I think the game had a small downhill trajectory even the last time I played, and it seems to just have continued. As someone have stated forums and forum games are dying, it's a too slow for the coming generations. Just look at the average age of us players... When I started my first time pretty much none of us had kids or wifes or anything...
At the same time the game is made for forums, made for spreadsheet nerds and made for a pretty niche community so we will both need to find ways to recruit poeple and find a format where poeple are more likely to engage. Without me having any mayor suggestions for how. I like jt's suggestion about trying to do some race discussions on discord. There was a discussion the other day on discord about spoilers, could there be a way to make both a discord chat and a discussion thread with a link to the spesific chat?
We also need to find ways to recruit new, active, managers. Let's be brutally honest, PCMDaily is dead, the only reason this forum even has any activity are us. How can we find new, active managers and reporters then? We should be on the search for a new home, but it should be somewhere where we can join an already thriving community where we can join them, and they can join us in my opinion. Consilidate where we can move the game, maybe develop it further, and at the same time find new players.
Then down to activity. I started reporting this year and the number of replies etc dosen't really bother me. Might be because I am fairly new to it. What I find sad however is as KB posted the number of managers who are just not present, we are a small game and community and we need everyone and we need activity to make it fun for everyone. To be honest I would rather have 2 active divisions, that would also mean less work for the admins and reporters. That is something I believe should be strongly considered going into next offseason
As I have Said in the past - and to further Heines remark about 2 divisions - I think it’s more important to enhance the activity among the active, rather than trying to revive something dead.
Those managers who regularly dissapear Only to commit 1-2-3 times during a season, spamming old race threads to the top, is a lost cause. A few might be reasonable, but most will continue like this for a period of time (1-2-3-4 seasons) and then stop anyway.
What kills my motivation is the period of time between races in which I am involved. I have now actively tried to Pick bands so I don’t have too Long downtime, but it shouldn’t be a choice. It should come automatically, that no one goes a week without being in a race.
To cut the CT would be one Way of narrowing things, if we are already having trouble finding enough active members.
Another suggestion could be amateur/development/U23 teams, to enhance manager involvement. We have had that before and tbh I found those to be quite enjoyable, as you could scrap your RP focus and try something completely different.
A final suggestion could be to plan for the first half of the season first, and then plan for the second half 1 month or so before the first race in the final half. This would help active managers gain an advantage over dissapearing managers, so we get those relegated instead of the active ones.
