Only One Egg In The Basket?

[hen]

I've been kind of wondering about this for many years. How come stratics is solely dependent on UO for , at least, message board traffic?

I know in the past Toon Town and Sims had a large following here, but both have died off for one reason or another.

Why are all the other forums dead?

 

[Taylor]

Stratics got in on the ground floor of the dot com era and benefited as a result. Their momentum with UO spurred there momentum with other games and they become a giant, professional network. Over time, folks got comfortable and began to coast. Coasting turned into neglect; neglect turned into decline. In Stratics' stead, other communities sprung up to support various titles.

When the old management left and the subsequent undeniably bad events occurred (let's not rehash here), those of us who stayed were left with the reality noted in the aforementioned paragraph. The folks who remained did not have the same technical, graphical, or marketing talents. We were (and are) just a group of volunteers who were trying our best to figure out how to drive this ship. Fast-forward a year, we are making real progress. We have a lot of really devoted people who are successfully pulling Stratics out of a nosedive. We're still volunteers and we still lack the technical/marketing/graphical skills of former folks, but dammit, we're working.

Presently, traffic on all staffed portals is growing. UO is still the bread and butter of Stratics, but the new WoW ME/AE have returned WoW Stratics to earning over 80,000 views per month. That's incredible! Oh, and they haven't even launched their new portal (WoW Stratics!). Other active, staffed portals include Combat Arms, EVE, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, ToonTown, Warhammer Online, and the soon-to-be-made-over Stratics Central. All are growing in terms of both content and traffic.

Will forum traffic ever pick up? It depends on the game. My own portal, Combat Arms, will probably never have an active forum community on Stratics. This is because Combat Arms offers an active, official forum staffed by CA employees. In the past 6 months, CA Stratics has grown from 0 views per month to nearly 1,500 unique views per month, so we definitely have readers. But I don't expect that this traffic will translate to forum activity. CA players come to Stratics for the news, but stay on the official forums for community.

In sum, forum traffic may or may not pick up, depending upon whether a forum is needed for a game's community. However, forum posts are a poor measure of overall health. UO is, indeed, our foremost portal, but it actually only accounts for 15% of our overall traffic. Eggs all in one basket? On the forums, yes. Overall, no.

Hope this helps. The volunteers could really use some community support. We don't get anything for this but fancy badges--and the novelty of these wears off quickly. The only reason we do this is because we care about our Stratics friends, both staff and posters. Also, we're always looking for new volunteers to join the team, whether to write, mod, or manage portals.

 

[Zosimus]

I would like to add on behalf of the Guild Wars 2 forums and portal. Even though you may not see anybody posting does not mean traffic is not coming.

As we all know not everybody likes to post. In my postion I can see who is on what forum. Meaning members and visitors. Even the ones that stealth mode the forums I can see.

In my case I actually work with other sites and share traffic from those sites. I always give credit to any information out there to their perspective sites.

The GW2 forums and portal was started recently and there has been sites up since the announcement of GW2 back in 2007. We are growing slowly but what we do is for the love of the game and the community. From what we have accomplished I am very proud of it and we are only a little over a month old.

GW2 Stratics is definetly not built to steal away members from other forums and sites. I look at it this way. We are part of the link of sharing information for all the GW2 gaming community. In truth thats what all the stratics portals and forums are about, not just the GW2 sites.

If players come by and post great. If they come by and visit and look for information that is great. We are here for the community. Some of my personal communication with other sites and guilds are through emails, icq, skype, and my personal twitter.

I would like to expand into podcasts on my section eventually and live stream GW2 from time to time. Making videos of the game after release is another project I will be focusing on.

There is a ton of games out there for coverage. Some big ones will be coming out again this year. If stratics had the volunteers for these games I believe you would see stratics grow much faster.

 

[Taylor]

I can hardly wrap my head around GWII's trajectory. Your portal launched on 6 January 2012, just over a month ago, and you've already hit nearly 1,000 unique visits. You and Bella have made nearly 70 pages and posts . . . in one month.

