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Director of Communications
By OKCoyote (Daniel Matteson)
 - Director of Communications
 -  
1E North American Continental Quarter-Finalist 2023
2E Cardassia Regional Champion 2023
#318211
I was recently notified that my only real consistent regular local player left is quitting Trek events.

I've been thinking about what to do next, and I am strongly considering quitting as a local TD altogether. It sucks, but it's no longer practical or worth the extreme effort it takes to round up players that just don't want to play any more, particularly now that there's a good chance that most of my events still won't get enough players to sanction.

I'm really depressed about this turn of events. As part of this community I've felt like I belonged to something larger than myself. I love this game and have wanted to support it ever since I found this site. But supporting the game starts at a local level, and the very first thing I did for the game was to run local events. I've been doing this faithfully for nearly four years. To consider ending things now, to shrug off those four years as a failure, leaves a big hole in my heart. I'm not sure how to fill it or to where to go from here.

Whatever happens, I plan to continue running online events. I also intend to continue as Social Media Manager as I've got some great ideas in the works for improving our online presence and I hope to see those out. But for the foreseeable future, I may not be posting as much in the forums, and I wanted people to know why that is and where my head is at right now.
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By DJstormtrooper (Tyler Fultz)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Architect
#318213
I feel ya, bro. The constant headache of trying to wrangle up the players who may or may not want to play wears on you. I miss the days of living in Germany where players were plentiful and enthusiastic.

There will always be online games, travel opportunities and players moving around. Don't despair!
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By kingmj4891 (Matthew King)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#318215
OKCoyote wrote:I was recently notified that my only real consistent regular local player left is quitting Trek events.

I've been thinking about what to do next, and I am strongly considering quitting as a local TD altogether. It sucks, but it's no longer practical or worth the extreme effort it takes to round up players that just don't want to play any more, particularly now that there's a good chance that most of my events still won't get enough players to sanction.

I'm really depressed about this turn of events. As part of this community I've felt like I belonged to something larger than myself. I love this game and have wanted to support it ever since I found this site. But supporting the game starts at a local level, and the very first thing I did for the game was to run local events. I've been doing this faithfully for nearly four years. To consider ending things now, to shrug off those four years as a failure, leaves a big hole in my heart. I'm not sure how to fill it or to where to go from here.

Whatever happens, I plan to continue running online events. I also intend to continue as Social Media Manager as I've got some great ideas in the works for improving our online presence and I hope to see those out. But for the foreseeable future, I may not be posting as much in the forums, and I wanted people to know why that is and where my head is at right now.
I too find myself discouraged by the lack of players in my area and while I have tried to recruit and gain people it just has not worked out the way I would like it. But the lack of a local playgroup is no reason to quit the game. I believe that the future of this game is in online play and online events. And we have a great group of people that play online and that number continues to grow. I hope you stick around because this game needs good dedicated people like yourself to be a part of it and while you may not have a local group you can always be a part of the stccg community.
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By DJstormtrooper (Tyler Fultz)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
Architect
#318242
I hope the rest of the CC sees this thread and takes it as a impetus to improve the tools available to players for outreach.
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By flrazor (Jeremy Benedict)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#318249
DJstormtrooper wrote:I hope the rest of the CC sees this thread and takes it as a impetus to improve the tools available to players for outreach.
At the least, I've brought it up amongst the Ambassadors for discussion. What sort of outreach tools do you think would be helpful to the greater community? Without knowing more about individual cases, do people find more often that the attrition of players is primarily due to the game itself or to outside factors (work, families, money, "real life")?

I'm always looking for new Ambassadors in areas that aren't already represented - if you don't have an Ambassador (or someone in a CC role) nearby, let me know if you'd like to volunteer.
 
By Honest
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
2E Australian Continental Champion 2019
#318258
Sometimes you need to hit a low in order to reassess things, and then either walk away or build back up. Hopefully you choose to build back up!

