2020 Q3 Report

[fantastic]

 

Q3 Report

 

In an effort to increase the transparency between the Board and the community, we decided to release a quarterly report detailing some high-level initiatives, issues, and other areas of interest. While there will be topics that we can't disclose as they are either tentative or too sensitive, you can expect a good chunk of content from these reports. These reports will cover what happened over the past few months, and what we look forward to addressing and releasing over the next few months until the next report.

 

Growth

 

In the past few years SG has been relatively stagnant in terms of community growth. We've always done about average in comparison to other communities - neither extremely better nor extremely poor. We've attempted growth in the past through mediums such as SCP: Secret Laboratory, Minecraft, and other games, but these efforts never lasted long and within a few short months the plug was pulled due to lack of interest. This quarter, the Board re-evaluated this strategy and determined that in order to see the community grow like we want it to, we would need to put our best foot forward and begin to go into games with the long haul in mind. As such, our expectations for proper planning prior to server releases and initiatives into new games have risen. Every half year or so, we'll look to run a fundraising stream where we can raise money for new servers. Along with other sources of revenue (new donation tiers, etc.) having a set pool of money before we launch a game enables us to keep that server going for as long as possible without financial worries. 

 

Starting this past quarter in the months of July to September, SG saw significant growth in numerous areas, particularly in our Squad servers. In September, we moved quickly to purchase a Squad server for 24/7 Fallujah. Many factors go into a decision to move forward hosting servers such as the ease in getting the server started, its burden on the community, and the expected conversion of players on the server into players in our community. This last point is particularly important - we can host all the servers we want, but if there aren't enough people who are actually participating in our community from these servers, we don't actually grow as a community. We've seen enough growth and success with our first 24/7 Fallujah server that we purchased a dedi in Virginia (east coast) and opened two other Squad servers: 24/7 CAF + HELI along with 24/7 NEW PLAYERS | BEST MAPS.

 

On the topic of growth: this quarter we introduced some changes to our rank structure by adding an IAO Manager position and a Streamer position. The Streamer position will be touched on later in this report, but the IAO Manager position is special as it aligns with our goal of moving day-to-day duties off the Board where possible. Giving the IA team some form of independence while keeping the Board close enables the Board to move faster with "big picture" ideas such as community growth. As we continue moving into new games and growing our community our rank structure will need to change to accommodate this. As such, next quarter we look forward to planning and potentially implementing a division system to increase modularity and independence where needed. The implementation of divisions is dependent on our needs and changes in the next quarter and is by no means a finalized decision.

 

Community Image

 

As our community grows our image needs to grow with it. These past few months, the Marketing Team and the Board have began steps towards increasing our social media presence along with our streaming presence. With the regular use of Twitter and Twitch, our community will be able to reach our playerbase even when they aren't gaming and reach new people as well. The establishment of a Streamer team within the Marketing Team means regulars in our community can pursue their passion of streaming with the support of our community while increasing our outreach as well. In the previous section we talked about community growth; as we look to venture into new games where hosted servers may not be a thing, the forums and Twitch will be incredibly crucial to tie our community together.

 

In the interest of growth without restrictions, BoM and others in the community continue to work on our Discord server. Through multiple discussions between players, staff, and the Board, we've come to realize that our initial vision of having everything on one server simply isn't sustainable. No matter what we do, at some point the Discord will become cluttered and difficult to navigate for players. As such, we've decided to move towards having separate Discord servers on a case-by-case basis. For instance, Squad needs several seeding channels along with other relevant channels as we increase our presence in Squad, and so we've opted to set up a separate Squad server. Rest assured, BoM and the team are taking steps to ensure these separate Discord servers will remain tied to our main Discord server.

 

Our web presence can be significantly improved as well. fantastic and the Technical Team continue to work on improving our site and integrating server stats as much as possible. This includes highlighting our servers in a cleaner way (one which makes for better SEO), creating a more consistent and modern look across legacy sites (CT Bans, ENTWatch), and adding more value to our site as a whole.

 

Challenges

 

As the Board continued our work in expanding our community, we've taken time to reflect on our existing community and game presence as well. Last month many of you heard about the situation with Zombie Escape. While it's unfortunate things ended up the way they did, we're able to launch a new presence in Zombie Escape and revamp our approach with how we're communicating with regulars and ensuring the server remains a fun place for everyone. With Paralyzed, Takuto, and Maniac at the helm, we have a great balance of the technical and social knowledge needed to get the server off its knees and active again. 

 

These past few months, SG has seen low population across our CS:GO servers as a whole. While there are many factors that can be attributed to this, the one we could control the most was where our dedis were located. At the start of this year we moved servers to Quebec and we saw numerous reports of people having increased ping. The CS:GO server browser sorts servers by ping; thus, it can be assumed that we dropped lower on many people's lists. The reason for the move was better hardware for a lower price, but having done a postmortem on the move, the Board and TMs came to an agreement to begin moving our servers from Quebec back to the US East Coast - namely Virginia. It takes quite some time to get things moved over and working again. With the co-operation of our TMs and server managers to inform players of the IP changes, we're confident we'll see some growth after our move.

 

We've also faced some serious burnout and shortage of helping hands at the higher-up level, particularly with the server managers and technical team. The staff who make it to this level often need to juggle their passion for our community with their duties in real life, and so we've worked towards making things more efficient in our community. This includes working on proper communication between staff ranks, a streamlined system to talk to the Board when needed, and re-evaluating priorities within the staff team. On the technical side of things, we've advertised our JTA and TA positions on AlliedMods, a popular community for modders of SourceMod. We've seen some interest come from this, and look forward to continuing to bring on help! If you're interested in applying for any staff rank, our door is always open - please apply here!

 

The Road Ahead

 

In the next few months we plan on continuing our steady path in growing our community further. Through the initiatives above along with exploring options in Rust and DayZ, we're excited at what the future holds. We'll continue working on communication between the staff and our community, ensuring that input is taken and used as much as possible. Although we're moving fast, we'll look to ensure we have solid plans when moving into new initiatives and due diligence is being done. Our community and staff team are exceptionally strong, and with the incredible support that was shown in the last quarter, the future is bright for SG.

[Amazing]

Rust 

[Roddy]

Minecraft :D

[BoM]

This man is delusional, you can't trust anything he says!

[Creten]

Rust please. It's a big interest in the community right now, a good amount of us are still playing it and we have people that'd be willing to seed it. 

 

@Amazing@janseen thoughts

[Amazing]

3 hours ago, Creten said:

 

@Amazing@janseen thoughts

yes can host epic gamer events 

[Wreck]

1 hour ago, fantastic said:

In the next few months we plan on continuing our steady path in growing our community further. Through the initiatives above along with exploring options in Rust and DayZ,

Sooooooooo we playing again or u gonna leave me again @fantastic

[Acer]

Rust would be sick ngl

[ArcticWolf]

I would love a rust server

[Benzene]

Yo @BoMhow about that discord partnership