by Hanley! » Jan 10, '15, 7:54 pm
I'm going to weigh in on this, but I'm going to try and be respectful as this isn't a game I'm involved with.
Why not consider changing the game? It's dying and it has been for a long time. I have every faith that you can keep the show going, Kaiser. But in it's current format, I don't think you can revitalize interest in it. Maybe you feel like you've proved the naysayers wrong by keeping the show going for this long, but it seems to be dead on its feet at this point.
Participation has been trending down for at least 3 years now, if you consider this game as an extension of the WCSF. Every now and then, there's a big conversation about how the game isn't working anymore and a few people quit and everybody else carries on. But nothing changes except now there's less people and the community has gotten smaller and there's even less commenting, discussing and caring about the game. Then a few months later the cycle will continue. The game will get a little smaller, a little quieter and stays going just the same.
It's gotten to the point now where if there are more than a couple of posts made in the PCW forum close together, that means that people are talking about whether the game should exist anymore. They're not talking about the game itself.
Kaiser doesn't need other people to fantasy book. He can do that for himself. The other members can certainly write without posting it on a forum. While people have downplayed the community/commenting element of the game in the past, that's the only part of this you can't get elsewhere. It seems that whether it's a conscious decision or not, people are fighting for the one part of the game that's already gone.
It would be easy for me to say that you should just call it quits and stop playing altogether. I don't have anything invested in it anymore. But instead I'll say what I've said the last few times this has happened: consider changing the game. Try something new. Something that might get people more involved - even if it's just the few people who are still playing right now. If you keep going without making a change, we'll be back here again in a few months except even more people will have left and nobody is going to be happy.
I'd like to make it clear also, that it seems to me that Kaiser has done a good job with the fed, and I'm not saying any of this as a slight against him or the other mods. To be honest, I think this format was just bound to eat itself eventually. When page counts started to balloon to ridiculous proportions years ago, and you suddenly had to put far more into the game than you could possibly get out of it, it seemed inevitable that when it started to lose momentum that momentum would be incredible difficult to get back. It's just not a sustainable format.
Consider implementing some changes. I'm not sure exactly what they should be, that's a larger conversation. I don't think just introducing page limits is enough at this point: that'll just make people feel creatively stifled now. But some of the trappings of the game have to change if it's to be a real success again.
Just my two cents on the matter, and I hope nobody is put out by them.