Pop expansion effort

[welchnome]

Games die; time takes its toll on the pop until there are only a handful of players left and is forced to shut down. Though inevitable, why take it with open arms?  

I have been pondering, and have come to a method in which we can expand this game's life. 

Many have attempted to twitch zs, youtube zs, and even tiktok zs. All of them representing one, not all. All of them died or moved one with few subs. We need a media powerhouse from multiple players and editors. Not just from hg, but from sunrust, Mall 24/7, and all the other zs variants. I want us to conglomerate together and expand the popularity of zs through more perfected and conglomerate presentation. 

Notice that the supermajority of recorded zs is people whining, mic-spamming, and being racist. That's for sure going to make people cringe and turn away. I suspect it's from having lack of content, which is why I suggest, all servers have a handful of dedicated recorders who trim off the amusing parts and a team of editors who filter them to make enticing videos. 

Now right now some of you are probably thinking, "eww, sunrust. This guy's an idiot", but hear me out. It is for the expansion of zs. Not hg, not sunrust, not ONE but rather all of zs. We need to help EACH OTHER in order to make it out of the dark pits of time. Everyone can die resentful or help eachother out of this impending doom and make something out of it.  

Enter ZSC, the Zombie Survival Convention! (name could be better, but zsc sounded like a nice snap to me)  https://discord.gg/yABmjJKG

Though not fully developed nor the actual proposed server, it offers a basic layout of a neutral hub where we could operate. 

Using the tool of permission to view, each team can perform tasks conveniently and efficiently under one roof, and potentially entice someone to buy an old game such as gmod due to the appearance of pop stability.

Under this one roof:

• All the players from all the servers can submit content, chat, and discover other communities.
• Representatives from the various servers can advertise local events and propose conglomerate events/agreements. 
• Video editors can share a google drive of their edited clips and refine them to make enticing, neutralistic videos. 

This is a start, but I need help refining it and working out the kinks.

COMON! WE CAN DO IT! We don't have to like each other, we just have to get along. Help me pull this game from the ashes! LONG LIVE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL!

Edited January 14, 2021 by welchnome

[Dolphin_]

First off, I really do like the optimism in this post. It shows the dedication the players have towards such a niche gamemode in a nearly 2 decade old game, it's really something you'll never see with triple a games these days. I personally quit playing ZS a long time ago and coming back to this community even if it's for a moment made this old dog happy. That being said, I'll get into what I want to say.

 

The Actual Meat of My Opinion Towards This Effort

If you want to know why my opinions have come to this conclusion, underneath will be a few paragraphs of context starting at "Present Context". But to be honest, "Present Context" and onwards can be ignored altogehter because it really was just me going on a tangent.

Quite frankly, I don't think this is going to work. This is mainly just because of the amount of people that are currently interested or even know about ZS. Unlike TTT or DarkRP, ZS, although it is one of the biggest gamemodes in Gmod, is nowhere near the amount of its larger contemporaries in terms of active playerbase. Even disregarding that factor, Gmod is steadily declining in popularity and is nowhere near being one of the most popular games comparing to other hot games at the moment like Rust of Among Us. It's unfortunately no longer 2014 where you can just showcase mods or play deathrun in gmod and get thousands of views anymore. Today, the big gmod videos out there are mainly roleplay, TTT or prophunt. That's not to say ZS can't be one of them, but a channel just dedicated to ZS in my eyes, is just not viable in today's YT/Twitch climate. Again, even if we disregard those factors, managerial factors such as quality control, motivation, dedication, teamwork, upload scheduling and the overall entertainment value in the content are all factors that need to be addressed. These are the major things that need to be addressed. Getting to the business side of things, how can it ensured that all parties can stay on track through very little incentive other than pure dedication? What about the finer details of the jobs structure? How will this be organised and executed? How can we get all servers and communities in line? How do we provide an incentive? With all these new players, wouldn't the actual experience in-game as well as for the community greatly change? So on and so forth.

All of this may seem unnecessary, but these are just a few of the issues and factors that need to be addressed in order for this to work. I don't want to set you up for failure with extreme optimism, I'm here to provide a more realist approach in this very bold pitch. Although I myself don't have all the solutions to these, I did say I had a few, such as:

• focusing more on HG's servers and the servers of other communities as a whole rather than just ZS. This way we can also traffic viewers and potential players from other gamemodes and games such as TTT or CSGO.
• Monetary incentive for other ZS communities via viewership revenue (for general server maintenance). This is only if you are adamant to include all ZS communities and will take some time to achieve. Splitting the revenue for server maintenance will make it a source of revenue for server maintenace, which will get server owners in on the project and make it more than just a community side-project.

