Expansion?

Hey, guys. It has come up in Staff that expanding to another forum may be an option for us in the near future. With Gen VI on the way, there's opportunity for new venues and members, and we want to know what you think about this idea before we really talk about it. Keep in mind that we have decided nothing. We want your opinion.

Do you think expanding to another forum would be a good idea? If so, when? Should it be before Gen VI or after?

If you think expanding is a good idea, what other communities would you be interested in? Are there any in particular you want to stay away from?

Do you think we could draw in enough new players and sustain multiple forums with our current community if not? Would you be interested in other aspects of thse forums besides URPG?

Let us know what you think!

 

I wasn't here for the last expansion, so take my opinions with a grain of salt.

An expansion requires a large, active base in order to make it successful. We have a strong, medium-sized base to work off of. I think it would be possible for us to expand successfully, provided there's some effort involved.

However, I don't think that the Gen VI release is a good time for the expansion. Why? We would not only have to deal with the pressures of expansion, we would have to deal with a heavy increase in the influx of members from all three forums we're currently on. This influx will be greater than ever before, in part due to the global release date. This global release date means that everybody, everywhere in the world, will be new to Pokemon X and Y, so they will need to look things up more often. Hence an extreme increase in bulbapedia traffic, as well as a rush to the multitude of forums (PE2K, possibly. BMG is most likely, but PWN will have a good number of people too) later on. We can expect a good number of those forum-goers to register for the URPG, and even if most go AWOL, there will be a large number who stay.

This influx makes me think that preparing for an expansion at this time would be the worst possible decision. Later? Fine. But the months leading up to the release would be better spent preparing for the new members.

I suggest an event, targeted to newbies, scheduled to start a week after the release.

 

I completely agree with your sequence of events prevented in this post. However, I completely fail to see how opening a new branch at the same time as the release of Gen VI is a bad thing. The entire point of an expansion is for an influx of new members, the bigger the better. I also don't see why we need a larger based of members to expand. Perhaps some more refs would be helpful, but other than that, our initial membership level is pretty irrelevant. Most of these new members will not be able to compete immediately with existing members, so it makes no difference. We don't have any real method of increasing URPG membership on our existing locations, so there isn't any way to really prepare for an expansion in that regard anyway.

 

@We Taste Pies...;

I simply think that our manpower resources would be better used for XY release event and preparing for the influx, rather than using them to setup camp in an additional forum.

 

I honestly think copy/pasting the rules and boards won't be a big deal. However, it will stretch our already thinning numbers to another forum... as it is, I rarely go onto pe2K at all and often miss things there. That may not be a good example, but I think it's fair to say that a lot of people would not be willing to stretch across new forums.

On the other hand, I think widening our horizons is a good idea. Either right before or after Gen VI, maybe this will be something to think about, just... not right now. Take care of the immediately important things, prepare for the new Pokemon and members, and THEN decide whether we have enough manpower to span four forums.

 

Personally, I don't see any need for any specific XY release event, nor why we couldn't have one that coincides with expansion. The only real difficult part of each is maintaining heavier staff activity. They can easily work in both an XY release event and new member events.

 

People won't participate in XY Release Events anyway.

They'll be too busy playing the games....

 

I would suggest having a forum for URPG only, because if we expand, that's 4 forums we have URPG on and that seems messy to me. Too much going on right there. If we have our own forum for it we could have everything centralized there at least, it'll be like a mixture of people from four different forums in one. Seems much more organized to me, not only that, but we'll have full ownership of the whole forum and we won't be found at the bottom of forums anymore.

But I do think we'll need to be more active to have a forum for it. But I still stand by the idea of having one.

Edit: I also think it'd be wise to make sure the people with positions and gyms are active before anything.

 

How will we attract new members?

 

the sex appeal of urpg mods and officials @Roulette

 

A Gym Leader rollcall might clean a few things up, but I agree that we're going to need more activity from anyone who holds a position.

Hence why I said a week or two after, when people have completed the main storyline and are trying to fill their dex/find extra things to do.

 

I am very new here, but from what I have seen, URPG is a fun game that is hurting for members. Loyal members on URPG are very active, but super activity from a few does not make up for lacking numbers, and URPG needs lots of people in order to run well. A new forum would give URPG the opportunity to attract new members, so I think that is good.

However, some major reorganizations NEED to be done first. Having three forums that all try to do the same things is redundant and probably slows up URPG. I think that before this site expands, its three forums should be divided so each deals with part of URPG. For example, one forum could deal with the National Park, another could deal with contests and battles, and the third could deal with everything else. A fourth forum would then allow for further division of labour and easier installation of new URPG sections. Of course, every forum would have a section to help Trainers start, as well as a Trainer Stats page and all shops.

