Ideas for growing the community

General discussion about anything related to Transcendence.
george moromisato
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Now that 1.2 is out, I'd like to solicit ideas from all of you for how to grow the community. I believe we can talk about this along two independent dimensions:

MORE PARTICIPATION: There are things we can do to increase the participation of existing members of the community. For example, we might add more contests (modding competitions, high-score competitions, badges, etc.)

MORE PEOPLE: There are things we can do to get more people to play Transcendence, such as advertising, getting reviews up, etc.

If you have ideas for increasing either of these two dimensions, please post them as responses.
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We seem to have quite a lot of people playing on the multiverse who aren't part of the community. Katami relaying their antics is currently the bulk of the IRC traffic.

I believe there was talk of integrating an IRC client into the game. That would help get them integrated.
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So i am a new person on the forums and love Transcendence which is my second favorte game.
So now back to the point. I would Love If there was a multiplayer added it would just be awesome i woud play with my grandpa and it would be awesome. If you want to participate in this idea and need help i would love to help code if you were to need my help Yours Truley SlicPlaysVideoGames. :D
TVR
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VISIONARY BUT UNLIKELY SUGGESTIONS

Release Corporate Command for free (PEOPLE)
"A better free game attracts more players."
-Ideally, this would be in tandem with the introduction of alternate revenue system.

Add multiplayer of some sort to Transcendence (PEOPLE)
"Players prefer to play together."

Stop banning fourteen year olds for acting like fourteen year olds (PEOPLE/PARTICIPATION)
"Teenagers are the most lucrative market demographic."

Incorporate certain community enhancements into the base game (PARTICIPATION)
"By the community, for the community."
-General enhancement mods, like SiaFu's graphics/CygnusX1's Excaliber targeting system/RPC's Adv.LRS/Shivan Hunter's HD Stargates/Vizth's More Dakka/WilyTheSquid's New Ore Graphics/etc.

Restart the Mod of the Month contest (PARTICIPATION)
"The highlight of month for many mod makers."
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TVR (+edit) wrote:Incorporate certain community enhancements into the base game (PARTICIPATION)
"By the community, for the community."
-General enhancement mods, like SiaFu's graphics/CygnusX1's Excaliber targeting system/RPC's Adv.LRS/Shivan Hunter's HD Stargates/Vizth's More Dakka/WilyTheSquid's New Ore Graphics/etc Pixelfck's Black Market Expansion.

Restart the Mod of the Month contest (PARTICIPATION)
"The highlight of month for many mod makers."
I feel positive to these two, both basically come down to: honour people for the time they invest into the community. With the second being a version where the community honours the modders (weak) and the first being where the developer(s) honour the modder (strong).

As for multiplayer, I can't see Transcendence work with co-op multiplayer, I would certainly sign on for that (but I understand that the engine is not going to support this without major rework).
Last edited by pixelfck on Wed Dec 18, 2013 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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TVR wrote:VISIONARY BUT UNLIKELY SUGGESTIONS

Release Corporate Command for free (PEOPLE)
"A better free game attracts more players."
-Ideally, this would be in tandem with the introduction of alternate revenue system.

Add multiplayer of some sort to Transcendence (PEOPLE)
"Players prefer to play together."

Stop banning fourteen year olds for acting like fourteen year olds (PEOPLE/PARTICIPATION)
"Teenagers are the most lucrative market demographic."

Incorporate certain community enhancements into the base game (PARTICIPATION)
"By the community, for the community."
-General enhancement mods, like SiaFu's graphics/CygnusX1's Excaliber targeting system/RPC's Adv.LRS/Shivan Hunter's HD Stargates/Vizth's More Dakka/WilyTheSquid's New Ore Graphics/etc.

Restart the Mod of the Month contest (PARTICIPATION)
"The highlight of month for many mod makers."
I think releasing CC for free isn't going do much as I think the focus should be put in making the base game better-known.

MP may be difficult to implement code-wise, but if it can be done, it is going to increase the size of our participant/fan base tenfold. However, do expect to cope with the additional moderating problems that would come as well.

Fourteen year olds being banned? Forgive my ignorance but I have never come across that.

I agree with adding really good community products to the base game. Though it may make it difficult to standardize graphics/stats/etc.

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The 14 year-old's don't generally get banned for being 14 years old, but more for their happening to be jerks who break the rules. If anything our moderators tend to be a bit on the lenient side. I actually joined this community as a teenager back in the day, and while I'm both non-average and a jerk, I do at least have standards and try to follow the rules.