Use this time as an opportunity to show the game to different groups of people, goobers you may not have previously think are interested. If you are not playing try, try a new game yourself, and then maybe show the new games group Trek. Play online to keep your hand in. And please keep posting, your posts are cool

And this rubbish about the last 4 years being a failure? Don't even think about it. You had a good time, your group had a good time. That's 4 years of success if you ask me Brother

Take care, stick around

Honest
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Director of First Edition
By MidnightLich (Charlie Plaine)
 - Director of First Edition
 -  
Prophet
#318260
I am open to any and all suggestions for what we, as an organization, can do to support recruiting. Bonus points if it's free.

-crp
 
By HoodieDM
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#318265
The biggest thing you can try is to simply try a "new spot" in trying to reach new players. The good thing is that all of our stuff is printable. Theres still plenty of sealed product available of the "cheap" stuff. So you always just show up at a new spot and ask to post a flyer around in their place with ur info. Youd be surprised who responds.

~D
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Second Edition Art Manager
By edgeofhearing (Lucas Thompson)
 - Second Edition Art Manager
 -  
Community Contributor
#318268
Dan, I'm right there with you.

One of my three other local "regulars" recently had a frank discussion with me, not about necessarily quitting Trek, but just that it isn't a priority right now. I get it, because we're all adults and have lives and stuff to do and other priorities to weigh; but on the other hand, it means that I haven't managed to find a date for a tournament that works for the four of us for several months. We'll play again, but opportunities to do so are getting sparser.

Part of my goal with how I've been organizing the Road to Worlds articles is to outline deck ideas and get people excited about trying things out. The other main goal has been to celebrate the local trek communities, make it so that local players can see interviews of people they actually know in real life on the front page. I want to keep people excited about Trek even when they're not actively playing it, even if they're not checking the forums as frequently as I do. While I was researching the RtW articles, I had a real Static Warp Bubble moment though:

Back in 2013, I managed for the first (and so far, only) time to mobilize my group to take a road trip to another Regional, in Virginia. I noticed that there wasn't a Regional scheduled for that group, so I looked it up, and they had two more tournaments after that 2013 Regional and then just disappeared. The Trek-playing universe seems to keep getting smaller; the closest Regional to Massachusetts this year (that wasn't in MA) was am 11 hour drive away in Ohio.

I don't know what the solution is. I don't even know if there is a solution. But I'm just going to keep looking for a Saturday where everyone is free, and obsessively looking at decklists to write about, even if it means I'm eventually the only one on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Image
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Director of Organized Play
By LORE (Kris Sonsteby)
 - Director of Organized Play
 -  
Architect
1E Andoria Regional Champion 2023
2E Andoria Regional Champion 2023
W.C.T. Chairman's Trophy winner 2014-2015
#318274
Sorry to hear this, bud. You're always welcome to talk to me about the ways I maintain our local player base, and of course are more than welcome come up and play with us any time. :cheersL:
 
By Wedge772 (Matthew Ting)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Adventurer
1E Australian National Champion 2015
#318277
Just an observation: it seems that the nail in the coffin for many playgroups is when 1 person drops out, for whatever reason, and the group goes from 4 down to 3 people.

4 is the magic number for tournaments. But tournament play doesn't need to be the only way to play. Casual game sessions with 2-3 people should still be a thing. What if the CC had an "organised casual game" program? I don't know what that would look like, but it would be some sort of program to support casual gaming. This would be outside the existing tournament rating / achievement system.

Obviously people can get together themselves and have casual games anyway, but having some sort of organised program to it could make it a bit more exciting. It doesn't help with the attrition problem, but it could mean more games being played which is always good.
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By The Mad Vulcan (J)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#318286
^ Alternatively, what if we could use Skype and Lackey to sanction a 3 man tournament. I.E. have the TD set up a laptop and then have a player 'join' the event.

