State of the Forum

[AnonymousRevival]

I think there are ways to help promote the game.

One think that would be nice would be if it had a story. I mean, sure Elements by itself is indeed a fun game. However, if you realize why games like WoW are so popular is because they have a story behind them.

Along with it, they provide lots of theme music, artwork and background stories. If this were implemented, I'm pretty sure many more would like to play it.

[Higurashi]

Moving forum had a noticeable effect alright. The forums were already hard enough to find. A couple things I'm going to comment on, as the rest of this thread is all good ideas.

we have problems having 16 people since this rule has been introduced.

Something I've had to disprove many, many times for some reason. We don't. At all. The first couple weeks of introducing this rule, I observed how many players we lost. It was a total of 3 over 8 tournaments. 3 people who were spamming low-content to get in. The kind of people we don't want in, and that would've likely been kicked anyway due to spam in the tourney room. They're the reason we made the rule, because we have volunteer workers organizing the tournament, and they shouldn't have to deal with a lot of the crap that was coming in.

We lost activity when we moved to the new forum. Just like we lost activity everywhere else. But you know what? We still don't have trouble filling the tournaments. Last one was one of the biggest in a long time. This is why, I think, people want things like more tournaments, unofficial tournaments and short PvP Events. They're much easier to participate in.

If you want to let anyone into those, that'd be your choice. But in an official event sponsored by Zanzarino and hosted by volunteer staff workers, I'm not going to allow any hackers, exploiters, cheaters, spammers or people who make the job harder for our hard-working staff that donate their free time into it. That naive part of me was quickly taught the reality of the situation when I first started as TO years ago. I would recommend you try to learn from the experience of others as well and take at least some part of it with you.

In the old forum's heyday players flocked to the community for a number of reasons, but one was definitely an Admin who generated buzz by exploring new ideas and feeding community enthusiasm.  As a community we can bring that back today.

I'm afraid there's a big difference between SG and us. She took all the excess ad revenue and treated Elements like a second job because of it. This naturally had a lot of negative side-effects as well, but it kept her inventing new stuff.. for the most part. None of us have the free time for it, and now Zanz pays for our servers through Alan.

However, if we all pool what little free time we have, we could substitute it partially. It's what we've been doing so far, and after suggesting people take things into their own hands for a long time (because we're all volunteers) I see the first signs of it in the last couple threads of this nature. Perhaps slowly we're realising on a larger scale that the Admins shouldn't be doing all the inventing. Just look at how it's done in all the other communities out there.

[mrpaper]

we have problems having 16 people since this rule has been introduced.

Something I've had to disprove many, many times for some reason. We don't. At all. The first couple weeks of introducing this rule, I observed how many players we lost. It was a total of 3 over 8 tournaments. 3 people who were spamming low-content to get in. The kind of people we don't want in, and that would've likely been kicked anyway due to spam in the tourney room. They're the reason we made the rule, because we have volunteer workers organizing the tournament, and they shouldn't have to deal with a lot of the crap that was coming in.

If you want to let anyone into those, that'd be your choice. But in an official event sponsored by Zanzarino and hosted by volunteer staff workers, I'm not going to allow any hackers, exploiters, cheaters, spammers or people who make the job harder for our hard-working staff that donate their free time into it. That naive part of me was quickly taught the reality of the situation when I first started as TO years ago. I would recommend you try to learn from the experience of others as well and take at least some part of it with you.

Well when I started playing the tournaments we're averaging 30 to 40 people.  Sure it's is really rare that a tournament gets in fact cancel, but in the last few months, most of the time, the tournament gets official at the last minute or we need to go in the main chat to get people to play so we reach the minimum.  The persons who came are sure nice to speedbuild anything to make the tourney going, but it shouldn't need to be.   
I'm of course against the unwanted people in tourney like we had and I know letting everyone in was favoring this, but I still believe less newcomers gets involved in forums partly because of this.  Tournaments are defently less a mess then before except when there is mass desynch which we can't really control.  Still, I'd like ways for newcomers to play without writing 30 posts.  Also, I represent a big part of the communauty who doesn't speak english as first language so I wouldn't post 30 times in a language I don't speak that well just to participate in somthing that may or may not be fun (for newcomers who read this... it is!)

