What's next?

[Prez]

Purely curious due to the nature of CSGO, communities in general and the gaming scene at large. Where does the board think the next step lies? I'm a bit out of the loop on SG as of recent but I thought I would see where the staff is currently gearing beyond current announcements.

[BoM]

On 7/3/2023 at 12:57 AM, Prez said:

Purely curious due to the nature of CSGO, communities in general and the gaming scene at large. Where does the board think the next step lies? I'm a bit out of the loop on SG as of recent but I thought I would see where the staff is currently gearing beyond current announcements.

This is what you think about late at night?

Having been someone who collaborated and implemented on a lot of the "where do we go next" talks/plans/expansion....I too am curious.

Current situation seems to be default to roots. Guessing people are banking on source 2? Players in servers are good...but it would still be nice to see a community beyond that.

[Caution]

On 7/2/2023 at 9:57 PM, Prez said:

Purely curious due to the nature of CSGO, communities in general and the gaming scene at large. Where does the board think the next step lies? I'm a bit out of the loop on SG as of recent but I thought I would see where the staff is currently gearing beyond current announcements.

What's going on man, how have you been?

 

As far as the community goes, we're doing a lot of 'simplifying'. As the community was growing, so were all the rules, the features, the structure, etc. While we're trying to check out some other avenues like fivem and CS2, we are also looking at our current situation and figuring out what can be fixed (and how) and what can't. With the Board having 5 people that are actually pretty actively engaged in the community at this point, there have been good discussions occurring with a lot of ideas floating around. Sort of generic answers here, but we're doing a lot of fine-tuning: making sure everyone is pulling their weight with the ranks they're at, removing managers from servers where it's just not working (or axing the server entirely), and taking in a lot of community feedback. I wouldn't say we have a lot of tricks hidden up our sleeves we're waiting to bust out, it's mostly self-inventory of what we have and who we have, and whether we want to add or subtract. We have some new server ideas we're tossing back and forth, such as surf rpg or zriot. 

 

Overall, it's an extremely hard time to be a gaming community. CSGO really pointed people towards competitive play, and that has been taking a toll on existing gaming communities where the focus is modded casual play. It's almost like just being able to come onto the forums is a huge accomplishment compared to other places. I can only think of one other community in the Counter Strike realm that is older than 10 years and still kicking. Not saying others don't exist or can't come back (I think I heard Hells Gamers is back~ish), but there's not a lot...and places are shutting down regularly. Us being able to confidently say we have zero intention of shutting down and it not even being a remote thought is big, imo.

 

We are actively monitoring the interactions in the community and making sure that we are providing an environment that makes people want to come back. A big part of this is trying to limit negative interactions within the community. I want to be clear here and emphasize that I absolutely do not mean people that have different opinions or give negative feedback (tactfully~ish), I mean people that hop on the discord and troll random people that they don't know, type 'no' constantly when others are trying to seed servers, or in general just have awful attitudes towards SG. We just don't have the time nor the desire to deal with it. We hate punishing people, but I think we're starting to hold more accountability towards people that are "habitual line-steppers", which we are hopeful will have a positive outcome. We are also getting a bit better about holding higher ups accountable for the things listed above.

 

We're going back to that 'small community' mindset, and so far have been liking the results. We still have a long way to go, but we'll get there. 

[Prez]

On 7/4/2023 at 7:26 AM, BoM said:

This is what you think about late at night?

Having been someone who collaborated and implemented on a lot of the "where do we go next" talks/plans/expansion....I too am curious.

Current situation seems to be default to roots. Guessing people are banking on source 2? Players in servers are good...but it would still be nice to see a community beyond that.

 

What can I say, I miss the 3am board meetings LOL

 

20 hours ago, Caution said:

What's going on man, how have you been?

 

As far as the community goes, we're doing a lot of 'simplifying'. As the community was growing, so were all the rules, the features, the structure, etc. While we're trying to check out some other avenues like fivem and CS2, we are also looking at our current situation and figuring out what can be fixed (and how) and what can't. With the Board having 5 people that are actually pretty actively engaged in the community at this point, there have been good discussions occurring with a lot of ideas floating around. Sort of generic answers here, but we're doing a lot of fine-tuning: making sure everyone is pulling their weight with the ranks they're at, removing managers from servers where it's just not working (or axing the server entirely), and taking in a lot of community feedback. I wouldn't say we have a lot of tricks hidden up our sleeves we're waiting to bust out, it's mostly self-inventory of what we have and who we have, and whether we want to add or subtract. We have some new server ideas we're tossing back and forth, such as surf rpg or zriot. 

