Raising and keeping a videogame community alive

[Erik_Twice]

There are many games out there that become hundreds of times for fun if you can play and compete with many other people. Fighting, musical, FPS, it doesn't matter, all those genres greatly benefit from tournaments and being able to play with your friends.

As someone who has tried to raise a clan and failed, or as someone who has succesfully run several big tournaments for fighting games I can't help but think that there's not many helpful tips online and often you encounter a lot of self-proclaimed experts whose advice you shouldn't take.


I think the single most important thing to keep a community alive is to do something together, whatever it is. It's easier said than done, tough as how to get things done is too often overlooked.

Very often I see tournaments or activities being organized only for half of the expected players not to show up, leading to an overall sense of dissapointment on the organizer's behalf.

I think this feeling of dissapointment is greatly lessened if you plan for it. The problem is not facing the fact that you only have 8 people, the problem is starting to cut "corners" when you realize that you can't do the tournament the way you intended because that's what really leads to dissapointment.

If you want to run an event, no matter what kind you should be prepared beforehand for it to be such a failure that nobody ever shows up and to be such a huge success that you don't know what to do with so many people. It's important to understand that the community and the events you are going to organize should grow slowly and naturally.

Many communities also fail because they don't attract new people. It doesn't matter how good your community is, sooner or later players will leave, even if they are the best of the best.

And well, that's my...whatever it is. Opinions, thoughts? What do you think that is needed to keep a videogame community alive?

[YoshiEgg25]

I entirely agree with your take on the community needing to do something together. But just having Black Ops tournaments all the time isn't the answer. You have to make your members have a reason to come back. For example (using Pokemon forums), why would I go to a place like Marriland over Smogon? Smogon has everything a competitive battler would ever want. Marriland only has an advantage in the fact that it's smaller, so it's easier to stand out, and much more friendly.

Really, it depends from person to person what they want. But if you have someone, you need to be able to convince them to stay.

[AmishSamurai]

A lot of forums that I've seen crash and burn just ended up being "hey, it's this forum where I invited all you guys from, but I'M in charge!". Sometimes offshoot sites work, but it either needs to provide something the parent site didn't, or the parent site needs to have fallen into such disrepair and sheer awfulness that everybody decent willingly flocks over (one TF2 group I'm part of, Ellie's Nun House, consisted of a lot of people fed up with the infamous Jiggly's Fun House, a site which in itself defies logic in how it stays alive).

[YoshiEgg25]

A lot of forums that I've seen crash and burn just ended up being "hey, it's this forum where I invited all you guys from, but I'M in charge!". Sometimes offshoot sites work, but it either needs to provide something the parent site didn't, or the parent site needs to have fallen into such disrepair and sheer awfulness that everybody decent willingly flocks over (one TF2 group I'm part of, Ellie's Nun House, consisted of a lot of people fed up with the infamous Jiggly's Fun House, a site which in itself defies logic in how it stays alive).

My forum is something of an offshoot site, and thankfully, we're covering both of those bases.