This reorganization would take a LOT of time and effort, but I believe it would help URPG in huge ways. A new forum is good, but not if it's just the same as the other forums. Therefore, I suggest that URPG looks into an expansion, but not until well after the Gen VI mechanics are in place and the site undergoes some major refurbishing.

 

I think people are sort of overstating the amount of work the new branch entails. I don't remember that much of a change at all when the PWN branch was added...

I'm not saying it wasn't work on the staff, but if the staff is ready to handle it then I think that it shouldn't be an issue. Also, the staff could always pull resources from the other members wherever possible. I think that the URPG should choose wisely with where it expands because honestly at the PWN branch was a pretty large flop. There was not much activity that stemmed from the forum (this could be the reason there was not much of a change for myself, I'm not sure) Everyone is also pretty aware that pe2k is a flailing forum. So I think the most important thing is to ensure that there is a good place for us to expand to. I don't think we should sacrifice a good opportunity if the timing isn't exact, but we also shouldn't just jump to a forum just because we think it is a good time to expand.

Overall, I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this. I'm not really sure how much of an influx of members XY is going to bring. I do think that the URPG could use with more members, but I'm not sure if the games will bring it or an expansion will.

 

Split across four forums is a terrible idea, but we also can't centralize ourselves without losing our main means of gaining new members.

Staff can handle an expansion just fine, it's not a lot of trouble. Adding a new generation is much more work. For the record, it is incredibly unlikely Gen VI will be added the same day as it's release. The staff need to time to play the games, do research, play the games, work out all the mechanics, play the games and play the games. Previously this could be done using the Japanese release, and we would only wait for translations. Probably not best to expand at the same time, but before or after I'm indifferent on.

A large group of new members would be good, giving us increased numbers across all sections. However at this point in time it isn't as big a concern as some people are making out. Our current numbers, while not massive, are pretty good and no sections of the game are majorly lacking activity.

Also: Serebii are a bag of dicks. Lets not expand there, tis a silly place.

 

Contests.... (And the story section isn't doing amazingly well (though this could just be because of competition from Park/Art) Also the Gym leaders have declined overall.

If there is a fear that being split across too many forums would be bad for the URPG maybe it's time the URPG thought instead of just expanding, dropping one of its branches for a more active one? It's not exactly the kind of thing you want to say, but it does sort of have some compelling reasoning. I think everyone can admit that BMGf is by far the strongest forum the URPG is on. Maybe it would be better to have the URPG on two very strong forums than one strong one and two weaker ones.

 

I'd like to suggest that you add more traffic to pe2k (and PWN), since those two act like ghost towns. If we expand more, would there be great amounts of activity? A branch with no activity does not work well.

 

There's no way to "add activity" without taking it from somewhere. PE2K has terrible server issues at the moment and lags like a bitch. It's just the nature of the game - it's very difficult to spread out activity because people will migrate to wherever suits them best anyway.

 

There are a few problems with this idea. First of all, some members are banned on some forums but not banned from URPG, such as TheEvilDookie who is BMG banned and Pidge (our Champion) who is pe2k banned. Second of all, it would be really confusing for new members to come and only see one section of URPG, it would probably make them less interested in it.

Expansion overall: I think we should expand right before or during the XY release so that we can have a large influx of members and have a really good Dojo League, which was my favorite part of coming in right after the BMG expansion. I also think that for a while we should keep the forum auction on that forum separate from the auctions on the other three forums because it's unfair to make large amounts of new members struggling for cash have to compete against people who keep 100k+ lying around and/or make that much regularly. This is how it was when the BMG branch opened up and that seemed to work well, only allowing members to bid in a particular one of the auctions depending on when they joined or what forum they joined on.

As for what forum to expand to, the obvious choice is PXR {Some people know what I'm referring to, others will have to wait to find out}, of course no one is sure how large that will be when it opens. I don't know much about the other Pokémon forums of the internet, I'm only a member of BMG, pe2k, PWN, EGC, and PXR and I don't really pay much attention to what goes on on EGC.

We definitely need more members, and an expansion seems to be the only way we can get them. I do agree however that having stuff on so many forums gets annoying, not sure what the solution is though to still attract members on the forums we are on. Having a URPG forum is nice, but you would need to have something on other forums that attracts people to it.

 

I don't think we should really base our decisions off of a very small portion of the population in very very specific scenarios, regardless of what the decision is. (I also don't agree that the splitting of URPG is a good idea, just saying)

I'm not staff member, so I don't know what dialogue has been had with other websites, but obvious options for expansion include: SerebiiForums, PokeCommunity, Smogon. These are all sites that have huge communities.