[Dragoon]

So many suggestions sound like "Someone could"s and "Someone should"s.  This is a fully volunteer group working to build this community.  The only person I know that is getting paid anything for their efforts is UTAlan for hosting the forums, and I am sure he would be glad to explain how "getting paid" is a gross misrepresentation.

Please do not hope for others to take responsibility for executing your ideas; take charge and take action.  As cliche as it may be to quote an ad campaign, if you want something done, "Just do it."  Do not ask "Can you do X?", say "I want to do X.  What can you do to help me make it happen?"  And do not use this many quotation marks.

Your ideas might not come to fruition or provide the results you desired, but at least you made an effort, and it is unlikely anything you do with the intent of building the community would harm it (getting us banned from Google Ads being a notable exception).

This is a good point. However, consider this. Everything here is very methodical and organized—which is a good thing overall. We have sub-forums for different topics with various staff to run them. We have official people who run tournaments, leagues, pvp events, competitions, etc. Because we have all of these official sub-forums and positions, people may think that all these kind of things need to be done through official channels. I mean, should a person just randomly start a PvP event in General Discussion, or should he post in the PvP event idea thread and wait for a PvP event manager to run it eventually? If he were to start it, would it be frowned upon if he posted 2, 3, 4 threads in General Discussion to run his event? What if several people did this? Do we want anyone and everyone to swamp General Discussion with all sorts of sign-up threads, battle threads, info threads, and more?

So yes, we need more action. But at the same time, it's good that we talk through things some before we muck things up too much.

[Higurashi]

we have problems having 16 people since this rule has been introduced.

Something I've had to disprove many, many times for some reason. We don't. At all. The first couple weeks of introducing this rule, I observed how many players we lost. It was a total of 3 over 8 tournaments. 3 people who were spamming low-content to get in. The kind of people we don't want in, and that would've likely been kicked anyway due to spam in the tourney room. They're the reason we made the rule, because we have volunteer workers organizing the tournament, and they shouldn't have to deal with a lot of the crap that was coming in.

If you want to let anyone into those, that'd be your choice. But in an official event sponsored by Zanzarino and hosted by volunteer staff workers, I'm not going to allow any hackers, exploiters, cheaters, spammers or people who make the job harder for our hard-working staff that donate their free time into it. That naive part of me was quickly taught the reality of the situation when I first started as TO years ago. I would recommend you try to learn from the experience of others as well and take at least some part of it with you.

Well when I started playing the tournaments we're averaging 30 to 40 people.  Sure it's is really rare that a tournament gets in fact cancel, but in the last few months, most of the time, the tournament gets official at the last minute or we need to go in the main chat to get people to play so we reach the minimum.  The persons who came are sure nice to speedbuild anything to make the tourney going, but it shouldn't need to be.   
I'm of course against the unwanted people in tourney like we had and I know letting everyone in was favoring this, but I still believe less newcomers gets involved in forums partly because of this.  Tournaments are defently less a mess then before except when there is mass desynch which we can't really control.  Still, I'd like ways for newcomers to play without writing 30 posts.  Also, I represent a big part of the communauty who doesn't speak english as first language so I wouldn't post 30 times in a language I don't speak that well just to participate in somthing that may or may not be fun (for newcomers who read this... it is!)

Right. Since the new forum, not the rule. The reason we've had to find more people for 3 of the tourneys since then is because only pika and me were TO's and real life got in our way. With enough TO's, we immediately saw an end to that. This has no relation to the rule either.

From what I can tell, you think there's an unseen, unspoken mass that doesn't join tourneys because they look at them and go "well that's too complicated". Good.
Rules and prerequisites are there for the purpose of weeding out those who won't abide by them. This is why I say it's fine if you want anyone to join unofficial tourneys or small PvP Events, but not official tournaments sponsored by Zanz. There are requirements for that, and the reason for those requirements is that we've gotten non-English speakers, people who can't read, and people who don't have enough respect for their fellow participants and organizers. The post rule is there to solve all of this, and it has. This is how an event evolves: the rule was created thanks to the experience gathered through a long time of organizing tournaments.