Mind = blown.

 

[hen]

Stratics got in on the ground floor of the dot com era and benefited as a result. Their momentum with UO spurred there momentum with other games and they become a giant, professional network. Over time, folks got comfortable and began to coast. Coasting turned into neglect; neglect turned into decline. In Stratics' stead, other communities sprung up to support various titles.

When the old management left and the subsequent undeniably bad events occurred (let's not rehash here), those of us who stayed were left with the reality noted in the aforementioned paragraph. The folks who remained did not have the same technical, graphical, or marketing talents. We were (and are) just a group of volunteers who were trying our best to figure out how to drive this ship. Fast-forward a year, we are making real progress. We have a lot of really devoted people who are successfully pulling Stratics out of a nosedive. We're still volunteers and we still lack the technical/marketing/graphical skills of former folks, but dammit, we're working.

Presently, traffic on all staffed portals is growing. UO is still the bread and butter of Stratics, but the new WoW ME/AE have returned WoW Stratics to earning over 80,000 views per month. That's incredible! Oh, and they haven't even launched their new portal (WoW Stratics!). Other active, staffed portals include Combat Arms, EVE, Guild Wars 2, Lord of the Rings Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, ToonTown, Warhammer Online, and the soon-to-be-made-over Stratics Central. All are growing in terms of both content and traffic.

Will forum traffic ever pick up? It depends on the game. My own portal, Combat Arms, will probably never have an active forum community on Stratics. This is because Combat Arms offers an active, official forum staffed by CA employees. In the past 6 months, CA Stratics has grown from 0 views per month to nearly 1,500 unique views per month, so we definitely have readers. But I don't expect that this traffic will translate to forum activity. CA players come to Stratics for the news, but stay on the official forums for community.

In sum, forum traffic may or may not pick up, depending upon whether a forum is needed for a game's community. However, forum posts are a poor measure of overall health. UO is, indeed, our foremost portal, but it actually only accounts for 15% of our overall traffic. Eggs all in one basket? On the forums, yes. Overall, no.

Hope this helps. The volunteers could really use some community support. We don't get anything for this but fancy badges--and the novelty of these wears off quickly. The only reason we do this is because we care about our Stratics friends, both staff and posters. Also, we're always looking for new volunteers to join the team, whether to write, mod, or manage portals.

This is a fair assessment mate, but I have to disagree on one point. A healthy forum will generate a lot more traffic than a dead one to a site.
I visit UOGuide a couple of times a week for info. I look at UO Stratics every day out of habit.

 

[Taylor]

The key to forum growth is going to be getting in on the ground floor. Guild Wars 2 is an good example: the title is in beta phase, but GW2 Stratics forum is drawing new users. GW2 Stratics started a month ago and has already received over 20,000 unique visits. Mind = blown.

We had this opportunity with RIFT, but dropped the ball. We have a prime opportunity with TERA, but we need to find someone to run the portal.

It's hard to find folks to volunteer for ME jobs. It's the hardest job at Stratics. I hope that one day we'll be in a position to better incentivize the roll.

 

[Vlaude]

I think your first point was quite valid Syrus. Usually with websites like Stratics, it is content that leads to community. One issue that puts fansites at a disadvantage is that their biggest "competitors" to gaming communities are the official websites themselves. That is where most of the community will go first for news, forums, etc. And that seems to hold particularly true for MMOs, moreso than other genres.

Some websites like IGN and Kotaku get their large communites by publishing breaking news exclusive to their websites or covering already broken news more in-depth with professional commentary and insight (which can often be pretty entertaining). Some of the Stratics portals try to achieve this, but many of them are just republishing news from the official websites and not adding much to it. People may be finding the articles from google searches, but they aren't sticking around because the news is either outdated or just republished.

 

[Taylor]

You're right. We want to get back to where we were, producing fresh new content and editorials. It's just taking some time. :<