 

Overall, it's an extremely hard time to be a gaming community. CSGO really pointed people towards competitive play, and that has been taking a toll on existing gaming communities where the focus is modded casual play. It's almost like just being able to come onto the forums is a huge accomplishment compared to other places. I can only think of one other community in the Counter Strike realm that is older than 10 years and still kicking. Not saying others don't exist or can't come back (I think I heard Hells Gamers is back~ish), but there's not a lot...and places are shutting down regularly. Us being able to confidently say we have zero intention of shutting down and it not even being a remote thought is big, imo.

 

We are actively monitoring the interactions in the community and making sure that we are providing an environment that makes people want to come back. A big part of this is trying to limit negative interactions within the community. I want to be clear here and emphasize that I absolutely do not mean people that have different opinions or give negative feedback (tactfully~ish), I mean people that hop on the discord and troll random people that they don't know, type 'no' constantly when others are trying to seed servers, or in general just have awful attitudes towards SG. We just don't have the time nor the desire to deal with it. We hate punishing people, but I think we're starting to hold more accountability towards people that are "habitual line-steppers", which we are hopeful will have a positive outcome. We are also getting a bit better about holding higher ups accountable for the things listed above.

 

We're going back to that 'small community' mindset, and so far have been liking the results. We still have a long way to go, but we'll get there. 

Hey dude, good to see you - getting married in 9 days so my life is upside down at the moment lmao

 

Thanks for the response. Totally makes sense given the dire state of community-play nowadays, which is why I was curious in the first place. I do think it's big that SG will continue to "be" for the foreseeable future, regardless of the state that it will be in/is in. Appreciate the detail on this as I'm sure others find value in seeing it too.

[Dominic]

13 hours ago, Prez said:

 

What can I say, I miss the 3am board meetings LOL

 

Hey dude, good to see you - getting married in 9 days so my life is upside down at the moment lmao

 

Thanks for the response. Totally makes sense given the dire state of community-play nowadays, which is why I was curious in the first place. I do think it's big that SG will continue to "be" for the foreseeable future, regardless of the state that it will be in/is in. Appreciate the detail on this as I'm sure others find value in seeing it too.

 

Dude, congrats on getting married, that's awesome. And thanks for checking in, always nice seeing your name pop up here and there.

 

Caution put it pretty perfectly, honestly, but I can try to put something into my own words and maybe add a bit more on the off chance that it brings anyone any higher degree of comfort. But yeah, the biggest thing is that we have a lot going for us. I think the problem for the better half of a year or two prior to me returning (and Revenga, cause we funnily enough came back at pretty much the same time) was that I saw everyone in a state of panic as they reminisced on the glory days. Yes, SG was a lot bigger at one point, but it was also a lot smaller. Yes, SG used to bring in a lot more revenue, but it also used to be in danger of shutting down. I find my thinking on a daily basis to be that the community is at a middle ground at this point, while progress may have been lost, we're not in the dark ages. Things are actually going pretty well, again, all things considered.

 

It's coming up on a year since I first returned to staff and I can confidently say that at that point, we had no players in any of our servers for days on end. Now, we're seeing massive numbers on Surf, a consistent population on Bhop, our Retakes servers filling up, GMod TTT pulling numbers, 1v1 has randomly spiked a few times now, and Prison Break had a crazy stint for a few weeks of 20+ players day after day. It may not be producing a 'community' so to speak because onboarding people in general is insanely difficult and CS:GO doesn't make it any easier for communities, but it's better than where we were at. It's also not as if we've seen no results at all. We've brought back a few admins, brought in a few new admins, seen some rejuvenation in the Discord and forums.. so on and so forth, so it's doing us some good.

 

With CS:GO still being a massive game and CS2 still seemingly on the horizon, and with SG not being in any danger whatsoever of shutting down.. we really have nothing but time. Time could produce a miracle as it sort of already did with the 'fixed server browser' that brought an influx of players, but it also gives us the time to further develop the community into something people want to come back to, as Caution said. The Board is very active, yes, but we also do get busy and burnt here and there and that sometimes causes setbacks (like the last week or so has been one of those times), but that's been the case with every higher-up team I've encountered here. We've made far too much progress in every aspect for me to be disappointed about that, honestly. It just doesn't worry me. We're still dumping a lot of time into this place.

 

Overall, kind of returning to the roots and focusing on the servers instead of stuff like internal affairs or marketing and whatnot. We're pretty much back there now. We may open one or two more servers but I think we're pretty much done axing stuff and then we can sit back and chill and just play and work on the servers instead of all of the other tedious stuff. There's still stuff that needs tending to like the Discord but other than that we're pretty much good to go. I quite honestly foresee a lot of success once we're nice and settled with pushing out everything we're pushing out (we just opened 3 new servers, and one more is on the way already) and then the main focus is just on building the community and onboarding people into Supporter and admin ranks.

 

Thanks for the post, was probably a good idea for us to come out and say something about recent events anyway. We may hold a staff / community meeting soon too in case anyone doesn't wanna put their thoughts into a post, but I implore everyone to post here if they have anything to say.