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.
When I was still able to report I was definitely also not happy with the (big) number of manager simply not replying. Breaking up the calendar deadlines (like 4 in a season) is a way to keep people a bit more engaged, but definitely makes reporting and the stuff around it more challenging as well.
The constant whining about everything also is very discouraging both as a reporter and participant, at least for me. Would be nice if people could realize they can't win every race and not every detail of the game can be exactly how they'd like it to be.
Catching up on the above discussion and I agree with a lot of what has been said.
We used to be able to rely on an influx of new managers each year, and now that unfortunately isn't realistic for a variety of reasons. When you account for returnees (Heine, jt, Booker etc), over half of the current managers have been around for at least 10 seasons, and around 75% for at least 5. While we should of course be glad people are sticking around, it just shows how hard recruiting and retaining new managers has been.
That in turn means that we've been more accepting of inactivity than we used to be, as we want to keep roughly the same number of teams. While there were good reasons for stopping managers having two teams when we did, do we need to consider whether that would offer a solution? If we want to have (for example) 60 teams, is it preferable to have 60 managers with 20 inactive, or 40 active managers with some having 2 teams?
The other knock on effect from a lack of activity is on reporting. We've generally not wanted managers reporting races their own team is in except in a special circumstances. However, if we cut the number of managers that becomes more challenging, and we're finding currently that it is becoming unavoidable in order to stay on schedule. Potentially that is something to reconsider going forward?
Big thanks to kb for starting the analysis for the season. I have not been able to work on stuff like this despite wanting to have an update at the end of March racing.
I think most of the points on my mind have been covered here. With respect to this, and the possible game modifications from next season, putting up some thoughts in the suggestions thread.
Will try do a deeper dive into manager activity soon as well.
