Alzir

heh thanks I just learned a new word…

I agree on opening the forums, but Andy’s already said that’s on the agenda and it’s been discussed before so I don’t think we need to dwell on it. It will definately help, but we need to also go out and look at the communities imo. Some examples I can think of are the Jolt forums, and also wireplay (I think they’re still up and running, and if so it was always the more laid back of the two), which are both UK based and support communities for practically any game you can think of. There’s also the site the original owner of co.uk went off to manage, although it looked massive (which has a tendancy to attract a lot of wankers) and I can’t remember it’s name anyway.

Recruitment itself is not a priority atm, but it should be in the long term. The fact is we’re unlikely to find a game which ticks the boxes for all of us again. Having just the one branch of XDC is sustainable but we’ll continue shedding members, and with 4 servers now we need to consider actively expanding in those areas or there’s no point in having 3 of them. The other thing though, as Dave said, is that we do need to work on our servers, especially TF2 now that half of us have moved to COD on what looks like a permanent basis.

Regular events/matches for each game is another idea, and would help with all the above as well.

Good to see you Jim, give John and chris a nudge, get TF2 and we’ll be back to our late night madness of a few years ago 🙂

The problem as I see it is that we’re becoming invisible. We’ve had the greatest success in the past when we’ve been actively involved within a games community. Whether that involves community forums, or competitive games, both put you on the map better than our own servers ever can do by themselves. We’ve not been doing that for years, and the fact is that old friends move on, and we’ve not been out making a whole lot of new ones.

With all of us spread across so many games, it’s harder getting a server going by ourselves, the tf2 server for example usually takes two or three of us along with a couple of rats before it fills up. When we do get new people on it, it’s also important to acknowledge them and hopefully get a bit of banter going across the teams, it’s a rare occurrence but last week I had some brilliant 2v2, and 3v3 games late at night which ended with people asking how to add us to their favourites. Of course that doesn’t really help us much in building a player base if we are empty 90% of the time. So what I think we should do is to put ourselves out there more, find the communities and get involved. Advertise our site and server through sigs, and see where that takes us.

We could also reintroduce the idea of sections in xdc, where we have at least someone willing to go out and build a membership for each game. It doesn’t really have to be that formal, really just recognition that we are building a team/player base for that game. The reason I suggest this is that there seems to be confusion about who we can recruit, eg the RO players must surely have met a lot of people out there who fitted perfectly with our style of play and attitude, yet I don’t remember any RO recruitment threads. Do people think we can’t recruit for minority games within XDC, or was that more a case of we couldn’t be arsed and were happy enough with what we had? I might be wrong on that, but still my point here is that if we are to go and get a server for any game, especially TF2 and COD4 these days, we really should be thinking of expanding our own player base for that game at the same time, it’s in our own interest as otherwise we get the empty servers we’re seeing today. The problem is that it’s a time consuming job, and initial recruitment needs to be extra careful, but I’m sure we’d be up to the task.

Thoughts?

ps I’m getting COD for christmas so I’ll be joining in there soon as well as TF2.

The blackbox ones are too dark for me, think I’d prefer something similar to what we had, unless there’s a truely amazing theme discovered. The sub theme’s seem to fit the bill, eg Subfresh (http://demo.phpbb3styles.net/subFresh) Subsilver+ (http://demo.phpbb3styles.net/subSilver-plus) Subsilver2 (http://demo.phpbb3styles.net/subSilver-plus).

heh you’ll also find bossman is an oximoron when used in xdc

Dial up, and AOL 😯 !! Sounds like the service hasn’t changed at all in the last 10 years.

WOW I’m impressed. Eight birthdays I’ve had in the time of xdc and I think this is my first happy birthday thread (aside from the once I prompted 😛 )! And it comes from a rat!!!

Thanks, and yea I had a good day, same as the day before (I’m getting that old now ;))

@crazy hippo wrote:

i think eve is like marmite. you either love it or you hate it

lol so true

But I’ve yet to meet someone who hates the pvp.