Also if you're quoting you need to cite the source. I find that snippet highly suspect as it 1. lacks a source. 2. Lacks a date. & 3. Lacks the market/product/sector it refers to. From my own experience with tourism studies, I'd suggest that teenagers tend to lack disposable income, although given this game's free that may not be an issue. However.....the idea behind that is rather a good one. We've done some polls here on the forums, but some more market research never goes amiss. Seeing what kind of community we've got might be useful....while it's potentially annoying, it might be worth putting a survey into the next version that peeps can fill out voluntarily (and anonymously) to collect some basic info on how people are finding out about the game, what they think of a few ideas of how the game/community could be developed... and possibly let people suggest stuff (there'll be a lot of crap, but maybe a few good suggestions). We've come up with a lot in the forums, but we really need to ask the peeps who aren't here about it, and that's kinda tricky.

Getting the game into gaming media is handy if someone likes the game and gives some nice publicity. It may be hard to do though, since the game was 'released' quite some time ago now.


In other, more simple areas.... I think rewarding players for a job well done would be a good thing. Letting us see the global high scores ingame + giving something to people who get up into the Top 25 or so might be neat. Once there's a bunch of registered mods (and there need to be quite a few), then having a decent mod browser ingame would help community content get shared and encourage others to start out. Having IRC be part of the game client itself might be nice.

Multiplayer....well....it would be a really nice addition. Hard to balance, harder to code, and a massive amount of work........but people have been turning up wondering about it for years.

In the indie game scheme of things, Steam is often considered the holy grail of distribution, giving massively increased playerbases.....but it does have its own downsides. Not least of which, having average steam users around the place. It would also require reworks since the multiverse functions duplicate what parts of Steam do. Still, looking into offering the game through steam or another less annoying (but smaller) distributor (GOG or Desura maybe?) might be worthwhile, although they'd probably want a cut of extension money for the game copies "sold" through their platform, which is problematic given it's routed through multiverse. The "freemium" model of free base and paid add-ons may not work for these things however, unless it's packaged well and people decide it's worthwhile.
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I put myself behind any efforts to make a multiplayer version possible.

I agree that an integrated IRC client, Scoreboard, and Mod Browser in the game would be better and attract more participation from current players.
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I think the only users who were ever actually banned were:
a lot of spambots
some user who was spamming NSFW material
Nithril (trolling and insulting people on IRC, trying to evade temporary bans)

Two accounts were also closed by request.



As for multiplayer -

If a function to send & read UDP packets to a port via the local loopback interface was implemented (and then being able to send the data for any item or ship or object or string etc), an entire multiplayer server/client system could be set up purely through the use of mods and external executables. I even know how to handle concurrency of multiple systems easily enough, as well as the concurrency of multiple players.

The game itself would not be transcendence as we know it today: there would have to be a lot of balance changes and more.

But I know that with that single function that george can implement, the rest can be added externally.


edit: adding community content to core

yes, this is happening, BUT, it is only content created by active modders who are willing to have their content included in core (hence why they must be active - you can't ask someone for permission if they aren't around).

There are of course, other caveats (such as "would this work better as a registered extension?" or "does this 'fit' core?" or "is this of sufficient quality to start with?")
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I keep seeing IRC as a possibility but I would rather have it as an optional feature. Not much of an IRC person.
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Another thought that I had is this: There are quite some people hanging around here that are willing help this game grow and continue to be great. Generally speaking, contributing to a project increases the community feel.

So, why not ask the community to develop certain specific, pre-specified, features for the game?
It would take some managing to make sure that the requested feature has a description and some design requirements and appoint people to tasks. It would most likely also require some sort of copyright waver agreement, but I think it would result in a lot of added value. Both in terms of growing the community as in increasing the development capabilities of the game. (I know from my own experience that a single person development team -even a very dedicated one- can only chew away so much work.)

I'm not sure there needs to be payment, for some, contributing to an actual game may be payment enough (having their names show up in the credits may be an added bonus). If felt that payment would be required, it could be in the form of a free copy of a paid extension for example.

Reading this change from the perspective of the developer who invested a lot of time, energy and dedication into this game (that's you George), I can image that suggestion will feel like chopping up your baby and giving out several parts of it to be cared for by people you barely know at all. In other words, it would be a huge shift in perspective and may feel like a leap of faith. But I do not suggest giving up control or letting the community decide what to develop. I merely propose the delegate some of the (carefully selected) work to people who are willing to help you out, while at the same time increasing the strength of the community.

Cheers,

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george moromisato wrote:Now that 1.2 is out, I'd like to solicit ideas from all of you for how to grow the community. I believe we can talk about this along two independent dimensions:

MORE PARTICIPATION: There are things we can do to increase the participation of existing members of the community. For example, we might add more contests (modding competitions, high-score competitions, badges, etc.)

MORE PEOPLE: There are things we can do to get more people to play Transcendence, such as advertising, getting reviews up, etc.

