[MatthTheGeek]

I know I've done as much advertising to FSO as was practical during and after the SC crowdfunding. There definitely were some people interested. Can't really do a large-scale advertising campaign on my own though.

[Spoon]

Ya know Mongoose, I'm happy for you. I truely am.
I really wish to live in the same land where you are residing, filled with rainbows, butterflies and unicorns. The same land in which you can flatout call me wrong on a project I'm part of. I know Stellar Assault is dead. But its okay man, in your world its not. Since you have preceived some general indication of progress. In this same world, TAP is doing grrrreat too. Since getting capable 'new staff' is super easy. And it will be right on its way to a stellar release once it has aquired this staff.

I'll just be here, sticking my head in the sand. That's what seems to be the popular thing to do around here.
I'm out (again)

[Luis Dias]

So instead of whining and complaining about how HLP is dying (which it isn't at all) we should be working on how to get ourselves more attention and more new users. Chris Roberts new game looks exciting but it won't be out for another 2 years. We have content now we should be figuring out ways to pull those people into the community now.

Once MediaVPS 14 and deferred lighting with shadows become official, the internet will be flooded with Freespace gorgeous screenshots.

Notice that in GOG FS2 is selling at 10 bucks, up from 6 bucks in the past. I deem that good news, it means that it has been selling okay. And that population is probably lurking these forums or the moddb.com pages for new stuff. And a small percentage of those people will contribute in the future.

About Star Citizen, there's the odd possibility that it may not contribute with a good competition against FRED. And if that's the case, many Star Citizen wannabe modders may want to check FRED out.

[Mongoose]

Ya know Mongoose, I'm happy for you. I truely am.
I really wish to live in the same land where you are residing, filled with rainbows, butterflies and unicorns. The same land in which you can flatout call me wrong on a project I'm part of. I know Stellar Assault is dead. But its okay man, in your world its not. Since you have preceived some general indication of progress. In this same world, TAP is doing grrrreat too. Since getting capable 'new staff' is super easy. And it will be right on its way to a stellar release once it has aquired this staff.

I'll just be here, sticking my head in the sand. That's what seems to be the popular thing to do around here.
I'm out (again)

Well this is pretty much the exact opposite of a constructive sentiment.  I don't exactly keep track of every single member's badge collection, so I missed that you were a member of the Stellar Assault team.  And far be it from me to ever be accused of being optimistic.  But I have been around here for a long time now, and by the historical standards of this place, a project whose showrunner posts an active work update just a few months back is pretty much bustling.  There's a reason why Duke Nukem Forever has always been held up as a comparison point around here.  (Though now I guess we have to switch to Half-Life 3 or something...)  I think you're framing that argument in a very limited definition of "alive."

[wistler]

If I had to guess I'd say the most prominent way of securing future longevity is by nurturing future FREDders. Its good level designs that's important. It's what makes sure the new ships are used, that new features are shown off. If big mods have a open door for new people to learn the ropes and to encourage them, it'll pay back in great FREDders.

[Droid803]

Look okay, if anyone is wondering what's wrong, just look at the first few pages of this thread. Maybe, just maybe, modders aren't being motivated to finish their projects because nobody is playing them? Or maybe as the community grows older we have more responsibilities and less time to spend on modding. I know that's what happened to some of the old guard before I came around. Yeah, mods have always popped up and died, but would be farcical to say that there hasn't been something amiss lately.

I don't know if I can put a finger on anything concrete - but the general atmosphere and mood has, well, taken a turn deep into the ****-end of the pool. It's not just the people going "We're all doomed!', it's probably partially to do with the people going "No shut up, everything is fine. It as always be- WHAT DID YOU SAY BLAH BLAH I'M NOT LISTENING." Together it just looks totally dysfunctional, and the fact that people want to keep dredging up the topic whenever there's something slightly related sure as hell isn't helping.

Take ASW for example - we shouldn't panic because it died. We should celebrate because it actually got off two whole freaking releases before dying. AG got off a demo which for all intents and purposes can now be treated as a mini-campaign. MT...well that was dead years ago. At the same time, we shouldn't be totally ignoring the fact there may very well be something off with the community. Certainly I can't say that this level of pessimism is normal, and being dismissive of it probably isn't helping. Now certainly, it would help if those who had their gripes would come forward, but at the same time, maybe we could all look at ourselves and ask - what more could we do?

[General Battuta]

My big effort to retain talent has been the 'history of HLP campaigns' thread. I wanted to give everybody's work a place in the narrative, a sense of what it contributed and did beautifully, and a positive sense of 'people pay attention, in depth, to what I do'.

I still plan to keep going on it, but damn, I was expecting a little participation.

[MatthTheGeek]

What participation ? It's your thread, you're the professional writer and the guy who was there forever here. What do you expect us to add ?

[rubixcube]

This thread is getting a little more heated than I would have liked

[General Battuta]

What participation ? It's your thread, you're the professional writer and the guy who was there forever here. What do you expect us to add ?

Just the stuff I suggested in the thread :shobon: I haven't played everything!