The trick would be coding it so that it doesn't count as playing in that region for the player calling in. It would somehow have to be a local for 3 players and an online event for the 4th.
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By chompers (Steve Hartmann)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
Continuing Committee Member - Retired
1E Australian Continental Runner-Up 2019
2E Australian Continental Semi-Finalist 2019
#318296
In 2009 I found out the Star Trek game that I had stopped playing long ago was being played again and supported by the CC. I found out because local player Honest was promoting the game. I turned up at a tournament and got to catch-up with a bunch of old friends that I hadn't seen for years. So I started playing 2E again which led to playing 1E again and playing Tribbles for the first time ever.

133 2E, 34 1E and 134 Tribbles tournaments later I am still here and those old friendships have strengthened to be some of my closest friends. I have really enjoyed every bit of those 7 years and hope for many more.

In 2009 when I played that first tournament I never would have imagined that this is what would have happened.

Whatever the future holds I think the achievements of the CC are astonishing. I doubt anyone could have imagined the success that has been had. Everyone that has been involved in this game has been responsible for that.

Whilst it certainly seems that times are tough, there is no reason why we can't enjoy future success.

I recently moved to an area with no local Trek and no local gaming groups. So my only option is to drive 2.5 hours to Sydney to play. It's working at the moment but ideally I'd like to have a local playgroup. I am thinking of starting a social gaming club. If I can get a group of players in we will play whatever suits. If I can establish that group maybe down the track I might be able to get them to play Trek. Baby steps ..........
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#318302
(NOTE: I make a lot of absolute statements in this post. Feel free to argue with them.)

We can't stop attrition. Attrition is part of the life of all games -- all things, really. Life changes; Trek becomes impossible. One day, I will stop playing this game. (Indeed, I already have -- I spent a decade away and chanced back at just the right moment.) And so our problem is not attrition -- which strikes me as actually being extremely low around here -- but the fact that we struggle very, very much to recruit new players. We have three great, totally free games. So why aren't people playing them?

(1) I think people who would generally be interested in our game don't know it exists, and those who do remember it don't know that it's still running and free to play. Practically every time I'm at a tournament, some rando walks by, does a double-take, and says, "Wait, is that Star Trek cards? People still play that?" Then we immediately try to squeeze in the CC's sales pitch. Sometimes we actually have a New Frontiers Business Card handy, and hand that out. It's... somewhat effective, by which I mean that I think we got a new player this way once.

Advertisement-by-random passerby, though, is not going to bring in enough new players to save the game. We must have stronger outreach efforts. Tournament notices can't simply go up online, where only active members see them; they need to be posted on paper in local gaming shops, with information about how to learn the game. While playing, we need one of those table-sign holders that says "Star Trek CCG - Free to play - Find out more at TrekCC.org". (At my last event, the venue literally gave us Star Trek Attack Wing placards. This was not helpful.) The goal should be to get people to check out TrekCC.org.

(Yes, ideally every player would be introduced to the game by a friend and carefully mentored into full bloom. I have gone through this process a few times, with one real success, and it is very good -- but most of us have pretty much tapped out all our IRL friends who might be into this. That means we need to recruit anonymous people into the game, and that almost definitely means getting them onto the website.)

If we could win a few advocates for our game on the staffs of local gaming shops, that would be even better. Why not ask your friendly local game salesperson to play a game or two of this community-run, grassroots game? (Gamers love grassroots stuff.) Build him a top-notch, tons-of-fun deck to play and have him at the table during the next tournament. If you win him over, he is the best possible evangelist we could possibly have.

(2) Now we're driving more traffic to the website. New person traffic. Yay! So they hit the website and what happens?

They leave.

Our website is extremely powerful and extremely useful -- for active players. For new players, it is a total nightmare. There are not one but THREE games on the front page, crammed into tiny spaces with no explanation; if you don't know that the TrekCC supports three different games, you can't even know where to start. The number of links on the front page is totally overwhelming; there are nine separate navigation contexts (I'm told that three is really the maximum users can handle) with a total of over 200 links (half of which are expansion icons). We know what it all points to. But to a newcomer... what the hell is all this? I often repeat this, but it bears repeating: the first time my wife saw this site, she yelped out of sheer intimidation. She has a degree in Computer Science. This is not good.