If you have ideas for increasing either of these two dimensions, please post them as responses.
Wooot!
@ george and fellow mod authors.
NexusMods is now unlocked. Read DarkOnes full report.
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/news/12223/?

If you are looking for widespread modders, players, and developers... Look no further than the nexus.
For a mere 30ish mods uploaded Darkone is willing to provide a personal nexus site for a moddable game. Gee how many mods does xelerus have as modders resources. This would be the perfect mirror site and attention site for all modders.
Also file pages are allow quite a bit of space for uploads etc. Up to around a gig now I think. This will be a great place to host MTO, since as I recall everyone complained about the strange off-brand upload site download links such as 4shared and then xelerus about hosting mods over a certain file size.

I would like to see some feedback on this from everyone. Esp George.
-Mooo

ps. RE:
TVR wrote:VISIONARY BUT UNLIKELY SUGGESTIONS

Release Corporate Command for free (PEOPLE)
"A better free game attracts more players."
-Ideally, this would be in tandem with the introduction of alternate revenue system.

Restart the Mod of the Month contest (PARTICIPATION)
"The highlight of month for many mod makers."
Nexus server hosts Mods of the Month every Month. Little or no work involved other than word of mouth and sheer player appreciation is required for this one!

As far as George giving his first little gem extension away for free.
NO DON'T DO IT!
If Bethsoft can charge 3 bucks for Horse Armor as a joke extension and get away with it and people still buy it, then george... will have lost a lot of development dough.
I'm sure that since George is the Lead Developer, he can even get a official extension page listed under Official DLC, which would link to his pay-me here site.
Heck, do you know how many people just tip/donate to a modder/dev because they appreciate the work they have done.
Make a decent mod and you will get more than just appreciation if you are good at it.
Modders can consider a 3 dollar tip to them will buy george's next cup of java/tea and a official Transcendence DLC.

pps.
As far as 14-year-olds ignoring the rules...
Nexus modders are modders that have spent the time earning other peoples respect. This doesn't always come from ripe end of the barrel verbally per say.
If a user is being adolescent, then yes they should probably be warned first. If stupid-@ss behavior still continues, then ban may be a option.
Simply noting excessively problem posters/users here would be a bit easier. Reputation usually depends on the "Official Forums" which in this case would be here and also nexus usually follows suit.
Real problem posters are quickly found and labeled. Plus they have a better far bigger moderating crew for crap such as this.
If someone uploads something that obviously doesn't have clear rights to do or is obviously wrong, then the situation is handled rather promply at times, with discussion from moderators usually.
Maybe when they are older and and have gained some respect, they may try again. And if they f-bomb it up again, well then, go figure.
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Oh hey, thats.. a really neat feature (of nexus) - could be the replacement for xelerus - we will see.

@pixelfck - yes, this is already happening! (Even if its going slowly but surely)
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Wolfy wrote:Oh hey, thats.. a really neat feature (of nexus) - could be the replacement for xelerus - we will see.

@pixelfck - yes, this is already happening! (Even if its going slowly but surely)
Of nexus....? Replacement?!? No Not ever. Word of mouth by people like me and you built nexus. And it is the truth.
The Original roots will never be erased.
Sorry buddy, we are as deep as we can go...

In a world of advertising, sure we will see. We will see firsthand.
I'm not here to impress upon anyone what they should do. I'm just the pressman.
I could be a pressman, I could be a advertiser, I could be in a world without paper or words... hmmm. I hope I suceeed, yet I think. I think.
Hell, I quit> I will be a writer. NOT. tho I enjoy it so, it is not my passion, tho I am apparently good at it they say....

"Though I may be good at doing something, does not mean I enjoy (doing) it." - quoted myself

SourceCoder is closed source ATM because I choose. BTW (Or ask a laywer)
I would like to see George Succeed at the very least. In his endeavors, He has earned It.
He is close(To Success and Failure) but by far... and ready to fall or rise....

Tell: grandma I told about (scared-excitement)! also.
boo-ra may they not all be pussies and maybe take a chance at least once in their lives.

Whether nexus is included in his future or not is his choice and his alone.
Let's call george the BDFL of Trans. if you will...

I am not here to argue
just suggest as the OP states...

I will not take the first step.

Not everything is my choice.
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Ummm... wait what? I didn't understand what you were saying, and possibly you didn't understand what I was saying?

Well, you haven't been around in a while:
Xelerus has effectively been running headless, as bmbl left due to RL, meaning that its staff roster cannot be updated with new active members who are staff on IRC and the Forums, some problems cannot be fixed by any of its current staff with the way its permissions are set up. What to do has become a growing concern over the past few years.

the multiverse exists, but at the moment this is just for registered mods.
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