I was going to do a thread with a bunch of issues that MCGamer needs to resolve along with my solutions, but it was going to be way too long. So instead I will post each issue in a separate thread to break up the reading and allow for a more focused discussion. I will post the next issue when the pervious one has been thoroughly discussed. To start off I will provide a little background as for the purpose of doing this series of threads, and then we will get into our first issue!
One of the prime reasons that I resigned from the staff team after over a year was that I lost my motivation. Why did I lose my motivation? Well I thought at first that it was because that after 365+ days of performing the moderator duties I had just got bored of doing them. Well, it turns out that while that was probably certainly part of the problem, I am not realizing that the bigger reason was that I had little to no motivation to log on and play on this network in general. Since resigning I have played a few games of SG and I played a few rounds of BG as well. Here and there I have logged on form time to time, but I think sadly I am getting bored of what this network has to offer in general. I know as well from reading threads on this forum as well, I am not the only one. Others can relate to this.
While new players are certainly still joining the community, the reality is that about just as many people are quitting as are coming in. This network is not growing. This network is staying the same in terms of size, if not slowly declining. This is not something that most of us who have been a part of this community for a long time like to see, so it is time that we do something about it. Here is my first problem, along with a solution. While problems like the one I am brining up today may seem as if they should have no direct correlation with player interest in the network, engaging with the community so that people feel that they have a voice helps keep people interested and involved. And so with all that in mind it is time for our first problem! Like I said at the start of this thread, more problems will be posted in a future thread.
Problem: MCGamer takes very little input from the community. Networks like Badlion are constantly running polls to gather data from their community. Then they take that input and put at least some of it into action. MCGamer is capable of doing this. We saw them run an in-game poll using a rebuilt in-game polling system after Solo SG was release. The question was would you prefer the games to be 12 or 24 players? After seeing that a lot of people were split, MCGamer went with both to satisfy everyone. However, while we did get one good instance of this with the one in-game poll, along with one or two questions within the MCG Awards when has the Sr. staff gone out of its way to collect the date since the Solo SG poll? Fun fact: If you do /poll in-game it still has the Solo SG poll from 6+ months ago. Even though they already added 24 player servers! Maybe MCGamer knows the community too well and already knows what we want? Well, I guess if that was true then UHC Worlds would certainly have turned out a little different.
Anyway, my point is that MCGamer hardly ever goes out of its way to get our feedback. Instead the network has created an environment where we have to write threads like this to get our voices heard. Not to mention that it can also make us feel as if MCGamer doesn't care about our opinions, even though I am sure that that is not the staff's intentions.
Solution: Well, if my memory is correct (and it is) this issue was brought up at a staff meeting a month or two ago. Nothing has changed since then, even though the Sr. staff did admit this was a problem. So while I hope that the staff team make this a priority, I am going to take some initiative here. I have created a survey to collect some data! For full transparency I would like to make the data public in a future thread, however if the Sr. staff don't want it made public I will send it to them privately. I don't think this should be an issue though, I stayed away from the more sensitive topics. My goal is to show what kinds of questions MCGamer should be asking, rather than create a bunch of questions that will provoke responses that make MCGamer look bad.
MCGamer Feedback Survey: http://goo.gl/forms/S2KYgwwZEi