[Mongoose]

I don't recall which campaigns you didn't have in there, but I do think that's definitely a thread that's worth stickying, so that other people can see it and chime in.  Do you happen to have the link handy?

[General Battuta]

Goob has agreed it's worth stickying once I updated it one more time. Pretty sure it's on, like, the second page though

[Mongoose]

Ah, so it is.  I couldn't remember if it was in here or Missions, and given how ****ty the built-in search is, I didn't trust that it'd turn up.

[Axem]

Allow me to out myself as a shadowy doom-and-gloom illuminatus that Battuta has been referring to.

Now I don't usually say much, so let me drama queen it up with some meandering observations and burn this all to the ground.

First, I don't think HLP is dying. Sure, projects like Machina Terra and Syrk and TAP are dead or dying. But you also have people like mjn and Spoon with brand new projects, doing really cool stuff. Battuta's only come into the modding world with War in Heaven. These are the faces of new modders, releasing their work after 2010. Could you say in 2008 or 2009 that 2010 would see three high quality campaigns be released within a month of each other, with new mediavps, with a new solid build? Its not even the equivalent of planets aligning, because we can tell when those are going to be well in advance!

Maybe in 2013 or 2014, 3 or 4 or more great projects will release together for another golden time. I think this "era" of Freespace has the greatest potential, and it just going up from there. The tools are easier to use, the game has more features than most modern games. But working on this stuff can be hard. Not difficult, just hard to go forward on a motivational level.

While I typically consider myself to be the target audience of my mods, its wonderful to share and see my works be discussed and be, generally, successful. So I've released quite a number of things, how's my success been (judging by release thread activity)?

Shadows of Kraken: 25 replies
JAD1: 92 replies
JAD2: 92 replies
JAD3: 201 replies
Vassago's Dirge: 328 replies
JAD2.21: 78 replies

Looking at these numbers alone, I'd say that its time to retire. It seems ludicrous that I spent over a year working on something that gets less response than the first two installments of JAD. But I know people really liked it, I know people played it. But I can't really tell how many people actually played it and liked it. For every reply, maybe there were 10 that liked it but didn't say anything. Or maybe 50. Or maybe just 1 extra. I can't tell. I tried to gauge better reactions with a poll, but interest died out on that pretty quickly as well, so I ended it well before I originally intended to.

This might just be a problem that I created myself. I try to bring unique missions and gameplay to the table, but its hard to know where the line between "this 5 minute mission is worth spending a month on" and "this 5 minute mission is not worth spending a month on". You can be sure any game developer would not like 5 minutes of gameplay taking a month to do, so I probably need to... not do that.

But hey, no feedback is probably worse than negative feedback. At least people will tell you what you've done right and wrong. With no feedback, you've only got yourself to go "why didn't they post", and if you're in a foul mood, you won't get any good answers.

So Axem, you've whined and complained enough. What do you expect us to do? We're busy, we're taking breaks from FS, we've got exams, we've got kids. I think we need new people, new creators, new players to replace the ones leaving. And we need to make them aware of whats here. Diaspora was a great thing for the community, brought plenty of new people in and hopefully peripherally exposes them to FreeSpace. But we can't depend on new battlestar fans to sustain us all the time. Maybe we need to take a slightly more aggressive approach to displaying the talents of this community to attract people. Half life mods get game site coverage all the time. New minecraft mod release threads can go at a rate of like a page an hour! What do they have that we don't?

Once we've got them here, we need to show them what's actually here. I've seen many posts going "never herd of wings of down" or "whats antagaonist" from people who have been here for years. Battuta's guide to campaigns is a great start, but that's a history lesson. Getting that blasted installer working right is great too, but how do we know what we should actually be playing, or what we should be looking forward to? We need current events! Yes, NEWS. Make site news much more prominent, like the highlights! Get dedicated people to trawl topics, see new and neat stuff, grab pics, and previews for news articles. Gather up information in threads and summarize it for people who don't want to go through a 400 post thread. Maybe every month or two, an article for what's been released, and what's coming up. Years in review! Ships, campaigns, everything. We need to increase our internal visibility to ourselves. And it needs to be consistently updated, weekly at the very minimum.

Semi-related to that: I think we need better showcases of our released content. The wiki is great, but some of it seems too encyclopedic. Custom ships has come a long way recently, but the campaigns are still pretty bare and uninteresting.

http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Silent_Threat:_Reborn <- This is a released 18 mission voice acted campaign
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Between_the_Ashes <- This is for an unreleased campaign with a 2 mission demo

With zero knowledge of FreeSpace and HLP, which to you looks more interesting? You have 5 seconds to decide before your interest makes you close the tab.

Of course we can't depend on people finding the wiki first:
"I liked that freespace game, i wonder if there are any mods! i will search teh googles for freespace mods...aha a hit. what new map packs do they have???"

http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.863
http://www.freespacemods.net/download.php?view.24

First one has nothing that would make me download it. Second line looks pretty bad too. No pics, a 1 star review. Better not play that either!

