The continual decline of activity felt throughout the forum, what do you do?

#1

Hey guys, I hope you’re all well. :slight_smile:

It’s been a well established trend for many years that activity is in decline. It’s publicly available information and if you’ve missed Tree’s biannual topics regarding it you can find forum activity data at the bottom of the forum. We’ve really been around the roundabout with this one, I’ve read every single topic in this board and the old one tonight and I’ve come across members suggesting the forums “death” can be attributed to poor management, runescape’s decline and a plethora of other reasons, some more bizarre than others.

It’s very hard to pinpoint a sole cause for every misfortune this community has had (Apart from the obvious reason of Classic) and while I do hold my own opinions regarding the reason activity has declined those opinions aren’t what I want this topic to be about. Instead of looking for something in the past to type and talk about I’d like the community to step into the shoes of the sole owner of this community and tell me about what they’d do.

Maybe you’d divert funds from the SSP into an advertising campaign? Or focus more on the SEO of the website? Perhaps you’d even change the theme, or push harder for an official server? :slight_smile: I genuinely want to see things through the frustrated eyes of those who post in this section, and instead of arguing about themes or reputation systems I’d like to discuss meaningful advances on a higher level than forum modifications.

#2

Official server seemed to bring in some people, I constantly have people asking me how they can play.

#3

I got a job

#4

tom i’m writing u a very angry complaint on facebook now please check your messages

#5

[quote=“Classic, post:4, topic:551680”]tom i’m writing u a very angry complaint on facebook now please check your messages[/quote]desu waifu chan senpai kawaii classic? ^.^

#6

The forum is providing a product no one wants, that’s why it’s dying. We should merge the forum with the IRC server.

#7

We are page 5 on google when you search for “Runescape private server.” SEO should be a top priority for bringing in new guests, and then we need a reason to keep them here. Official server, community, shiny badges, doesn’t matter as long as it gets people active.

#8

I don’t completely agree, however there’s a point there. My opinion points to Bowser’s comment, these types of servers are quickly becoming washed up, and there really is no master project that can save it, it’s just dying, there’s really no other way of putting it. Sure there’s a few servers that are very popular, but if you look at the overall population based on what it used to be in the private server community as a whole, is wearing off. Over time I feel like there will be surges, after RS makes its final attempts and finally fails, where nostalgia will take over and there may be a spike, like alot of old games we used to play years and years ago.

Honestly, in my opinion, one of the ways to keep the Moparscape community somewhat active is to take from the focus of RSPS, and more towards a programming/gaming standpoint, maybe open up to other game servers, and such things. The only ones that are still here are the noobs that are late to the party, and those of us who have been here 3+ years and got way too involved while the forum was popular and are now stuck here forever.

#9

that has been tried in the past AND that would hurt the forum more than it would help. This is a rsps forum. The last thing we’d want to do is move away from that. Any active user base that we have atm would leave, most likely.

i think the obvious answer is to gather the greatest rsps minds like noah1gamble, silab, ikitiliki god or something, and yung simmie, and create a time machine. that way we can all go back into time and wouldn’t have to worry about anything!

my real answer:

well obviously, if you google rsps it’s definitely concerning that we aren’t even on the first page. We should be top 5 atleast on the search IMO.

There’s also nothing new and fresh being released. Same shitty servers for download, same shitty tutorials, and the same shitty servers being advertised.

I find myself browsing through r-s instead of mopar a lot, and i’m sure others do to. What do they have (besides more users) that we don’t that makes it more appealing?

#10

I was going to say less elitst assholes, but that really isn’t true at all. I always stayed away from r-s because they were never extremely friendly over there, was always unsure why everyone enjoyed it so much… r-s’s forums are so mainstream style, they always have been. The big signature graphics, they’ve always had the big fancy avatars, shitty fanboy vB forum software… Alot of the members here on mopar I feel are exactly the type that hate that, I know I do. I love the simplicity of these SMF boards, hate the #420yolofaggot kids that are all sorts of about now-a-days, you seem them mostly on r-s. I feel like as the types of people that hate the mainstream, have run off a good amount of potential… Thoughts?

#11

It MIGHT help to bring in a new look. I’m not saying it’s going to bring in like… 100 members, probably won’t even bring in 50 but the fact that this forum has had the same look since it’s creation is mind boggling. As I said, a fresh, sleek new look all the while bringing in a new theme (which shouldn’t have even taken this long to come up with the idea of what to bring on the forum).