Ask anyone who has organized more than a few tourneys. They won't disagree if they have enough experience, and that's the only good way to add rules. Through experience.

That said, I've considered lowering the amount of posts required, because I only need to see a few in order to be able to judge someone's amount of common sense.

[kev]

I'm of the opinion the mini-event idea would need some sort of reward to attract players.  Either a small in-game reward (1k electrum for first, maybe we could shave these off the tourney winnings?) or a forum award icon.  Since we don't want 100 additional forum award icons given every year, maybe one that shows the number of wins would suffice.  Something like this only with artistic talent:

   


If the forum reached a point where it did one day generate excess ad revenues, one alternative to marketing would be to give it back to the players as a prize.  Even a cash prize as small as $100 for an Elements The Game World Championship would create a crazy amount of buzz.


Other games have found success retaining players by using guilds to create a greater sense of community.  Maybe we're not big enough yet, but I could definitely see an advantage of something like this.  Off the top of my head I could see choosing from one of 3-4 guilds before or shortly after registering to the forum.  3-4 Masters could head each guild.  It might increase willingness to help tutor new players, etc., and War/Brawl/etc could be rebuilt based on feeding rivalries.


I'm impressed with participants of this thread keeping the onus on the community, rather than zanz, to expand.  There's been some out-of-the-box ideas, too.  Keep 'em coming.    Some of the proposed ideas are logistical nightmares, but that's what we have a Council for. 8)

[BluePriest]

Honestly, we could probably have 12 guilds, 1 for each element. This could then even help out with war. In my very limited experience of playing in 1 war (so take this with a  grain of salt) it was a pain getting organized early. EVeryone was confused about their roles and it took a couple matches for everything to get settled. We would easily be able to accommodate  12 guilds since we can get 12 teams for War and that requires a several month commitment at times. Guilds, on the other hand, dont require a large amount of commitment (ultimately the individual members get what they put into them) and are more fun oriented where as war can seem like a chore at times. Having the War be guild oriented though, would not only increase interest in War, but make the whole process smoother. There wouldnt be the whole picking part before hand, as people would already be in the element they want (leader permitting)

The possible flaws I see with it relating to war is that it could create some unbalanced teams, but Im no War expert so once again, take everything I say about it with a grain of salt. It might be worthwhile to have a whole topic just for discussing guilds, as I think it is my favorite idea ive heard for quite a while.

[ZephyrPhantom]

Skimming through and giving my own two cents :

I think we can all agree the neon sign needs to come first. But that requires Zanz so this idea is probably not meant for this thread, unless someone can edit the website.

Spoiler for Bluepriest/Guilds:

Honestly, we could probably have 12 guilds, 1 for each element. This could then even help out with war. In my very limited experience of playing in 1 war (so take this with a  grain of salt) it was a pain getting organized early. EVeryone was confused about their roles and it took a couple matches for everything to get settled. We would easily be able to accommodate  12 guilds since we can get 12 teams for War and that requires a several month commitment at times. Guilds, on the other hand, dont require a large amount of commitment (ultimately the individual members get what they put into them) and are more fun oriented where as war can seem like a chore at times. Having the War be guild oriented though, would not only increase interest in War, but make the whole process smoother. There wouldnt be the whole picking part before hand, as people would already be in the element they want (leader permitting)

The possible flaws I see with it relating to war is that it could create some unbalanced teams, but Im no War expert so once again, take everything I say about it with a grain of salt. It might be worthwhile to have a whole topic just for discussing guilds, as I think it is my favorite idea ive heard for quite a while.

Having a guild that provides potential candidates for war teams and other ETG-related events seems interesting and a way to check activity/create more events. I'm not sure if the benefit is too big though given that I've seen the forum essentially compared to a 'megaguild' several times, with all its pros and cons.

Regarding unbalanced teams - it would be a matter of how easy it is to switch guilds and benefit of sticking to one guild. Too much 'loyalty' could result in one guild trumping all the others with high level players, while too little 'loyalty' would result in lots of switching and thus no real way to determine War candidates.