The first thing I do on a lot of confusing sites I visit is click About Us, because the basic About Us overview can often tell me what a place is trying to do, even if their front page is a stygian nightmare. (Note that, according to research, most people are not this patient -- they will leave the instant they are confused.) But our About Us page is worse than useless; it's an org chart. Literally. Confusion upon confusion. Where does the website say, "We are the Continuing Committee; we are a player-run community that designs and develops three Star Trek-themed card games. Here is a little about First Edition (here are some links), here is a little about Second Edition (here are some links); here is a little about Tribbles (here are some links)"? As far as I know, the website never does anything like this, and, if it does, the fact that I still don't know about it after several years of high activity here is no less an indictment.

The big thing that our website gets right is that, right smack in the middle of the homepage, we have a big button that says "New or Returning? Click here!" The odds of a new or returning player even seeing this strike me as fairly low amid what they can only see as a massive jumble (I missed it my first visit here), but at least it's there, it's a big visual anchor, and it's a call-to-action aimed squarely at the target audience.

If anything behind that call-to-action were remotely helpful to new or returning players, we might stand a chance. But it's not. It's a collection of articles that kinda-sorta touch on what new players might be interested in, once they get on their feet. But -- if we are positioning ourselves to succeed -- we are dealing with raw recruits, many of them (hopefully) teens with a lot of free time, who have never seen this game before and very probably have only seen one or two series of Star Trek, if that. We can count on them having a familiarity with Magic: The Gathering and/or Pokemon... and that's about it. First question: "What are these games?" The entire website is silent. Second question: "Which game do I want to learn and play first?" The entire website is silent.

Third question: "How do I play the game I have chosen?" Second Edition is a little bit better at this than First Edition, because Second Edition actually has a rulebook that contains and explains the actual rules of the actual game. First Edition currently does not. And I don't really know about Tribbles. And all games at least have rules documents online. But how does a new (or returning) player find them? Not from the New/Returning page! And they aren't available anywhere else at all, actually, except directly from the front page, which (as we've discussed) is an extremely unusable page. It gets worse: we don't provide any guidance to users about how to sort out the rules documents. Look at First Edition: we have posted there a Rulebook, a Glossary, Current Rulings, Conversion Rules, a Converted Cards List, OTF Rules, Revised Rules, X-List Rules, the Block Legal Cardlist, the Organized Play Guide, and the Dilemma Resolution Guide -- and that's just the rules documents! The new player has absolutely no idea what any of this means, and gives up in frustration. Heck, JUST TONIGHT the 1E forum had a guest asking whether the Rule Of Four would apply at 1E Worlds! Sunsetting 1E Revised and X-List is a helpful first step, but it is quite frankly impossible for a new player to figure out how to play this game by using our website. You have to go to the forums and ask someone to sort it out. And how many people are going to engage with a community that has done nothing to interest them and made it so extremely difficult to figure out the most basic information about what we do? A miniscule percentage.

The CC is working on more content to help explain the game to new players, in the form of tutorial videos. This is great. I applaud it. From a recruitment perspective, it's the best news in years, and I was excited to hear about it. But how are new players going to find these videos? Are they going in those sidebars? Because, if so, you may as well just burn that money on a pyre, because new players will never actually find them. We already have content -- tons and tons and tons of it. (There's even more non-official content out there: Jeremy Commandeur's Open Format tutorials are out-of-date, but still pretty handy and still chilling out on my website. Zef'no's Brief 1E introduction is great. My rulebook is pretty snappy, IMHO.) But it's impossible for a new user to find the content relevant to him in the torrent we hurl at him the moment he navigates to the homepage.

At this point, we've lost probably 999 out of every 1000 prospective players who visit our website. But the ones who have stayed aren't out of questions yet! Question Four: "Now that I now how to play, how can I find my first deck, something to get me familiar with the game?"

Crickets, sayeth the homepage and the new-and-returning page.

