Is our community gradually dying?

[TehHank]

Now it has occured to me that over the past 6 months since Gmod 13 arrived, the amount of newcomers we welcome has fallen to almost very little compared to the previous years. What also concerns me is that the Ratio of Admin/VIP:Regular members has been imbalanced with the drastic increase of Admin promotions and VIP promotions.

Not to mention many Admins and members have left the community last year and the year before. Also like to mention that our Stronghold and Zombie survival servers have little to no activity, compared to 1-2 years ago when they were constantly populated most of the time.

Now i am not saying any serious actions have to be taken but rather think about where our community now stands and whether eventually we will become just a large group of friends that play together.
Discuss.

[coolzeldad]

The community was founded on the basis for people to hang out and have a good time together.

Whether it be Dayz, minecraft, tf2, some mmo, etc. I always see people hanging out together and trying to set up group events.

Garry's Mod was one of the original initiators but things change and interests shift. The community has always been an open door and you can come and go as you please. Also note people who have stayed for years and some people that have come back. I am not attempting to dismiss the fact that some players have left, however I would rather acknowledge the good times we had with them and attempt to make more fun memories with the people around today.

Keep in mind no offense to you in particular, however this is typical response I have heard over the years over and over. Our community has seen dips and spikes but on average we have always come out bigger somehow. This might not continue forever but I am not going to make some drastic change to attempt in reviving some statistic which may or may not hold that much significance. While I am not going to attempt to make any predictions I see a lot of new content coming our way soon. Hopefully people will enjoy it and become part of the community but that's all I can say.

I have tried my best to transition the Garry's Mod servers over from version 12 to 13 with the help from ruben and minic especially and we have gotten really far with that. There were concerns that we wouldn't be able to switch over at all.

The last few GMod updates rendered custom content on a lot of servers inoperable making it impossible for new people to play zs and stronghold.

Their popularity was actually increasing overall since I started hosting 24/7 again.

Also, we still have much more than a lot of other communities, consider how many servers we have and dedicated members.

I stuck with this when there was maybe me and a few others I knew personally playing wire years ago and it developed into something much larger.

While there are always times of lower inactivity, I would say our community is stronger by the fact that we actually don't require the Garry's Mod servers to keep us together.

[saivon]

Yeah I was asking one of my friends the same thing eventually and I don't why but I still keep thinking about it.

But I don't really think it is dying and what coolz said the community is pretty strong so idk it's not dying though I know that for a fact.

[○ Μαρία ○]

People will come and go, and no matter how many people are in our community, we will always be thriving. It doesn't matter how many people are with us, it just matters how many people care.

[Peetah]

I hope there will be a new generation of players coming soon.

[Tiger Guy]

A small community with people that aren't insufferable is better than a big one where people are.

[Fenix]

I would LOVE to play more Zombie Survival if we could fix the damage issues. Gmod 13 fucked with damage on guns and its no longer fun at all because its extremely hard to get kills.

[Tezuni]

Both Hank and Coolz make very good points. 

Firstly, the noticeable decline:
Compared to a little over a year ago, the activity seems like a third of what it was.  That's just my own estimate.  The necessary downtime of the servers back then topped with the release of gmod 13 appears to have lost a lot of our player base.  These things just happen, not throwing blame at anyone in any way. 

Secondly,
rNd has been around consistently for years before the two events I mentioned, building up a large player base.  Then it went down and the dysfunction of gmod 13 during its' return didn't help - this was just a spike as coolz said.  I feel that given time, as rNd stabilizes again, it will build up its' player base once more. 

[HideoKojima]

I think one thing that effects the servers is the time of year.
People are less active now because school is back in session so people are using a lot more time to that.

I see plenty of new people come and stay for awhile, so I guess you could say for every person that leaves a new one comes.

[[Valor]iPounce]

~read it wrong~snip

[Xrain]

This question is asked at least once every few months.

The amount of people in the community tends to peak in the summer / winter break, and hit a low again right about this time, as well as somewhere in the October/November time frame.

I think it has a lot to do with that people are more busy at this time of year, considering nearly all of our members are still in school, and these time periods are usually the busiest as far as that is concerned.

Another thing that happens, is each wave of incoming people has somewhat of a life expectancy, we will get a rush of new people, they will play for a bit, some many will eventually get board and leave, leaving a few solid members behind. This also tends to lend to the perception of the community is dieing.


Unlike what the economists in the country keep telling us, infinite growth isn't a natural state in a closed system, you will have peaks, and valleys in the number of people on the forums. Yes one day the forums will die out as we all move on, but it all really depends on how good of friends you are with people in the community.

For the record, TehHank; interestingly enough what you have done in asking that question is to perform "speculating" rather similarly to the stock market speculation. Most of the time that the oil prices have skyrocketed, is because people perceived that oil was declining rapidly, despite it remaining pretty static with respect the the last 30 years. So because of this it artificially drove up gas prices.

Same thing can happen on a gaming community, if every says the community is dead/dying, even if it has had the same amount of population or growth the whole time, people can be convinced to leave the community and actually make it die, when normally it would not have done so.


I find it a bit interesting in what parallels can be drawn in something like our gaming community, and much larger events transpiring in the world.

[๖Ϝцzsioᴎ]

Not really dying, just people don't have much time, I've seen the TTT server go up to 15-18 during weekends and on Fridays.
Point is, more people get on when there is some sort of break for people in that country.
So I don't really think it's dying that badly, as coolz said, the community goes up and down in popularity.

[Viole]

Time juggled between Forensics/Debate and LoL = No TTT for me

[Alkaline]

I guess it's just one of those times where we hit that moral milestone. But I enjoy the fact we can thoroughly communicate and cooperate, and get together ocassionally.

[memo3300]

I would LOVE to play more Zombie Survival if we could fix the damage issues. Gmod 13 fucked with damage on guns and its no longer fun at all because its extremely hard to get kills.

Coolz is working on that