Website activity dwindling

How about making a community poll on certain topics? Thats how you empiricaly, without any polemic and blame-shifting, can get objective answers.

Example: how would you rate the site acticity for live game on a scale from blabla to blabla.

Do u think that the site activity in live games has dwindeled?

Do you struggle to get people joining ur game? Give ur answer on a scale from bla to bla....

Do u think it is hard for games with certain settings/maps to get started? What setting/maps have it especially hard/easy?

What kind of games do u play the most?

What are the reasons for u not to start a game?

Do u think the waiting time for certain games is too long?

And so on....

Make this poll mandatory for every player with 10+ games, notice their rank, how long they are members and so on, with other words the main demographic data....

The problem with making poles mandatory, Dima, is that I did not join the site to take poles. I joined it to play risk. Voluntary is one thing but not mandatory. As far as the topic is concerned, the original poster is asking if any of the staff have specific numbers.

The answer is no. The staff do not have access to these numbers.

The programmers I'm sure do but there is one thing in particular that would stand out to me about asking for this type of information to be made public;

The statistics are really juicy information for competitors. Those should never be made public, even just to satisfy your curiosity or to justify my opinions.

I personally don't have numbers but my opinion is this:

I do believe that there are less low quality 2 player live games available to join.

I also believe that there are pretty much the same amount of multi-player live games available to join. There has always been a consensus that there are not a lot of these all of the time and the number does ebb and flow during peak and down times but there isn't really a noticeable difference in those games so I don't believe there is much of a change there, just in the unlimited live 2 player games from non paying members.

Further, I believe that the tournaments and long term games have increased in both quantity and quality since the programmers created tools to make it easier for both staff and members to organize and there seems to be a fairly popular following for these games.

Overall, I do not believe the site is anywhere near dying. It very well may be that the specific type of game play activity has tilted more towards long term games and tournaments than live games but if that is the case then the focus of your specific desire to have more multi-play live games available should be on suggestions as to how to encourage more live multi-player games,

I encourage others to share their opinion on the site activity and what they think it is like compared to the past as well but I would rather take a little more interest in Dima's thought process in approaching the subject. Let's talk about area's we would all like to see improved and hear suggestions on positive ways to accomplish those idea's,
 

I never play live games...don't have time for it. I also never play anything less than 4 player games...everything else is just a crapshoot. I don't play capital games either. Most of my games are spent in tournaments with higher-quality competition.

I think that this time of year activity goes down a bit because of the holidays as people are traveling, etc.

i myself have no suggestion apart that of making a poll, even if a poll that is mandatory would be better than nothing. by doing so you get an idea of the current state of affairs. only then you can properly plan your future actions, implementations etc, only then you can think about possible improvements.

Later when i have time i can send u an email with possible questions and then we can post them as a poll in a thread and everynbody who is up to can vote.

cheers

Just post the questions here. No need to filter them through me (or others).Whomever would like to answer can. Anyone else who wants to do the same can do it here as well.A mandatory pole only forces people to answer questions they may not care about. Open questions and answers are involving people who really want to make a positive contribution or even offer productive insights.

If the pole question is unrelated to this thread, I'm sure a new one can be created on whatever the subject is regarding.

This is a good thing and one of the main reasons the forums were created in the first place.

Just use Google Forms to create a "poll" and then post the link in a thread and see how many people respond.

dwindling?

My how times have changed...too bad people cannot afford to chip in more.

this is what it was like when i first started playing online risk back in 1999/2000 on MSN. dozens of live games to join.

I can't hardly even take my long term turns during the busy hours, don't know how people are managing to play live, the server is so slow

It is sad that it takes a pandemic to increase the number of players and games. Looking at the long term games there must be a lot of new premium members since of the 273 available games, 175 of them are password protected. Hopefully they will all become long term members.

I think you just have to be premium to start new games with a password, but anyone can join if they have a password.

Also, I think that there are likely a lot of games that are set up in advance for tournaments.

I think this is an absolutely great site, with very high quality, both in overall design, the functionality of the games and the quality of the players. I've tried several sites for playing Risk but in the end I've put all others aside except this one and another one.

