Stats - The 100th mass promotion topic thingy

[Relative]

Most nights (except weekends) it just barely passes the 200 mark, a few months ago it was closer to 300

[TradeMark]

Where are the yearly stats, so we could calculate the future! Maybe we get 1000 users in next year ;o

[AF]

The trend in the last few months has been a slow downward gradient. Our lobby userbase is slowly getting smaller.

[Abokasee]

Who is too blame... I say crappage, because his a tit

[Neddie]

This is what I started trying to combat months ago. The trend that AF mentions.

[Relative]

Also, if you look at the players list you will see ~60% of users are of Star rank. We have a pretty good user base of long time players, but with no new users to retain numbers as people naturally leave over time.

The problem isn't retaining old users, but getting new ones. Neddie's project is needed quite badly. We also need better official support for linux, which is our best place for growth. Right now you either have to compile spring, or search the linux forums to fine a link to someone's personal FTP server for a binary installer.

[BrainDamage]

time for mass promotion?

[Neddie]

I'm sick, bedridden in fact, and in danger of having to withdraw from university if this persists. Give me a few days, lads. I hope you understand.

The mass promotion project has been pushed back several quarters due to numerous demands for time by developers, contributors, lobby developers, game developers, and the SM3 hopefuls. I can't say I disagree with their reasoning - even though desync seems solved, there are issues a plenty to deal with.

[imbaczek]

Next version should have a lot of bugs fixed and it shouldn't be too long... if Tobi still aims for mid-September release

IMHO it's time to gear up for such an action, but don't fire the big guns just yet.

[Tobi]

I do.

I just hope I have enough time, but it still seems doable as long as no one breaks SVN too badly

[tombom]

The mass promotion project has been pushed back several quarters due to numerous demands for time by developers, contributors, lobby developers, game developers, and the SM3 hopefuls. I can't say I disagree with their reasoning - even though desync seems solved, there are issues a plenty to deal with.

You can wait forever and people still won't be ready. There are no big issues and nothing big on the horizon to wait for.

[Neddie]

Well, I'll set aside time to do the article writing then, after I catch up at university. That should be in about three weeks. I expect this will cost me about six or eight hours a week, so I may not be on lobby or the forums as often.

If anybody has any images, videos or articles they would like to contribute, post them on the Community Development subforum of Smoth's Site or email them to neddiedwarf{at}gmail[dot]com.

If anybody has a target audience they are interested in doing the work to attract or has a list of sites for me to consider targeting, you can reach me the same way.

[FLOZi]

The trend in the last few months has been a slow downward gradient. Our lobby userbase is slowly getting smaller.

Eh.. People holiday in august, and back to school in september.

[Caydr]

I'm planning a whole bunch of AA publicity.. well... spam, yes, spam that's it... at a bunch of places once I re-launch it. Maybe that'll bring a few players. Most RTS players don't know Spring exists, but it's superior in most ways to just about every other RTS.

Is there a general Spring-oriented fansite anywhere? A TAUniverse but for Spring, that kind of deal?

[SwiftSpear]

The trend in the last few months has been a slow downward gradient. Our lobby userbase is slowly getting smaller.

No it hasn't. It was constantly high right up until about around august 25, and then we had about a signifigant drop that continued in a down trend towards the current, where we are about 3/5ths of our usual capacity during the summer, and have held for about the last 3-4 days. I'm expecting a small continuing downward trend into the middle of September that should then level off to a fair degree.

Anyone else care to take a guess at the culprit? It's not a very hard one here...

[Relative]

The trend in the last few months has been a slow downward gradient. Our lobby userbase is slowly getting smaller.

No it hasn't. It was constantly high right up until about around august 25, and then we had about a signifigant drop that continued in a down trend towards the current, where we are about 3/5ths of our usual capacity during the summer, and have held for about the last 3-4 days. I'm expecting a small continuing downward trend into the middle of September that should then level off to a fair degree.

Anyone else care to take a guess at the culprit? It's not a very hard one here...

Pokemans????

[AF]

This trend has been happening since early 2007 late 2006. Early 2007 was a tipping point and the school holidays was another tipping point. In the early holidays a lot of people left as usual but the influx of users with time on their hands was miniscule compared to previous years, leaving the lobby dangerously close to critical mass.

As a result the rate of the trend accelerated and became more obvious.

The problem isn't just attracting new users.

