questions

[Syhto]

Re: questions

people have just gotten overly sensitive when it comes to any topic thast they consider anyone who doesnt share the same views a troll.

tru

[Patricoo]

Re: questions

Eight years going on nine years and whereas I've had major shots of activity, I've been a lurker on the site a few times a week for near all of the time.

I've seen major shifts in tone in the site, its forums, and different elements.

For one, there have always been trolls, flamers, and bad/abusive staffers. Always. Sure the instances have changed. For instance there were spamming bombs in the chat, people getting high on cam (back when the community wasn't so smoker majority that people gave a damn), people with troll mic sounds, and overt flaming in the forums. Sometimes more overt, I'd say. Its always been here.

Yet right now I think we're in a community decline at the moment. The game, I'm happy to say, is on the upswing what with its regular music, active homepage updates, and the brainstorming of a new engine. Mixed with multiplayer, its really all I can fairly ask in a game.

So why is the community going down? I'd say the site right now is something different that what it was before. At its best it grew into a series of mini-social groups but now its reverted into this single giant nebulous one. Wherein years past, even in points of FFR stagnation, you could be active in vidchat all day and no where else, or just in challenge threads, or in forums, or a little bit of prochat and a little in other areas. Now Chit Chat and Prochat make up the overwhelming bulk of the social activity of our social leaders (Or at least, when any site drama goes down its there now.) Its hard for new people to enter this sort of attitude in a group and frankly its in two worst possible mediums. (One is a super anything-goes forum and the other is a text only chat that feels restrictive.) So many people have such apprehensive starts.

Secondly, this structure makes it easier for problems to explode. Get in a forum argument? Hey, it happens sometimes. But where do you go to avoid those you fought with? I'd say before you could just lurk on another end of the site, but now with everything so centralized most just sort of quit for a while which hurts for the few who actually don't ever return.

The point is, I don't know how but the community should be doing more to find ways to branch out rather than move in. Obviously there are exceptions, and not everything has been bad but hey, what do I know.

[ic0slay3r]

Re: questions

The fact that it took two hours for anyone to respond to this (and it's from someone who lurks much more often than he posts) paints a pretty gruesome picture of the activity.

The name of the thread dint really help, I just clicked it cause its 3am here and I'm really bored lol. But yeah its kinda true, the activity on this site have been going down since the the crash :/

I kinda like the community as it is now, but at the same time I would love for more people to join this site. It gets really boring seeing the same people post in the same threads.

what do you think the first impression is on a newbie of the ffr community as a whole?

I was talking with a friend of mine not so long ago about what does he think of the website now. (He has been a member for like 2 months)

He told me that the community is pretty calm, but slow. The website has pretty low activity and doesn't really motivates to play that much. And that he haven't post in the forums cause he feels intimidated. (but I think everybody past through this, every time they join a community)

[yo man im awesome]

Re: questions

This is the Exact reason I wanted to make an FFR Rebirth Project. I, like most of us, don't want to see the site finally crash and burn. I want to see it continue, I want to see more newbie's. Honestly, I love talking with new players. I want to see more options community-wise than just adding to the game itself. The general appearance to the site should probably be upgraded as well, which somewhat goes along with my Blackwebb contest, but that's only for the engine.

[xXAll-ProXx]

Re: questions

You guys have no idea, I've been on other forums where 5 out of 10 threads would get locked 2 hours after their creation. FFR has an outstanding community imo. Most of the people are very helpful and nice. I've been helped out numerous times by many different people. There are a couple of trolls (...plan lol), but I don't mind them, as long as they don't push it too far, it's not really something that can ruin the community.

I just feel like FFR's community is very small. I've never seen more than 400 active members at once, and I'm pretty sure no more than 2000 members are active in total. If we had more active members, FFR would have a brighter future (Tournaments would be hell of fun, more people in MP, more recognition, etc..)

[Plan_Bsk81127]

Re: questions

[rushyrulz]

Re: questions

lol @ rubix and his calculus humor..

[igotrhythm]

Re: questions

I've been here for almost 7 years now, and for that entire time I've felt like I've been a little slower than the movers and shakers in the community to pick up on jokes or the latest hot trend.

I agree with what AJ said in that in the golden era of FFR, around 2007 or so, people congregated in multiplayer, there was MeTrivia, R2 and the sim DB to occupy people that wanted to try something different. There was something for everyone, and thus everyone was able to find a niche that they could settle into quite comfortably, and the end result was an active, thriving community.

Fast-forward to 2010-2011. The site is struggling to recover from a major crash and to update itself to meet new standards of both software and user expectations. The community is much smaller as a result of this long dormancy...heck, I didn't come back until a friend of mine pointed it out. It's very much like a brand new site, only its members carry the weight of added years and the emotional baggage that that implies, much like the game itself.

The Great Crash has amounted to a changing of the guard, and we find ourselves in a unique position to dictate the future of the site by our actions towards members old and new alike. But with the incident in PC that one night that involved everyone getting access to the admin panel, my prospects are grim indeed.

[PrawnSkunk]

Re: questions

I've been here for 3 years now, but the hardest thing for me has been trying to convince friends to join the site so I wouldn't be as lonely. As several previous posts have noted, the site is not as inviting to new players as I would like to see.

It does get tiring talking between the same group of active members on the forum every day..