The RPS Steam Group

[Nullkigan]

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/rps

So, we have a decently large steam group and occasionally Jim or some other member of the Hivemind posts an announcement or two for a game weekend. Usually it's TF2 or Bad Company 2, occasionally something like Air Buccs.

Recently, things have been largely left in the Tyrannical hands of the non-Hivemind admins and most events have been for Arma 2, Red Orchestra, or whatever the people in the chat room really want. You should join the chat room, by the way. We don't want it to stagnate.

The non-Hivemind events have also included advertising for one person to join a Defcon game (maximum of six people, with five already in the game), or asking people to watch someone (non-Hivemind) stream a popular recent title. Neither of which have been particularly popular with the people in the chat, and I know a lot of you hate any and all popups... but eighty people watched the stream, and even for RO2/Arma/TF2 only 30 or so people can join in on a single server!

So, what do we DO with the group then? Do we continue to let the spurious announcements seep through? Should we be putting up a weekly event for various games? Should we be explicitly inviting people into the chat with the events? Do we drop the more esoteric announcements in favour of just the (irregular) gaming ones? Or do we drop announcements altogether?

The "Plan", before the Hivemind got distracted, was to have regular Game Club weekends. Remember those? There was one for Plain Sight, another for Dogfighter... and about five for Arma. These went up on steam, and had good turnouts. Whilst it would be nice to resurrect them, the effort of organising such events is non-trivial and the Hivemind is busy churning out Finest Words.

So tell us, what should we do?

[Ansob]

The purpose of a Steam group is to post announcements to get people into a server to play games. If you don't want those kinds of announcements, I would suggest leaving the group.

On the flip side, it's not there for certain people to abuse the announcement system to post private stuff that is of no interest to pretty much anyone, either.

So yes, weekly manshoots.

[Joseph-Sulphur]

It would be awesome if the RPS writers could get involved. All of them, if possible. Still, I understand that they have other stuff going on.

I agree that its important to get more people in chat. That way the issue of announcements wouldn't matter as much.

[measurements]

As a fledgling member of The RPSettes I can attest to there being no finer set of game-buds for your free bro-hours of congenial fun time (reading a Richard Morgan book, the one with the italics).

I reckon you'd get a jolly good shout out of there being '<another game here> weekends'. Where there's an announcement of a recently discounted/released game each week on a Friday or maybe even a calendar of events that people can anticipate and the end result is a massively beefed up audience for said game for that weekend and maybe a little stronger fan base after the fact. Plenty of good multiplayer titles just don't have the the numbers to prop themselves up. Plain Sight is a good example of one, but there are plenty more. And it doesn't just have to be ailing games! But it should be a wide set of games to call from (even classics like Total Annihilation! OR QUAKE).

[imirk]

So tell us, what should we do?
Please, have some cake!

[Nullkigan]

I should probably point out that the weekly Manshoot is a bit mooted by Jim having to regularly massage the servers back to life?

edit: The reason I didn't include non-manshoots is that it falls more under the Game Club thing. I don't really have much experience with the likes of Lead and Gold/Dogfighter/Etc (which are all pretty much manshoots anyway), and we don't have RPS servers for them either.