Quote:
Originally Posted by Loutre
A new community is going to have the same effect as every other new community. It's going to be cool for awhile, then it's going to boil down to a couple circlejerkers posting about how bright the sun is.
The only way to revive stepmania at this point is to find an assload of new and devoted members, and I highly doubt that's going to happen.
|
This is exactly right.
While I think it's cool that you guys want to revive the community, how is it going to be any different than a separate community that is basically composed of everyone in this thread plus a small handful more before it undergoes the same fluctuations as places like ODI/KBO/etc? Simply making it centered around Stepmania, I think, won't be enough.
To resurge a community I feel you really, really have to focus on making it noob-friendly, and you need to give some tangible goals. Yes, creating a bunch of new files and having a SM forum will be great. But it's not going to draw a large audience and it's not going to offer anything you can't get elsewhere.
I can't speak for everyone else, but the number one thing that drew me to FFR in the first place was skill/forum tokens. It's also what draws people to sites like Kongregate and retains them. You need to always have something fun to work on / work towards. The problem is also that SM is an inherently insecure medium and so it's way too easy for people to cheat. You need to make the community less focused on raw competition (score) and more on personal achievement/fun. Newbies get discouraged if they work really hard on a song only to get compared to people who've perfected things at magnitudes far greater.
That's what's worked well for Kongregate. There are scoreboards, but nobody
really cares about them. What people care about are getting mass-lists of achievements on their profile. Kongregate adds new games/achievements almost every other day, and so there's always something to come back to.
In other words, I think that it's worth figuring out a decent achievement system and somehow try to work that into the community.
Just my 1.624 Yen.