Here are the factors I see as contributors

• Lack of integration and Seamlessness
  
  We have a miriad of arbitrary programs. Some such as tasclient are poorly designed and where never intended to be used as they are. None of them are integrated in any way save for the usage of unitsync.dll. Users are stuck with logins for the site forum, the wiki, the bug tracker, the lobby, the ladder, UF, FU and so on.
• The AI crash
  
  AI development is following a similar trend and crashing. A chronic lack of lua support and a general lack of effort from modders fobbing off AI support on AI developers and their user base is killing off AI. Most users don't seem to realize this because they're active in the lobby and thus whatever doesn't bother them doesn't bother spring, they do not understand the importance of single player mode.
• Lack of mod innovation
  
  We're still primarily TA based. And our TA based mods haven't changed very much over the last 2 years. Sure we've improved graphics here and there, added sfx, added/removed the odd unit and made balance changes, but its still the same set of games. On top of that the insistence that this game is to be held directly alongside fledgling games such as kernel panic stifles any chances a new game has of acquiring a stable player base. On top fo that these other games are bad mouthed in the lobby channels. As a result the content stays relatively identical to prior versions and new users are put off and dont stay as long as they could.
• TASClient and TASServer
  
  A while ago the Starwars mod made it into PC Zone, a major UK gaming magazine, on the free ware page. Although it was highlighted as good the comments were mainly critical of the UI and the process needed to get from "oo where do i get it?" all the way to "wow lets send those walkers across the map"
  
  Why was this? Why did they say spring was sprayed at the edges? TASClient. It wasnt designed as a good rock solid lobby. It was designed as a temporary replacement for "Spring Lobby" jouninkomikos original buggy C# lobby setup. Jouninkomiko didn't really know what he was doing and had never written anything in C# before, people just wanted a lobby that didn't crash in the first 5 minutes and that's why tasclient was introduced. The archaic design of the TASServer protocol and zero co-operation from betalord further stifled any chances of a replacement lobby system. So we were stuck with a lobby system that had terrible design flaws in its basic GUI interface.
• The website
  
  Poorly maintained, awkward to get any work going, not particularly intuitive, mostly walls of text. Most users arrive then leave as soon as they see the front page.
  
  The new site is an improvement but imo I or tim working free reign over a working website development environment with a few days to spare and no 'development process' could do in hours what is currently taking months.
• Development e-bombs
  
  To date I have seen more projects die from this that could be in use by now than I have fingers. Betalord ratcheted a few of these by killing off 3 or 4 ladders and its only now he's away somewhere that we finally have a multi mod ladder. How did this happen? He announced his intentions to do a ladder himself in the future. Every time he did this the rival project collapsed under lack of morale or motivation or the developer gave up because betalord had official Spring team status. To date he's not written a single line of code for his ladder. And he's not the only person to do this either, you all know who you are.
• The its fine as it is crowd
  
  There're a lot of people who because they're familiar with how it all works don't want it to change or fail to see why change is necessary. This may be for personal ends, or it may be to cause trouble, or because they really fail to see the point.
  
  For example, people in XTA and BA who've played the game for years not wanting a change made or try to pussyfoot around the real problem with a unit, for example the zipper, whose overpowered because of its mobility in XTA yet nobody in XTA will admit this and instead refer to its health or its dps and use those to insist its balanced. Or the whole slope tolerance fiasco in BA/AA where a major mapping issue was sidelined because AA players wanted to play the existing flat maps while maintaining that AA was perfect, eventually mappers were forced to correct the issues and the mapping problem remained to this day.
  
  Or the site, numerous people came out of the works and said it was fine and tried to stop the new site going ahead. Or insistence that tasclient is a good program.

What should be done?

• Remove XTA from the spring installer
  We should have either rotating mods (with TA based mods all counting as one slot on the cycle not 1 per mod). Mod makers (mod makers not players) would put forward a version theyd like as the latest official release and those would be cycled through on each major release.
• Move the spring website environment off of fnordias webserver and to somewhere more convenient. If the svn is not updated when a change is made within 10-20 minutes of a change occurring then the either the change shouldn't have been made or svn shouldn't be used. The development process is a gigantic negative to site development. SVN alone has driven off many potential site developers.
• Support new projects and organize standards and co-operation.
• Greater lobby moderator flexibility.
  Moderators are few and far between and some of them feel that they're restricted unnecessarily. I vote swiftspear be given the right to recruit moderators in the lobby and that #main be registered and a new moderator level be introduced (operators in #main, for people who can be trusted to keep the peace in #main but cannot be trusted with server wide moderator powers )
• Wiki menu structuring.
  When I first signed in to the wiki as Redstar I started taking the main index page layout and manipulating it to create sub menu pages, greatly increasing the organisation of the wiki. Most notable of these was the AI section. Further use of this structuring would greatly increase the wikis usability.
• Wiki index changing.
  imo the wiki is too shallow. The main index page should be split up into a collection of pages, labelled, 'playing spring', 'developing for spring', 'content creation', and 'other'. Whereas at the moment the whole lot is filtered into 2 columns.

[Dragon45]

I havent been on lobby for weeks because im getting me an edumacationz

[AF]

I havent been on lobby for weeks because im getting me an edumacationz

Are you sure you weren't banned?

[SwiftSpear]

AF, not that I disagree with you that all those things are awesome and should be tackled ASAP by as many people as possible, but at the onset of this last summer we were up to 300 users during prime time. That's our all time high. Spring hasn't been declining since 2006, late 2006 our prime time averaged around 150.

Spring has been exponentially increasing in size at a slow but steady rate for the past 2 years, this school break end is the first major size decrease we've seen in a while.

That being said, I really think that the spring project can do better than 300 users during prime time, especially with the solidness of the current versions. Lets get as many of those things holding us back under wraps and try to push our averages around 300, and our primetimes around 1000.