You go to a place like Moddb and you've got pictures everywhere.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/vassagos-dirge
http://www.moddb.com/mods/luyten-civil-war

This stuff is more flashier and with all those pictures and videos, its easier to catch and draw people in with. Perhaps we need to more aggressively put our stuff on Moddb or come up with a system of our own or revamp the campaign pages. Those veteran comment boxes on ships and weapons could probably be a lot more useful for campaigns.

so tl;dr Axem thinks HLP is dying because the Illuminati have stopped putting candy bars in the machine.
(That's what you get for skipping my :words: )

[rubixcube]

You were joking about retiring right? Please don't retire! I loved every single one of your campaigns 

[SpardaSon21]

Axem's retiring?  I was looking forwards to JAD 2.22 with the return of disco, now freshly arrived from Japan.

[General Battuta]

He didn't say that, but hopefully people will take Axem at good faith and not run him off as some sort of cabalistic has-been whiner.

[karajorma]

Allow me to out myself as a shadowy doom-and-gloom illuminatus that Battuta has been referring to.

After all the disco music, I'd always expected Axem outing himself to go..........differently.

So I've released quite a number of things, how's my success been (judging by release thread activity)?

Shadows of Kraken: 25 replies
JAD1: 92 replies
JAD2: 92 replies
JAD3: 201 replies
Vassago's Dirge: 328 replies
JAD2.21: 78 replies

Looking at these numbers alone, I'd say that its time to retire. It seems ludicrous that I spent over a year working on something that gets less response than the first two installments of JAD. But I know people really liked it, I know people played it. But I can't really tell how many people actually played it and liked it. For every reply, maybe there were 10 that liked it but didn't say anything. Or maybe 50. Or maybe just 1 extra. I can't tell. I tried to gauge better reactions with a poll, but interest died out on that pretty quickly as well, so I ended it well before I originally intended to.

And herein lies one of the biggest problems in motivating the community. There is no easy way to simply say you like a campaign unless you are a member of HLP. Perhaps we should just give up and add facebook like buttons.

It's the same with Diaspora (although to a lesser degree). I get the feeling we were really loved on release but the Diaspora release thread has only 384 replies. So maybe you should use that as your comparison, Vassago's Dirge was almost as popular as Diaspora!
 Hell, given that many of the posters on the release thread are one-time posters, it's probably more popular amongst HLP members!

So instead of being all gloomy about the issue, let's see if we can come up with some ways to make it easier to get the feedback we want.

This might just be a problem that I created myself. I try to bring unique missions and gameplay to the table, but its hard to know where the line between "this 5 minute mission is worth spending a month on" and "this 5 minute mission is not worth spending a month on". You can be sure any game developer would not like 5 minutes of gameplay taking a month to do, so I probably need to... not do that.

Oh come on, you know you love the challenge about as much as I do.

Maybe we need to take a slightly more aggressive approach to displaying the talents of this community to attract people. Half life mods get game site coverage all the time. New minecraft mod release threads can go at a rate of like a page an hour! What do they have that we don't?

I think the issue is we're perceived as something of a niche market. We need to make sure that we ride Star Citizens popularity to prove we're not. As for the rest of your points, I pretty much agree wholeheartedly.

[niffiwan]

Oh **** - I was hoping Battuta wasn't referring to Axem...

Just some small comments on your post, the post counts on something like Minecraft/HalfLife vs ours?  Freespace / Flightsim style games are a niche market.  I've tried over the years to get my friends/acquaintances/random people at LAN parties interested in playing them with very little success.  So I think that comparing us with something like Minecraft that has "mainstream" appeal is not a good idea.  I doubt there's anything we could do to achieve "success" if this is our standard for comparison.

I like your news idea, but I think we're going to have to communicate more to make it work.  I've setup my forum profile to watch 90%+ of the released projects boards, and slightly less than 50% of the WIP boards, and my feeling is that there isn't a lot of news coming from most of these (with some exceptions obviously).  The content creators would need to generate more news / updates in order for someone else to be able to collate & publish it.  Perhaps harvesting interesting screenshots from the "Celebration of Freespace" thread would also work, there's certainly been some interesting stuff posted there (e.g. Blueplanet almost-teasers from MattTheGeek, IIRC, but that's not the only example)

Anyway, if I can take the liberty of writing a summary:

1) update campaigns in the wiki to sell them better (or ModDB pages, etc)
2) regular NEWS
3) better marketing (much as I normally hate this term! )

[karajorma]

He didn't say that, but hopefully people will take Axem at good faith and not run him off as some sort of cabalistic has-been whiner.

I think you misunderstood my intention when I referred to a sewing circle. Basically I just meant that by chance the group of people talking to each other were always pointing out the bad side of things. If you don't have anyone to put the good side of things in the group, you've quickly got a downward spiral.

I think that's a lot of what's going on here. It's why we're only hearing complaints now instead of having people suggest ideas to improve things months or years ago.


But either way, I think it's time (and past it) to start asking for ideas on how we can get the content providers their much needed feedback.