And that's really all I have at the moment unfortunately. I can't really think of any ways to address the other points I have risen up unfortunately, I just can't really see a way of achieving them at the moment. That being said, I don't dislike this idea, I just find it very difficult to achieve, there's just so many ways it can fail in my eyes, and if the idea can't be fleshed out more thoroughly, the chances of uploading the content let-alone garnering in more players is low. I know your idea is still very young, and you might not have had enough time to properly think it out, I'm here to make you think more on it, so that ultimately, it can work.

 

 

My Tangents

Present Context

I'm going to provide a little context onto how I came to this post; here I am, on my computer, checking my emails to see if any important related school stuffs have been sent my way, the newest email today is this and here I am. I'm not sure why I haven't changed the newsletter settings yet but here I am. It's getting close to two years since I last spent most of my day playing ZS and I read this post about wanting to increase the population via uploading content to various popular video-sharing platforms. Being empathetic towards the situation and having viewed the state of the population of the gamemode a few weeks beforehand, as well as wanting to express my own opinions and provide valid but helpful criticism to benefit the effort in the long-run, this has led me to where I am now.

 

To give you guys an insight towards my perspective, I'm going to share my past experiences, as well as my current feelings and opinions towards the games that I have accumulated over the span of a good three and a half years.

 

My Past in HG ZS (For some context)

General Information of My Past as Being a Regular at HG ZS (long subheading)

The biggest piece of information I should share is that I haven't spent a massive amount of time on the game for almost two years now, as mentioned before. To put into context how many hours I mean by "a massive amount of time", I mean around 50-80 hours at average per week, and this only went on for possibly a month at most beginning from January 2019 - Feburary 2019 (I can't exactly remember). For many people, this might not sound like a lot, for me, especially now, this is a lot of time spent on a game in such a short amount of time, I could never think of doing that again. But to provide even more context as to why I did this, around a year prior (~Jan 2018), the laptop I used to play ZS on broke because of water damage, the replacement laptop couldn't handle HG ZS with 80+ players even at the lowest settings (keep in mind the avg player count in HG ZS at this time was almost at max no matter what time of the day) and so I couldn't play HG ZS on a regular basis until I got a new laptop at around Dec 2018. The new laptop allowed me to play HG ZS once again at an acceptable framerate at high with all the players and so I did the one thing I have been wanting to do for a year - play ZS.

Now the last two things I should mention here would be the most obvious thing I haven't yet talked about and a bit of a TL;DR - I started playing on HG ZS around mid 2017 and I consciously quit playing at around early 2019, with a one year gap of nothingness at around early 2018 - early 2019.

 

Past Experiences

If you understandably don't care about what has been mentioned, that's fine. All it is is some general information such as dates, as well as how much time I spent playing the game before I decided to quit almost two years ago. My past experiences with the game are important to understand why I feel the way about ZS as a whole as you may already know, so this will be rather short. When I played the game, I was a pretty big tryhard and asshole when I played the game. I was very insensitive, and I would complain and act like a little shit like every single regular that plays HG ZS is. I was only 13 when I first played the game, and I was only 14 turning 15 when I played again for the second time. Even though it's only been a short amount of time and I'm only just turning 17 in a few months soon, I have grown up since then (at least I like to think). My taste and personal thoughts towards video games as a whole since then has changed drastically, and now I only play with friends I know irl.

From what I remember, the main reason why I played for as long as I did was because of the community (the people in vc as well as in text), and I wanted to listen as well as interact with the community. I really enjoyed the funny remarks by people in vc and I personally took a liking to a lot of them like Corgi, Precariusa, xKatn1ss, eXfro and many more I can't remember anymore. That being said, the main take-away here is that I really only played the game for the community, as well as to point-whore but who didn't at the time :P.