Spoiler for Kev/Acsabi44/PvP Events:

I'm of the opinion the mini-event idea would need some sort of reward to attract players.  Either a small in-game reward (1k electrum for first, maybe we could shave these off the tourney winnings?) or a forum award icon.  Since we don't want 100 additional forum award icons given every year, maybe one that shows the number of wins would suffice.  Something like this only with artistic talent:

   

Provide an editable template where an artist could change the number easily, and I'd say this wouldn't be a bad idea. Even a simple non-dynamic icon would be helpful to boost event popularity.


If the forum reached a point where it did one day generate excess ad revenues, one alternative to marketing would be to give it back to the players as a prize.  Even a cash prize as small as $100 for an Elements The Game World Championship would create a crazy amount of buzz.

Seems very far off in the future (To quote Essence, 'Elements 5.0'). But hey, who knows?


Other games have found success retaining players by using guilds to create a greater sense of community.  Maybe we're not big enough yet, but I could definitely see an advantage of something like this.  Off the top of my head I could see choosing from one of 3-4 guilds before or shortly after registering to the forum.  3-4 Masters could head each guild.  It might increase willingness to help tutor new players, etc., and War/Brawl/etc could be rebuilt based on feeding rivalries.

Hmm... reading this after Bluepriest's 'guild' post makes me think we could merge Guilds and a reworked Mentor system, so that both run smoothly. Would it be possible to have the guilds be of a Communal nature, where everyone helps everyone else out until 'War' when everyone takes sides?


I'm impressed with participants of this thread keeping the onus on the community, rather than zanz, to expand.  There's been some out-of-the-box ideas, too.  Keep 'em coming.    Some of the proposed ideas are logistical nightmares, but that's what we have a Council for. 8)

Regarding mini PVP events:
- Winner would get a new forum award icon, "minievent winner" (or something). Same icon for every event, just like tournaments now. Make it a star or something.
Same as kev. Any icon should do, an editable once is nice though.

- I think the correct lentgh for this is 2-3(-4) days. IMHO it is more interesting than a few hrs-tourney. IT has the "feel" of something greater than a simple tournament. The partcipiants will also have more time to build decks, which contributes majorly to the fun of the event (the more time you take to polish a deck, the more attached you get to it, and thus, the more positive feedback if you win with it). Overall, I feel that those minievents require less time than a month long PVP event or war, but more mental and emotional commitment than a simple wekeend tournament.
- On the other hand, it is not terribly long, so dropouts or other interested players will only have to wait a few days before entering the next minievent.
This sounds about right. (The organizer should able to commit over a range of time that prevents setting aside one designated day (Tourneys), but at the same time the even can't carry too long that commitment become boredom (PvP Events)) I'd say maybe even a whole week could work for a larger event, though, if multiple users are willing to commit as Unofficial Organizers.

- I think a staff of 8-10 can run 2 events every week(with backup TOs for every role), with a staff of 4-5 prolly can run one in a week. I don't think finding some interested vets would ve a problem.
Just taking Competitions, TOs, Leagues, and PvPEs, we generally have 3-4 events running per month + 3-4 tourneys, with smaller events being managed by one person and larger events being managed by several. Just a wild guess, but with 4 active TOs running smoothly, you'd probably need 6-8 at most(?) to rotate and keep events running if the idea is to have things coming at a 'relaxed' and continuous pace. If you're super-active, you might be able to handle them with just 2-3, but less Organizers = Increasing vulnerability to Schedule Slip.

- Since the relatively short timespan for duels, if something goes wrong, it should be handled strictly in a "PM to organizer"- way. The two disagreeing players send their opinions and all their evidence to the organizers, who decide when they log in next time.
- The thing the organizers would need to do is solving disputes, updating brackets/groups/standings and maybe posting next round's rules in every ~10 hrs. I think 2 or 3 active organizers could do it neatly.
- While the participiants would have ~24 hrs to read the current round rules, think of some decks, test them a bit and play their matches (a player should have no more than 2, ideally 1 duel per round). This would take a few hours at most for them.
Necessary rules, should definitely be any events started.

Spoiler for AnonymousRevival/Music/Story:

I think there are ways to help promote the game.

One think that would be nice would be if it had a story. I mean, sure Elements by itself is indeed a fun game. However, if you realize why games like WoW are so popular is because they have a story behind them.