I personally have never had much experience with bringing people to a forum so I can’t help too much with this but I do think a nice, neat new look would help a little - IMO.

#12

I think the biggest contributor, as someone has already mentioned, is the fact that people just aren’t as interested in private servers as they were in the past. This forum is literally just becoming that one bar that a group of old guys still go to every Friday night with each other. No one necessarily feels welcome to the crowd, and for those that don’t care, well, they just aren’t interested in the first place.

#13

how do you fix a community thats based on a dying product? you don’t you keep it alive for the veterans and they slowly die off. If you want to fix the community you need to change the focus from runescape into something more popular.

#14

minecraft

#15

[quote=“WarTusk-RSPS, post:14, topic:551680”][quote author=Miss Silabsoft link=topic=670595.msg4484091#msg4484091 date=1432713002]
how do you fix a community thats based on a dying product? you don’t you keep it alive for the veterans and they slowly die off. If you want to fix the community you need to change the focus from runescape into something more popular.
[/quote]

minecraft[/quote]Moparcraft where u @?

#16

The only idea I had was to host a big ass PK tournament on a server we made with our very own community elitist devs and have a nice prize for the winner. Idk if it would work, but PK’ers on other servers would sure as hell talk about it with eachother and convince eachother to join and participate. If you’re reading up on the story behind League of Legends, we would be like the Institute of War and all the PK’ers coming in from other servers would be our champions… And a traditional tournament board with let’s say over a 100 participants would run forever untill a winner is decided and you can have a re-entry for people who lost in the first round or you can buy yourself into the re-entry pool.

#17

There doesn’t seem to be much innovation on the MoparScape forums in terms of private server development. We have a large number of people working on projects that are the same as all the others but we don’t have anyone doing crazy things with their clients or servers like Harry over on R-S with his RuneScape FPS. This was something that I hoped could be addressed by releasing my refactored client, by making it easier for people with less knowledge of the RuneScape client to make their own modifications to it but sadly it just didn’t have the effect that I expected.

I think the way to get more activity on MoparScape is first to release more informative threads. We need to be the place to go for snippets, tutorials and code releases. The other approach would be to encourage innovation with the RuneScape clients and servers - to make us less about RuneScape emulation and more about RuneScape modification.

#18

I would like to see a new theme. As for increasing our ranking on google I doubt that would do much at all as Silab has said Runescape is dying. The only reason R-S is still doing well is because for one they cater to their members every demand as you can tell by the full page sigs, the over 9000 ranks and custom titles, donating (to stay unbanned), market place to sell their stolen and hacked goods. And last but not least SHOUTBOX!!!420SWAG.

What do we have?

an IRC network, a non maintained wiki, 15+ active all days members, and last but not least Taharok.

#19

[quote=“drubrkletern, post:5, topic:551680”][quote author=Classic link=topic=670595.msg4484044#msg4484044 date=1432684299]
tom i’m writing u a very angry complaint on facebook now please check your messages
[/quote]desu waifu chan senpai kawaii classic? ^.^[/quote]
This guy. Get rid of this guy and everyone will come back.

But to be realistic I remember when David started up the official MoparCraft server, the forums were so active and people loved it even for as short as it lasted. Maybe something needs to be done not to change the theme of the forums, but to add to it like we did with Minecraft. Maybe mitb would like to partner with Frell and his buddy to support and maybe receive some sorts of exclusives for Blackwake? Official server, early alpha access etc idk.

#20

[quote=“TabbyKiller, post:19, topic:551680”][quote author=drubrkletern link=topic=670595.msg4484045#msg4484045 date=1432684518]

This guy. Get rid of this guy and everyone will come back.

But to be realistic I remember when David started up the official MoparCraft server, the forums were so active and people loved it even for as short as it lasted. Maybe something needs to be done not to change the theme of the forums, but to add to it like we did with Minecraft. Maybe mitb would like to partner with Frell and his buddy to support and maybe receive some sorts of exclusives for Blackwake? Official server, early alpha access etc idk.[/quote]For the record, I’m open to this idea for my game too. Would love to build a community for it, especially considering how well the MoparCraft server went. Wouldn’t mind having people here test it. :slight_smile: