Sales Pitch

[Barbarossa_5]

Basically, we're trying to get it back to being more like Doublecross, and less like Payload.
Our shenanigans were cheek and fun, their shenanigans were cruel and tragic. Thereby making them not shenanigans at all... evil shenanigans.

Sent from my KFOT using Tapatalk 2

And by Payload, I hope you mean the monster it became, as it was more on the lines of what Doublecross was when I played on it before SB left. That said, will there be any attempts at reviving the custom map servers, meaning Payload and Montage?

 

[EdFromHumanResources]

Maybe if you tried to go back to 2009 when the atmosphere was more open and diverse. People laughed, had fun, and traded jabs with one another. Late night discussions were casual, sometimes insightful, other times completely ridiculous, motivated by our desire to be heard speaking in a politically incorrect tone. People were nice to one another, people were mean to one another. People were allowed to be themselves. Admins didn't get involved unless it was a serious incident like an obvious hacker or some 4channer spamming trololol over and over by putting the mic next to the speaker to bypass the 3 second limit. In the beginning the Payload server was almost completely unmoderated. If you were being trolled and didn't like it you used the mute feature rather than having an admin do it for you. If you didn't know about the mute feature people were always eager to tell new players how to use it. The Payload crowd was a rowdy bunch to play with but that's what made Payload so successful. The rowdiness is what attracted that group of players. The other servers attracted a more milder audience. This diversity is what made FreeFrag so successful.

 

[VintagePC]

Ed - You do have a valid point. We are currently in the process of re-evaluating the admin rules with regards to a few things, and the level of moderation/admin action is definitely something that has come up, and how to keep all admin actions consistent from one admin to the next.

And by Payload, I hope you mean the monster it became, as it was more on the lines of what Doublecross was when I played on it before SB left. That said, will there be any attempts at reviving the custom map servers, meaning Payload and Montage?

Custom map servers are something I'm willing to revisit, but not until things settle down a bit.
We had a 30 man payload up for a while (before I changed it to Halloween) and it was dead.
We had montage up for a while after the crew left. It was dead.

Part of the issue there is that custom maps don't bring in any Quickplay players, so they are dependent on regulars to get the server going - so once we have established a solid base of regulars on the current servers, we will re-evaluate what's going on.

 

[Net]

I get that the workload is being spread out more, responsibilities delegated. That seems like a logical/good idea.

What is being done about funding? How is VF4 going to sustain itself right now? I understand the goal is to create a place where people want to play and give you their money. Where is the money coming from now? What are your ideas for soliciting donations? How are you going to attract and then maintain a server population? Are you just depending on the same old game servers?

Silence. Right now there are a few of us that plan to keep this place a live until it can survive on its own. I have enough funds to be able to keep this place a live for a year just on my own.

The main objective is to provide a place people want to be apart of, who will come back consistently, and who will attract more people just by them having a good time. We need to get solid regulars in who decide to support us and by them being on the servers with perks having a good time will spread to other players who then become regulars themselves.

Right now we are missing the solid regulars. We have to start from scratch on that unfortunately but are on a solid track to getting that back again. We just need people to go in and have a good time with others so the servers become favorite and they return to have the same fun. People are willing to support fun, and that's what we aim to provide. Unique fun environment with a gathering of players who all just want to have fun.

 

[textercist]

Right now we are missing the solid regulars. .

I've got a good amount of the old payload folks on my friends list. I'll try and bring them this way.

Sorry for quote fail, I'm a forum noob.

 

[Csiko]

Part of the issue there is that custom maps don't bring in any Quickplay players, so they are dependent on regulars to get the server going - so once we have established a solid base of regulars on the current servers, we will re-evaluate what's going on.

And how many of those quickplay people were donating? A grand total of zero? You made a conscious effort to pander to those who would bring you little to no benefit.

 

[VintagePC]

And how many of those quickplay people were donating? A grand total of zero? You made a conscious effort to pander to those who would bring you little to no benefit.

Considering this was post-PL/Montage collapse, it had more chance of succeeding than pandering to people that have decided to leave and go elsewhere.

 

[DeBo]

In case anybody wondered what happened to Katsu's account here, apparently that wasnt her Posting, so we deleted this account, and had her recreate one.

 

[Anonymous 72]

Quickplay is a good idea, but it needs more than just quickplay to work. You need a base of talkative regulars that will convince quickplay players to actually stay and become regulars themselves. It's what Fug did to become pretty successful, not to mention the downsizing of their servers (most of their servers are 24 people instead of 32). You can't bring back the Montage and Payload crowd back, Going Places and Railbait have filled in the niche that FFN left wide open. As such, you should focus more on other groups of people that DON'T have regular servers. Event nights would be a good way to start, with people who are talkative and use their mic a lot being on.

That and please don't do lots of the stupid shit FFN did. Nubz stacking, yeah that's nothing compared to the level of stacking going on in pubs everywhere now. Highlander taking off made that WAY more often. Speaking of which, you should be on the lookout for a team to sponsor. Post on the UGC forums saying you're looking for a team to sponsor and that you'd be willing to provide the team with both a voice and gameserver, and have someone from the community take care of managing the team. I'd help you guys scout teams to find a suitable one to represent the community, but that's it really. You should also sign up for the next Communities vs Pros for even more exposure and try to get on CommFT's Community of the Week. There's a lot you can do to get the word out there, and it's frankly irresponsible and really telling of the direction the community will take if you don't go out of your way and take every single route to get the community's name out there.

 

[DeBo]

Thanks for that Info Rawr, I'll make sure to take a look into that with teh Highlander teams for sure. Captain suggested the same. I'd really like to see our Prophunt and Srs Business server get its name out there, I think those are pretty niche and fun if we can get people in on them. That's where the redo comes in, getting our butts back out there as staff and the few admins we have and trying to get things going again.

 

[textercist]

I was mainly a payload player, but anyone who'd remember me knows I'm not one of the bad crowd folks

 

[lonesome killer]

I agree with .silence. So far all I've seen is "We're going to change. We're going to have more fun in the servers. We're going to make people want to play here everyday. We're changing our staff so we can get stuff done faster." Not a thing about how you'll do any of it. I understand that you are just starting to create a new name/community and it may take a while to implement all your ideas.

But right now I see people happy that it's only the 4th day in the month and you've got 1/2 your donations already. This is just silly. So far VF4 hasn't done anything different. The only thing is they've tried to so far is "rebrand" (how I hate that word) and everything else is the same. Same perks in game. Same servers. When you throw the word "rebrand" around it will always cause excitement and curiosity and might spark people's interests for a while. Of course you'll get some donators. But they will quickly fade when they see that nothing's changed.

It's like Food Lion for anyone who has them around. I see commercials all the time how they've lowered prices on every day items and increased savings. Yet when you go to Walmart everything (EVERYTHING) is cheaper there. Why go to Food Lion? The commercials got everyone excited and curious. Truly the only reason to shop at Food Lion is because you need an emergency item, like having a barbecue and you run out of buns, and it would be closer than driving to a Walmart.

I'm not saying that donating is bad. Just don't be too excited when you see donations coming in now. The true test will be 2 or 3 months from now when you do implement your new ideas and see if people are still playing. Anyone can keep the servers up out of pocket but what would be the point if you have the servers empty except maybe once or twice a week?

 

[English]

Quickplay is a good idea, but it needs more than just quickplay to work. You need a base of talkative regulars that will convince quickplay players to actually stay and become regulars themselves. It's what Fug did to become pretty successful, not to mention the downsizing of their servers (most of their servers are 24 people instead of 32). You can't bring back the Montage and Payload crowd back, Going Places and Railbait have filled in the niche that FFN left wide open. As such, you should focus more on other groups of people that DON'T have regular servers. Event nights would be a good way to start, with people who are talkative and use their mic a lot being on.

That and please don't do lots of the stupid shit FFN did. Nubz stacking, yeah that's nothing compared to the level of stacking going on in pubs everywhere now. Highlander taking off made that WAY more often. Speaking of which, you should be on the lookout for a team to sponsor. Post on the UGC forums saying you're looking for a team to sponsor and that you'd be willing to provide the team with both a voice and gameserver, and have someone from the community take care of managing the team. I'd help you guys scout teams to find a suitable one to represent the community, but that's it really. You should also sign up for the next Communities vs Pros for even more exposure and try to get on CommFT's Community of the Week. There's a lot you can do to get the word out there, and it's frankly irresponsible and really telling of the direction the community will take if you don't go out of your way and take every single route to get the community's name out there.

Rawr, Thanks for some great suggestions.

 

[DeBo]

Lonesome, one of the BIGGEST changes, you can't readily see. We're working closer and taking more input from the other Staff with the group. Admins and Moderators say is a WAY bigger thing now. THere is 1 forum that we use now for communication and discussion of things at the staff level, no super secret discussions unless it involves the security of the servers. I'm also making attempts to get other parts of the community more involved. We have a large LOL community, that we just havent made a big use out of, and I think that needs to change.

Also we're going to make sure the community knows about changes BEFORE they're done. Vintage/Reechard have thrown around the idea of a change log before, and that might not be a bad idea. They can put pending up dates there and if there are disagreements with that we can discuss them openly.

 

[EdFromHumanResources]

Another thing to consider is, especially if you're looking to create and launch a payload server and hope to attract the same group of players that flocked to the original one, reconciling with the most rowdy of the bunch by purging the sourcebans database would be a good start. Unless they were banned for hacking, you should be able to forgive them. Give them a clean slate to move forward with and if they choose to come back, welcome them with open arms. You'll need these players to help get a server going.

 

[VintagePC]

Another thing to consider is, especially if you're looking to create and launch a payload server and hope to attract the same group of players that flocked to the original one, reconciling with the most rowdy of the bunch by purging the sourcebans database would be a good start. Unless they were banned for hacking, you should be able to forgive them. Give them a clean slate to move forward with and if they choose to come back, welcome them with open arms. You'll need these players to help get a server going.

We considered purging the database or just starting fresh when we began. However, given that there are MANY people in there that were banned for cheating, we'd like to keep those folks out from the get-go.

HOWEVER - we're more than willing to give second chances with the new community and all that - so anyone interested in having their server access restored need only ask. It is much less of a headache for those of us involved than sorting through some 2000 bans to unban a select few that were not banned for cheats. I hope you can understand. Once halloween dies down (today, I think) and Payload is restored, I'll make an official thread about it.

 

[tigar]

not to revive an old topic but vintage id be more then happy to go sort through all the bans at a steady pace just figured id say :3

 

[lonesome killer]

But right now I see people happy that it's only the 4th day in the month and you've got 1/2 your donations already. This is just silly. So far VF4 hasn't done anything different. The only thing is they've tried to so far is "rebrand" (how I hate that word) and everything else is the same. Same perks in game. Same servers. When you throw the word "rebrand" around it will always cause excitement and curiosity and might spark people's interests for a while. Of course you'll get some donators. But they will quickly fade when they see that nothing's changed.

Seems I was right. You even had a great incentive to donate (2x tickets for the Holiday Giveaway).

You need something. How about some events? I keep seeing discussion on the forum about LoL tournaments or even in game PUGs for TF2 yet they never seem to go passed the planning stage. How about appoint someone to coordinate events? I have plenty of stuff (Steam games and TF2 items) to give away if you need some prizes.

 

[Spago]

Lonesome, keep in mind what month it is right now... Christmas is the hardest time of the year for people to shell out some money. I would normally give $25 to the group every month, but I'm watching my wallet a little bit because of Christmas time. Come tax return time I'll be giving that again.

 

[CorruptDictator]

Only reason I do not donate (yet) is that VF4 does not host anything I play and I very rarely even hop on TS. I love you guys and all, but servers I play on are a key decider for donations for me (at my last community I donated non-stop for 4 years).