Preface: I will probably be blunt in this post. I've also been a large part of some of the issues I'm going to address. I apologize on both counts.
Admins are busy, prioritizing life over EC.
Admins have not been perfect, I'll admit. However, I do have an anecdote I want people to consider: I messaged two Admins (making the decision to bypass Council, as I've been unhappy with the activity lately) about a small matter recently and got replies from both within an hour. I've done so multiple times and always got a reply within 24 hours.
I think Council activity is currently a bigger issue than Admin activity.
Admins' previously promised changes have been pushed back indefinitely.
Please elaborate. The major changes I'm aware of required Council discussion that didn't happen - primarily Overhaul
(see below)Council is scrambling to fill positions. Constantly getting 0-2 applicants.
Those applicants are largely filling those positions because no one else will.
Council is generally taking all positions and giving it to a very small number of people out of necessity.
These are related issues. Personally, I've never been a fan of stacking positions - that person generally just burns out and then we lose much more than if we had just hired a slightly less qualified candidate, but one who could focus on the one role.
The bigger issue is we have too many staff positions right now for a small group of active members. We don't need the amount of people we have on PvP Staff right now, for example.
New active member acquisition is essentially at 0
This is kinda true - we're definitely losing members overall, but it's because more older members are fading away than new members are joining. We do have some of the latter, however.
As far as I can tell, this place is now actually at a standstill. Two routes to take:
Admins invest time, effort etc. to work with Council to revamp/reinvent EV. Overhaul.
Failing that, as has been the case thus far...
Council begins cutting/reworking old programs the current community can't support. Ideally while adding reliable member acquisition paths.
These should bother ultimately be done. For the public -
Council was discussing Overhaul, the details of which were never set in stone, but would likely involve things such as cutting back on the massive amount of subforums here, expanding the scope of the community to include non-Elements gamers, changing providers, and utilizing other external resources such as moving the official chat to Discord.
Leave it relatively as is, idle, 'maintained' with no end-goal in sight,
Reworked so it may grow [Many ways to do this],
Reduced to just redirecting to the Discord,
Taken down entirely.
The only realistic option, in my opinion, is really the second. You're correct that there's different ways to do that - the primary one being Overhaul.
A logical first step would be to unite the elements players already here. There is Kongregate where new players continue to stumble upon Elements, as well as the official Elements blab chat that people may visit when running into the game from anywhere else. And on top of that, there's some other... thing you seem to promote users to abandon the official chat for.
I assume the 'other thing' is Discord - while I'm not the biggest fan of Discord as a chat service, the fact that it's the de facto official chat currently makes it strong candidate to completely replace Blab, which Council has discussed. That'd consolidate a little.
There's also Reddit, which two (of three) Admins agreed to enable the expansion of - the small matter I addressed above. I personally feel that the key to all of this isn't necessarily limiting the community to one place, because people prefer different things, but doing everything we can to keep them interconnected, such as with cross-promotion and power members active on multiple platforms. I think forums, Reddit, and Discord can be pretty easily intertwined.
The council was established to help the admins manage an increasingly bulky community, with hirings to give its members a fair chance to contribute to the community for staff positions. The fact that there are not that many applicants, the fact that admins do not have time to interact with council as much as one would like, perhaps now is the time to ask: how much is the council still needed? Are they still helping the admins as intended?
Council itself is likely outdated, but I think hierarchy in some form is needed, particularly where hiring is concerned - whether that be additional Admins, the return of Global Mods, or some other replacement for Council, I'm not sure.
Perhaps instead people should be assigned staff positions based on their activity in that section. Someone hosts a lot of tournaments? Make them TO. Someone is offering to help update league standings and doing a good job? Make them LO. One should not have to wait for hirings, right? Give the people that want to help the tools to do it, rather than trying to shove it onto someone.
I agree. The current hiring process doesn't work without a high-activity community. Hiring in the present day should be closer to what it was pre-Council - notice someone contributing to a section or actively express ideas to improve a section, and take action to enable them. Essentially, I think the community needs to become more organic moving forward.
As a result, it may come to pass that there will be no organizers left for certain events. So be it, such is the result of a forum infrastructure that has become too bulky for the current community to lift. Reducing the size does not necessarily mean the end.
This is a great summary of your post, and a very important point.
After consecutive days of not being able to find league matches, I became discouraged. I wanted to continue learning and improving. I was willing to lose a lot in order to get that experience. I also noticed many active, pvp-skilled veterans were not participating in leagues but were on the forums/chat daily. So, I asked why. The answer I got was that leagues was basically viewed as lame and not worth their time. I felt (a) disappointed about that attitude and (b) dumb that I was so enthusiastic to put energy into this "lame" event. What is lame about being active with a community? One league PVP match every few days is not so much time. Some folks spend more time in chat rolling dice. If an event, like leagues or forum games, is really struggling, perhaps it does need to die out. Sometimes, old growth in the forest needs to make way for new growth. There were positive attitudes encountered, too. One positive experience was with Afdarenty. She/He offered to play a league match even though she/he didn't really do leagues. Afda was willing to spend time helping me have that experience. We ended up not playing due to my constraints, but that kind of attitude was encouraging. There were many others that were willing to spend their time even if leagues was not their jam. But, the negative experiences kept mounting. The lack of activity for leagues overall (staff + participants) is but one example of discouraging experiences one can experience in the community.
I also attempted competitions because I like creative tasks. Keep in mind that I was involved with the community for 3 months at that point and still not knowing much of the historical contexts, and what works/what doesn't, and the nuances of some of the competitions. What I remember was that I won two of the events and for the first one, no one seemed to care much. With the second event I won, the most prominent comments were essentially complaints and disapproval of my winning entry. A young sprout was squashed. With overall frustrations mounting, I withdrew from the third competition that I had entered even though I spent hours to finish my entries. I also rescinded my brawl application, which is probably an event I would have enjoyed very much in theory. I sensed in reality my frustrations would continue. There is much more that I was hoping to experience, like trials and a war. I was even thinking I'd learn enough to volunteer as staff at some point (perhaps after 6 months). But all these activities are a time and energy commitment. After a few months of observing consistent lack of leadership, fragmented cooperation throughout the community, and inactive staff/administrators, I believed (intuitively) that the risks (of frustration) outweighed the rewards (of satisfaction).
I'm sorry you had multiple negative experiences - I had some as a newer member even when the community was high-activity, so I can understand. I think activity is probably the biggest issue, but there's also this massive wave of indifference, and sometimes pessimism and derision, that's prominent in a lot of the veterans, primarily because of years of no development and watching people (often friends) come and go. And I think part of why our current low activity is really bad is because these behaviors accent that negativity.
If by any chance you feel that I contributed to any of that negativity where you were concerned, I'm very sorry - please feel free to PM me so we can talk about it. If you want any part of your post specifically addressed in more detail, feel free to let me know that too.
I'll be attempting to create a lot of discussion in Council in the last month of our term, and set a good foundation for the next one, whether I'm in it or not. If anyone wants something specific brought up, please let me know.