 

Possibly My Last Ever Experience With ZS

When I lately played at around christmas time 2020 to suck up the nostalgia and just to see how the server was going, I was welcomed by a constant player-base of around 40-50 at any time. The last time I hoped in I was welcomed by around 20 bots and barely 10 human players for 2 hours until the server started to get some more human players only to be even more disappointed because of the current playstyle and the community. Even if it was for around an hour I was met by constant complaining in the vc, trash-talking other players (which has always been normal) but the thing that really got me the most was just the state of the current gameplay of ZS. With the introduction of ricocheting concentrated laser beam guns since I last left as well as even more ridiculous laser guns and melee weapons and just a wider selection of everything makes me feel like I'm trying to choose what flavour soup I'm getting at the supermarket. It also really ruins the immersion for me, and ultimately the gameplay feels more shallowed due to there just being extremely OP weapons making zombie pushing impossible (thank god I'm no longer a Zmain anymore). And this really made me think about the whole gamemode as a whole.

 

Current Feelings + Opinions (Towards ZS)

Looking back at ZS, the gamemode at a whole is very unrefined and repetitive, the main premise is to build a barricade in a room and shoot through little opening in the cade every now and then until you win or die, and with the large amount of people that played at the time, it didn't even matter if you were doing anything gameplay wise unless you wanted to grind points in HG. What I don't like more are the boring, uncreative maps that always get chosen all the time like farmhouse, where the rounds always play the same way and there's only two viable spots. The maps should really be in a random rotation to allow more obscure maps to be played but even then, at the core, the gameplay will always be the same, disregarding the other modes such as OBJ or ZE. For me personally, it really was just about the community of ZS, which is why I've focused on that aspect a lot in why I had a drive to play ZS.

[welchnome]

I'll look for a face for the youtube videos. We can set it up so that people generate content and the face can be the zip-tie to hold the attention to new coming audiences. 

As for getting people open enough to join, I have been connecting to other servers. Simply by being there, it gets people used to external presence. I advertise my presence not through speech nor sprays, that just looks cringe, I barricade. People see a tag every time they look at a prop. And when the cade wins, they be more open to the tag.  This strategy has proven itself worthy thus-far with sunrust. Yes, sunrust. Even the ultra toxic players changed their tone. 

After getting people open, you start asking the super small servers to join because they will need less enticement. After adding little server by little server, we end up with a notable discord pop, which can be converted to the face's subscriber pop. 

Now that we have multiple cameras, we end up with a greater potential of making it to meme lords.  People will wonder what this unusual thing is and can potentially find out. 

 

As for repetitiveness, let's take a look at call of duty. Spawn die Spawn die Spawn die. Cod zombies, circle circle circle.   People put up with the repetition because they meet new and unusual people.  Also they can get bragging rights when tryharding.

 

As an immediate snap of existence, it will not work. After breaking it down, it is very attainable.

Edited January 14, 2021 by welchnome

[welchnome]

The incentive to stay is supposedly going to be due to the orientation to the popular face and a "everyone else is here, why not you?"

[Snowyamur]

While there's optimism and enthusiasm for helping ZS shown in what you wrote, welchnome, I'm sorry to say that simply creating and signal-boosting ZS content online won't be enough to help boost population numbers. Nor will simply banding communities together under a roof for ZS help it out much. And this has to do with what ZS actually is.

GMod's an old game, and a lot of people have moved on from it. The Zombie Survival game mode is also old, and as some have said before, ZS is a niche game mode. Very few people are interested in it, and that's because there are far better video games than ZS to play and get addicted to. Those who have been on our ZS server for a long time have come on-and-off ZS for how addictive it is, but that's because it's addictive to them. They found it addicting. That doesn't happen with everyone. Someone could try it out and have fun with it in the first 2 hours, but after that, they might grow bored after discovering how boringly repetitive it is, then leave.

Content, in the form of new things to do in a game, are what drive people in. Marketing a game is just as important as its development, but if there's no new content to advertise, then there's nothing to market. Even if some popular content creators are brought in to help revive ZS by creating content for it, what about ZS could be interesting enough to attract an audience? And can there be different, potentially entertaining ZS content that can be made on a weekly basis with what ZS currently has?

And keep in-mind that not everyone knows ZS even exists, and I can see where you're driving at with content creation: the goal is to make it more well-known to attract people to it. The greatest limitation to that is what ZS actually is. You can advertise/market it all you want, but if people don't take interest in it, you throw away a lot of money and time. Unless more gameplay content is added to ZS, and its overall game design and stability are improved, you won't get far with just marketing on its own. You need development as well.

Edited January 15, 2021 by Snowyamur