Wow, so little activity

[Frazzle-G]

I'm new, I joined around July last year and have participated in most if not all threads concerning to warhammer, I even started my own thread which was a rather comprehensive strategy guide.

[edyzmedieval]

Bit of cross-promotion, but it would be useful to drop in some ideas here - https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...-Org-Promotion

In short, TWC and the official fora has taken most of the traffic, because they appeal to the casual gamers as outlined. The Org has been more for the veteran TW players, but even during RTW and M2TW days, the place was very very active. The difference started with ETW, which was panned by players and it recovered slightly with Shogun 2 TW (a lot of old players returned) but then it went downhill again with player disappointment over R2TW. (I liked R2TW...)

Perhaps bringing back older players and attracting the new ones will help revive this place.

[hoom]

For me lack of activity here is mainly that Warhammer & Attilla setting/periods don't do anything for me.

.org kinda died back in Rome1 time period, most of the modding activity happened over at twcenter & has remained there.
I never joined there but I certainly lurk.

I think a lot of new players don't know of the .org & stick to official .com.

I also disagree that Rome2 was really that bad.
Launched state yes but patched it mostly works pretty well.
Fundamentally they have a comprehensive list of factions with good unit rosters well modelled & a bunch of functional fixes to issues from the 3D map.

[edyzmedieval]

Org during the Rome 1 period was very very active, I joined during that time and this place was overflowing. Threads and posts every other refresh click. M2TW as well, going strong.

[hoom]

It was active but the rise of twcenter started in that period, its when the .org started to decline.

[ghostofxmaspast]

I must disagree. There has never been a huge MP following for any Total War game.

There was a large enough, relevant and growing following of MP during the STW/MTW era which was effectively killed off with RTW(1) and later game design.

As for modding, it was neutered by the CA themselves, not any fan forums. Not this forum. I remember .org hosting mods and assigning the modding project leaders as forum moderators for their own forums - not sure what more it could have done? Then I remember restrictions appearing during the "steam era" (don't know when, I was long past bored by then).

This forum in particular simply stagnated and went into decline under the previous administration - that's not the current administration's fault and there's actually nothing much they can do except keep the doors open/lights on in the forum they inherited.

We can dwell on past mistakes forever - the main one being that the forum used to be run by the staff, for the staff and that moderating and micromanaging every part of forum life was more important than just hanging out and having fun. Several years ago there were more than 5 moderators on the backroom and talking about and managing the backroom and various characters within it was "running the forum" in itself.

The .org went in the wrong direction when it focused on this, on "senior members" on "awards" on offtopic sections and the "gameroom" and forgot about it's origins and why it came into being. This was because, like me, most of the old staff and most importantly the administration were bored of or disliked TW games beyond STW/MTW. There was none of the enthusiasm of exuberance of TWC. TWC rose out of this as others have pointed out. But unfortunately there was no will at all to just retire and hand over to the next generation.

In later years, no amount of promotion, "content creation" or other remedial efforts would ever reverse this.

I told .org staff many years ago that the forum was all about the members + TW, not the "forum" (software) or about "managing people". But even back then most were resigned to the fact that this site would die and the TWC would grow. At the time, the only way they could see forward was to implement more forum bells whistles and toys and focus on offtopic and "mafia" games and perhaps consider diversification away from TW.

That's the past - there's no one left to blame for this and it's also so far in the past that it's both stupid and pointless to apportion blame anyway.

Someone mentioned longevity of other old games. It's true that many old games got continued support and lived on in some way or other. Some became free, source was released, etc. When it comes to STW/MTW, the CA would not even release patches to get the games to run on new OS with newer hardware. The STW and MTW forums lost most of it's players from 2004 onward due to people not actually being able to play the games anymore. But now of course you can buy the patch for the game you've already paid for on steam... it only took just over a decade. STW/MTW were precisely the kind of timeless games which could have lived on because they were in every way "cult" games with this kind of, sometimes fanatical, following.

But ultimately a site based on TW has to follow the whims of the CA. In my opinion the games became mediocre at best. If the games had maintained the class of STW/MTW with the enhancements of the later games, there would be enough traffic for 3 forums. This is simply because there would be different demographics playing the games - i.e. older players like myself would still be around. I never "signed up" for fancy graphics and arcade style gameplay. The "RPS" battle system and risk style map was what drew myself and many others to the game.

[edyzmedieval]

I take it you are an old member under a pseudonym, ghost, hence why you mentioned so many points.

One thing I tend to disagree about - this place can still become a rather active corner of the internet, it doesn't just have to go with the flow. It can generate much more traffic than it currently does. All it needs is some ideas and effort and application.

If you haven't, check this thread - and suggest ideas.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...romotion/page4