2015 was a very busy and successful year for GRG. Our membership continues to grow. We are hosting more GRG events through out the month. The ReaperCast continues to grow and improve. And we not only have an active XBox and PS4 community but are now venturing into a PC gaming community.
2016 looks to start off with a bang. We have the GRG BLOPS 3 Tournament scheduled for the end of the month. Teams should be picked very soon (so you can start practicing and trash talking). We’ll continue to host our standard events and ReaperCast. Hell, I even started an Ad campaign based off our 2015 game article.
Right now we’re trying to come up with ideas on how to continue to grow GRG and make it a better adult gaming community. So I’d like to ask everyone, WTF do you want from GRG?
What changes would you like to see?
More or less Community events?
Do you have suggestion to improve GRG?
Any Site changes?
Shit like that. Let’s hear your ideas and work on the continued growth of GRG (and not just our peen).
I’d say community growth isn’t a problem, the talking heads in charge seem to know what their doing.
Ya’ll could include prize giveways on Reapercast for more live viewers, like Disneyworld tickets or some such.
Yes, the year was pretty good and overall I think we should be happy with how things have gone.
No matter the people, the environment or the history there will always be ups and downs, and I don’t think there’s much that needs to changed for 2016.
If you’re looking for suggestions anyway, maybe one thing is we wait and see how the tourney goes and feed off of that by maybe having a once a month event. Obviously, not just COD, but even older titles that can be re awoken.
Otherwise the staff has been stellar, and I personally am happy with how things are going.
There are a couple of things we as staff are already looking at what we can do better.
improve member retention. We have close to 500 registered members now, but only a fraction are what we would consider active. Looking at ways to get inactive members back.
Improve site participation. We are building this as a community and would like to hear ideas on how we can interact with the community better.
better use of social media. Is this important to members?
Whether it’s important to members or not, this is something that can only help. Either with communicating with current members, or branching out and gathering new interest.
I agree @beers_and_leafs Im not huge on consistently using any social media but it can only help nowadays.
I joined in the middle of this year and in my opinion, I have seen some good things happen in the last 7 months of the year.
I think the Reapercast has gotten better as you guys do it more. Still feeling your way through it and always looking for new ideas to make it better. If anyone spends time in the forums so and watches the show, you can see that.
We can always improve on member participation in the forums, but I think we just have to keep asking everyone to do it. We say it in the forums, on the casr, and in slack.
The tournaments are a great idea and I think will bring members to the forums and the community. We just have to figure out the best system for us to organize it and pull it off in order to do it more often.
On that pont, I think the staff are putting forth the effort to make this community better and doing a great job. No one is doing this as a full time job and they are taking time out of their own day to do all of this. I would imagine it is pretty time consuming to get it all done.
The one point I would like to emphasize is getting members together and playing with different groups of people. I realize it all depends on the game and time of day your are online, but with so many member it can be hard to really play with people that you usually don’t play with. That is one thing that the tournaments and similar events could excel at. Random teAmsterdam will put players that usually don’t group together in the same party and the community will only get better. As a newer member it took time to get to know a bigger group of people to play with. That process could really be sped up in a tournament team situation.
I am looking forward to 2016 to see what happens. Great job GRG staff.
The reason we push forums so much are that they are central to the site. Facebook, Twitter, chat, etc all fracture and splinter conversations and players. While Facebook may seem easier to you, it’s just farming out our memberbase. Chat is even worse as people can’t see or participate in conversations that happen when they are not on.
You should spend some time on these forums. They are far from out dated and really have a lot to offer. For instance, posts update in real time (even on mobile ) which essentially turns the forums into a chat service.
As a site and community manager I have to look at the bigger picture and focus on what’s best for our community. A lot of time and thought has been put behind this. The goal is to get the community to to band together not fragment apart to several tiny cliques.
Just to further comment on this. I don’t the specific form on internet communication medium we’re using. Forums are not outdated, Reddit proves otherwise. I feel as though communities may be what is outdated. People are no longer really interested in building up large groups or putting in the effort to do so. Many want instant gratification. We get so many people that sign up and want to get into a game immediately. When that happens, they go elsewhere. Case in point, look at the popularity that the Destiny LFG sites have. Why go through the hassle of actually forming a relationship with other gamers when you can insta-raid and continue to be antisocial in a social game.
That’s really the issue we have to address. How do we find those (or retain those) who are interested in forming a gaming relationship.
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to fix the lack of events on the PS4 side of the community. At one point I had 4 PS4 Team Leads who we tasked with running the weekly GRG Community Event. They were also supposed to host 2 events each month. (giving you 8 total events). I was told from them that the PS4 side was not interested in that.
Now I have had 2 PS4 Team Leads resign. I’m sorry there’s a lack of events but it will continue to be that way until I get people willing to step and host events. So I really need people in the PS4 community willing to put GRG first and help out. Help host simple events
BTW, we get a ton of PS4 applications. I wouldn’t call it a small group by any means. Just an unorganized group.
Maybe I am old but I just don’t get the console vs console thing. Bottom line is we are all people who enjoy gaming. Honestly I like talking about games and don’t care about who is on what console.
This is the most confusing thing I’ve read today. And I’ve read all of GRG’s forum posts and chat posts. Wouldn’t you call that static group from GRG a friendly relationship?
The reason we hold events is for newer members (or lurkers) to know what’s going on. They can easily find out who’s running a room and who’s party to jump in on. This works very well on the XB1 side. Our events easily get 6-18 people easily. I’ve been doing this for a long time, there is value to planned events. It’s also important to show people we’re an active community. A bare calendar doesn’t show life, does it?
BTW, I’ll never separate the forums between consoles. I appreciate your comments but I’m not sure they apply to improving the community as a whole. Remember to think past what you like and think about what’s best as a whole. Case in point, wouldn’t Destiny raid talk be the same for PS4 as it’s for XB1?
Again, thanks for the input but I’m not sure we’re talking about the same things. Let me know if you have any ideas we can implement to improve the community.
The “News” point is a good one. Probably should be something like Community News or Clan News. Something to that effect.
As for having separate categories for consoles. We did think about that at the beginning when first designing the structure. The one thing we definitely wanted to avoid was having too many categories. We recently added tags to the forums to help combat this and allow more segregation amongst topics by filtering with tags. So if you do start topics please add tags to that post from the list.