Along with it, they provide lots of theme music, artwork and background stories. If this were implemented, I'm pretty sure many more would like to play it.

Unfortunately, there is no way to implement canon/themes ingame without Zanz (again). However, we do have sections for Writing and Music, which could serve as a good place to develop unofficial stories. (I find one of the strengths of ETG is that it has no official story, allowing people to create whatever they want as a story and not worry about 'canon science' of the elements.)  Music is a probably a little more demanding but if we could reimplement the ETG Radio on the forums it could have much greater benefits.

(Ssidenote : Let's try to move away from ideas that require Zanz, such as editing the neon sign into the game and adding more BG music for battles. While this is a community thing, Zanz isn't here at the moment, so it's up to the Community to handle things themselves. Think a little more outside the box - for example, we can't add BG music into the game but we could possibly code back ETG Radio into this forum, with Tiko's music as a start.)

"The state of the forum is strong."  I could not resist.

This might come off as rude, but that is not my intent nor do I know how to say it any nicer.

So many suggestions sound like "Someone could"s and "Someone should"s.  This is a fully volunteer group working to build this community.  The only person I know that is getting paid anything for their efforts is UTAlan for hosting the forums, and I am sure he would be glad to explain how "getting paid" is a gross misrepresentation.

Please do not hope for others to take responsibility for executing your ideas; take charge and take action.  As cliche as it may be to quote an ad campaign, if you want something done, "Just do it."  Do not ask "Can you do X?", say "I want to do X.  What can you do to help me make it happen?"  And do not use this many quotation marks.

Your ideas might not come to fruition or provide the results you desired, but at least you made an effort, and it is unlikely anything you do with the intent of building the community would harm it (getting us banned from Google Ads being a notable exception).

I think the highlighted summarizes the general idea of where this thread's going to have go if we want to go anywhere productive.

Speaking of which, I'd like to put this board up for those who are interested in hosting Competitions. It fell somewhat out of focus when I became a CO, and I think someone who's willing to take up the board might head it in a good direction.

[Tiko]

The idea of Guilds is really appealing to me, especially if they're related to a certain element, not to mention it sounds way better than 'Clans' or such. Not only they would strengthen the community spirit, I believe they would also improve many player's dedication to the element in subject (which would be a really nice improvement in general, in my opinion, as many fresh players are pointed to follow 'tried and true' strategies right from the beggining) and they could even serve as the backbone of many major events as mentioned above or simply establishing new ones; or even help resurrecting/supporting WoE (which was the very best thing/idea/event that ever happened on these Forums, and I'm probably not the only one with this point of view) within their limitations as an element by providing ideas, playerbase, background, lore, etc. They could also provide another function for mastership aside from War (and Brawl..) as guildmasters.

I guess a 'secret section' could be easily created for them, where they could practice their own set of rules, events, setting up their own Trials for membership applicants, mentoring, or whatever. It's all based on what people want to do with their Guild.

I say +1 for Guilds.

[ZephyrPhantom]

One other question regarding Guilds : would it be possible to have a guild for Unaligned/Rainbow Players, for those who wish to specialize in several elements? (When War comes around, players in said Guild could get a 'waiver' that allows them to go straight to the Team Underworld tourney if they desire.)

[UTAlan]

The only person I know that is getting paid anything for their efforts is UTAlan for hosting the forums, and I am sure he would be glad to explain how "getting paid" is a gross misrepresentation.

Yes, I would. Far from getting paid, I simply manage the financial aspect of the forums. The way this should play out would be to deposit money from ads into my bank account any time we need to spend money. The way this actually plays out is I spend the money, then deposit it from ads. (Unless like recently, the money gets taken away by Google before I can, so now I'm actually owed money.)

In short, I will never make a profit. All money earned by this community will be put back into it.

[Tiko]

Also, about the Radio:

As the end of the year approaches, I'll have more and more time to actually work on it, but I've been thinking a lot while I was "absent", and a dedicated (pop-up?) radio station would be way more appealing to the public than simple, 'one-at-a-time' music/program upload. There are still many unanswered questions in this matter, but that probably belongs to another topic. If the radio would help to attract even a handful of people, and we can find a place for it, I can double my efforts to come up with something, even if temporarily.