC: Gaming community with forums and big ass teamspeak server. Members of the community that had the possibility set up their own, passworded, WOLF servers for several games (Tribes, UT, BF1942 etc.). You would receive server passwords if you joined the community or by word of mouth from a WOLF member.
Initially they suffered the same problem as the TNGC: Small online numbers, low interest etc. But they got past that, got their "critical mass", and all of a sudden you could find WOLF members in every online game you can imagine (just take a look at their forum section to see what I'm talking about). They had the same problems as we do, sucked it up and worked for it and now their numbers are in the thousands!
w0lfeh wrote:i have to agree with soupy IRC is the way togo yo help the community.
Dark wrote:I would Encourage more people to get on X-fire
Xfire, IRC, Teamspeak, forums.... They are all just tools. They don't improve community feelings, they just allow motivated people to keep in touch more easily.
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How to solve the "problem" FJ spoke of:
I think the best practical example would be for BF2:
There has been talk about league play for BF2. For that you need a dedicated team. The fastest way to get people is to recruit them from inside the community. We can have a league team right
now! The only problem is: You take away people from other games. So BF2 will gain strength, PS and WoW will lose, and the community itself won't gain anything at all.
The best way is to forget about ladder play alltogether for at least 6 months. Set up the server, admin it tightly, and people will join this community because they like our BF server. When that happens, you will automatically have you league team, consisting of people that joined because they liked BF, not because they have been purged from other sections of the TNGC.
[Yoda]Meditate more on this I will[/Yoda]
