Gaming Staff - Summer Cleanup

[General Dragon.]

Greetings Everyone!

As you can tell, several changes happened to the structure of the hotseat sections recently, by the united decision of Gaming Staff. The General sub-forum will be soon renamed and repurposed to hold all important stickies with informations and guides in a one easy to look at place. Several threads have been archived or moved there and the hotseat naming system has been standardized for the hotseats, so anyone can tell from one glance what kind of hotseats they are without even looking into them. Some remaining threads are fully updated and cleaned up, and finally, as General is reused, Westeros and Third Age sections will be disbanded soon aswell, making it so that all of the hotseats are in one place from now on to manage.

Overall, this is an effort to make the section more simplistic and more inviting to new players and bring back the forum to life in general. It’s true, the forum has seen better days, but we believe that TWC hotseating, especially after operating for so many years, encouraging modding and having a community, even if we had our ups and downs, will always have a place for hotseaters. Hotseating itself is far from dead in itself, as there are many communities outside that have just started and booming on Discord as we speak. It is still, as popular as a few years ago, so the only thing we really need is an influx of new players. We, as Gaming Staff have a plan for bringing in new players, or as we usually call “newbloods”, but we’ll have to wait just a bit more for that to happen, while we are working on it.

I hope you agree with these changes, but feel free to write any of us or post in this thread here for clarifications on why we did certain things or maybe possible suggestions you want to include for the future.

[Dismounted Feudal Knight]

What may be worth considering is keeping the split forum structure, but rather than the historically divisive course of doing it by mod, do it by game type.

Newbloods, 'regular', RPHS, Gaming Staff. Something along those lines where people can go into 'their level' or 'their interest' at a given time and operate in the hotseats that tend to follow a fairly similar style in comparison to the others.

For professionalism, standardizing all 'mechanical' threads from the community chats to the 'what is this' under a system reviewed by one of your own or an experienced hotseater may be a good idea. By standardize I mean similar titles, similar layout, and 'duh' clarity as to what threads reference another. A general information thread would have on the bottom 'see here if you want to comment, see here for section rules, contact these people if you want to know more' with a link to the current gaming staff. Ideally, a member should only need to go to a couple threads, even just one to get all they need to be a regular assuming their retention is good.

Having a tiny branch of GS that works to consolidate the community and keep outside links up to date would surely be helpful, in effect a continuation of Jadli's drive to centralize the community here, or at least make this a nexus to find what people want even if what they want is not necessarily here.

Having the discord prominently mentioned and easily accessible may boost the amount of people who otherwise aren't as comfortable with the on-site chatting methods and thus don't involve themselves.

Finally, perhaps consider a review of each active game, where current games will not be approached and dying games will have the admins approached for a serious 'do we want to continue, if so, what should we do to revitalize this'.

[Mergor]

"What may be worth considering is keeping the split forum structure, but rather than the historically divisive course of doing it by mod, do it by game type."

There was no real problem with the past division either, but for the current playerbase, and for any future players, this format is - if not the best - the most simple and inviting. Simplicity is the key of this redesign.

As for your third paragraph, throwing out sticky threads would be a waste to make new "all-in-ones", so they were instead (if you check) updated, and a lot less are needed. But the information most newbloods would need are there, and there are a lot less of them. Several more may get sent to the new sub-forum that will be called "Hotseat Accessories"

"Having the discord prominently mentioned and easily accessible may boost the amount of people who otherwise aren't as comfortable with the on-site chatting methods and thus don't involve themselves."

While we fully support Discord hotseating communities, and we have plans to sponsor a few one on discords, (As we've already done before) making most, if not all of the hotseats on Discord (I know you didn't say we should do this but this is an important point) would in the end defeat the purpose of the existence of forum based hotseating communities like this one. The goal is to keep TWC hotseating in the larger part, forum based, and keep the continuity of this almost 9 years old community.

"Finally, perhaps consider a review of each active game, where current games will not be approached and dying games will have the admins approached for a serious 'do we want to continue, if so, what should we do to revitalize this'."

We have been already doing this, with either archiving those that are impossible to restart, or doing work behind the scenes to ensure activity.