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Some thoughts on the future of #openttdcoop

by Mucht

Overview of Current Situation (24.08.2006)

• Users in #openttdcoop: ~30 - ~42
• Active Members at #openttdcoop: ~5-6
• IRC: one main channel, one member-channel, one coopetition channel
• OTTD: Mainserver, Sandbox Server, Coopetition Server
• Web: Blog, Wiki, WebIRC, Coopetition-System (in Development)

Known issues at #openttdcoop

• People confuse #openttdcoop and #coopetition. The people motivated to join #openttdcoop on the mainserver seem to think they are under observation if they played a coopetition game. It seems not to be clear that coopetition is a new game-variant, even a new community if the coopetition-ladder is completed and running.
• There is a bad proportion between possible players and member in the community. It is always a challenge to scout for new members and aspirants without emptying the Sandbox Server and therefore giving all the focus on the Mainserver. Nonetheless we need some more members to balance the leaving amount of leaving or inactive members.
• 80% of community related work is done by Osai, XeryusTC and Mucht. Things like the Blog were ment to encourage other players to take part in #openttdcoop, off from the ottd-games. On the long run, the activiy of the average Sandbox-player or Mainserver-aspirant did not increase yet.

Why is there a need to restructure the community?

Some good reasons can be picked out:

• #openttdcoop attracts a certain type of player: the cooperative one, who likes teamplay and playing without economic or time pressure. Therefore on the other hand it is hard to find players for coopetition out of this pool of players. It is obvious that not every player of #openttdcoop likes coopetition. There need to be a clear and visible seperation between these two communites.
• The coopetition ladder needs loads of players to get more and more interesting. For many people out there it is not that interesting to idel on IRC all the time. We already registered the channel #coopetition - we should keep #openttdcoop and #coopetition all seperated. By now, the activity on #openttdcoop is already on a high level thus it is hard to read the channel history when you had some idle time.

What can be done?

We could restructure the community in certain ways:

1. "#Coop" is a proposed topic of all the subcommunities. It can be communicated rather than #openttdcoop. #Coop is chosen because it is in the name of both subcommunities.
2. #openttdcoop remains as a standalone-community. We have members who administrate things and players + aspirants which is the keypoint wether you play on the Sandbox or even on the Mainserver
3. #coopetition is the second community of "#Coop". Every player in the ladder is a member. Additionally, there will be some administrators which act as judges as well as pageadministrators and game-administrators. The administrators will be recruited out of the pool of #openttdcoop-members. This will be a plainly intern-handled thing.
4. The member-channel remains for members of #openttdcoop and admins of #coopetition
5. The channel #coopetition is recommended for players of coopetition, but they must not be there. They can find together in this channel but it must be clear they don't have to deal with #openttdcoop unless they want to.
6. The Bloki must be adjusted in order to communicate the seperation better. The Blog gets an other title ("Coop") and the categories are adjusted but in order to increase postings we keep the two communities within one Blog.
7. The Coopetition-pages on the wiki will be relocated to simple html-pages. It should not be too much work since we already have the ladder-system as html-pages. We just have to transfer some content from the wiki. Therefore, the wiki remains for #openttdcoop only because it is needed to document styles and users since #openttdcoop has a more sophisticated membership-system than #coopetition.