The only reason I'm not purchasing a Premium account is that I'm concerned I would become addicted to playing these games all around the clock and would not do my work properly... (Seriously.)

The only quality-related problems I'm experiencing from time to time are:
- Occasional brutish-psychopathic types who do a lot of name-calling and yelling to other players and create a bad environment. But overall, people here have good attitudes.
- Occasionally, email notifications about my turns don't get to my inbox, leading to missed turns and occasionally being kicked from games.
- Sometimes, when assaulting, the server can be a little bit slow to process the assaults and refresh the figures on the board.
- The coloring used for players in team games is confusing and makes it difficult to see at a glance who is teammate with whom. Light Blue should go with Dark Blue, Pink with Red, Yellow with Orange, Black with Brown, Dark Green with Light Green and so on.

I appreciate the focus on creating an environment for good quality strategy games. That's what makes these games worthwhile. I think it is a very good idea - in any type of "business project" - to apply one's core values consistently when promoting one's product. So if the emphasis here is on quality games for quality players, it is absolutely correct not to engage in superficial marketing campaigns bringing in other types of players or generating other types of games (such as low-quality two-player games between non-serious players).

Overall, I think this is a great site that should have excellent opportunities to attract players of Risk.

If there really is a problem with the number of paying members, here are some suggestions that come to mind for bringing more people to the site:
- Localize the site to all major world languages to make it available to more people around the globe.
- Allow people to select between at least 2 color themes. Dark backgrounds can be hard on the eyes for some. Make sure eye-sight isn't a concern.
- Implement a strategy for promoting the site on social media (viral ads etc.)
- Reward people for inviting their friends to the site.
- Promote the site among the chess community and other communities that gather people with a liking for strategy, thought and so on. Build bridges with those communities.
- Do a poll to identify the demographic profile of your community (age, gender, profession, other activities they like e.g. chess, social media they use, native language etc.) - in order identify the sorts of people who most come to this site. Once you have some results, you can then target those kinds of segments with targeted promotional campaigns.
- Research the parallels between chess and Risk (there are many!), write a good well-written article about that and promote it around the chess community. As a chess player, I have found enormous amounts of strategic parallels between Risk and chess and I even feel my own chess game, and myself as a chess player, have benefited from my reflections on Risk strategy.

Well, that's all for now. Keep up the good work.

tcjohans, thank you very much for your honest feedback. There's a lot to unpack there, and I don't think I am in the best person to respond to some of them, but I wanted to give a bit of context on some points, and ask for clarifications on some others.

Server slowness and email notification problems
I think both of these can be explained by the fact that while we do have a paid plan to pay for the upkeep, the website is still run by volunteers. That means the programmers don't always have time to directly address this issue, or spend a lot of time on improving the server infrastructure. The email problem we are having currently is sadly a bit more persistent than most issues we have.

Team colouring
I believe at some point @dough_boy had a browser extension that does this, so that is worth following up on. I understand this feature request though, it's just not something we've had a chance to work on yet.

Website localisation and colour themes
In my day job I work on web applications, so I totally understand the value of having a localised website, and even a separate colour theme. For a team of our size though, those options are just not feasible at this time. A localised website would require us to rewrite a lot of the UI to deal with different text in each language, and the same holds for the colour theme. On top of that, we'd have to maintain those going forward, which would slow down the rate at which we can bring new features to the website.
That being said, I wanted to ask if there are any particular points in the interface you think need addressing if you think they're hard on the eyes. While making a whole separate theme is a lot of work, I am definitely happy to address pain points, and try to make them a bit better at the very least.

Anyway, thank you so much for your feedback. I've read it all, and while it's hard to make any promises to addressing these issues given our constrained time, I will definitely keep them in the back of my head when prioritising what to work on in the future.

What I do for team games is just apply the "target" CSS class. So everyone not my team has it applied. The teams individual player colors are left alone.

For Assassination games, I apply the "target" CSS class to my target AND dim (alter opacity) everyone else's territories slightly so the target stands out.

Although I probably shouldn't share my secret sauce.