Let's say that the player doggedly searches the site, though, and eventually stumbles into some starter decks, which are buried on the expansion pages for 1E, on article pages for 2E, and don't seem to exist at all for Tribbles. But, God bless him, he finds 'em, and he's like, "Aw, yeah, I'm gonna play Dominion! They were so cool in DS9!"

"...wait. How do I get the cards?" (Question Six)

We don't actually state clearly the most awesome part about this game -- YOU CAN PRINT THE CARDS OUT ON YOUR PRINTER FOR FREE AND IT'S TOTALLY OKAY -- anywhere a new player might look. The only place I can think that includes the printable card policy at all is the OPG. And it's on, like, Page 13 or some deep, deep place of disinterest. And we really do need to not just state the printable card policy prominently, but clearly and repeatedly: I have tried to introduce friends to the game who didn't even believe me the first time I said it, and misunderstood the second time, because they couldn't wrap their heads around the true power of the policy. The printable card policy is radical, and it takes a few statements for people to get it. Right now, a new player who somehow survives our site long enough to find a starter deck is liable to think that it's just for display, and he has to go off and buy the cards somewhere. When he can't figure out where to buy Star Trek Cards, boom, he's gone, lost prospect.

Even once the new players wrap their heads around the printable card policy, they are going to need some further guidance about it. I have had other friends end up finding the whole printability thing off-putting, because they didn't understand exactly what they needed to do to make a legal deck, they didn't have a huge box of old commons (for this game or other games) and card sleeves to actually follow the printable card policy, or they simply underestimated how much time and work it takes to print and cut all these cards. An FAQ or something to that effect seems to me to be essential.

But let's pretend our prospects overcome these hurdles. They print out some starters. They play with their siblings. Good times. Maybe they actually use 2E's multiplayer rules for the first time since 2006. But they realize these starters are boring (NOTE: we should advertise very clearly that starters are much less interesting than the full game, or players are liable to think our game actually IS that boring!), which leads to Question Seven: "How do I graduate from starters to building my own decks?"

Again, here, the site has some guidance, but it's not very much, and it's not very well-aimed at the audience. It's aimed more at us -- players of long standing who are looking to branch out. Just look at the "Beginner Series," which are supposed to be aimed at newbies more than any other kind of article we write. The three top articles are Andreas's fascinating but extremely advanced Dominion strategy article (29 dilemmas?!), then Niall's awesome but inherently advanced Borg overview (because Borg are hard, entendre intended) that isn't really written to the newbie, and then (skipping the virtual deck and another Andreas Dominion article), Lucas's breathtakingly cool but totally-irrelevant-to-beginners "Cost of a Card Play" article.

My understanding is that the new video content will teach players how to play, but not how to come to grips with the massive universe of cards and build a functioning, reasonable competitive deck in the modern meta. So the video content will not solve this, either.

Our player is left to fend for himself, latching onto a few key concepts from certain articles, never really clear on how his dilemma combos should work, what Ref cards are for, and even what options are available to him. He needs an article that says, "Here are the affiliations in the game, and here are their play/draw engines, and here is how hard it is to play each of them." He needs another article that says, "Here is how you build your first dilemma pile." Another that says, "Hey, here's how you choose which personnel to put in your deck." He needs another that just says, "Here are the cards you need to be aware of right now." Time was, we would get cards in packs, which allowed us to learn them slowly, one by one, but now the entire 4000-card universe gets thrown at the player's head on Day One. I thought 363 cards was intimidating back in 1995. Can you imagine what it's like now?

1E Block is a good stab at this last problem, by limiting the card pool... but where does a player find out about Block? The 1E expansion list mentions Block, but doesn't tell the new player what it is or what it all means. (And it shouldn't; that's not that page's job.) There's a Block Legal Cardlist on the homepage, but (1) it has the same problem of not explaining itself, and (2) it doesn't show you cards, but just tells you the names of sets which you have to go look up somewhere else. And even once you know about Block, you're still being asked to look at nearly 1000 cards. That's not reasonable; we need to be able to point players at a single, narrow set of cards (like, say, The Next Generation) and say, "Hey, if you know and understand what every red- or black-bordered card in this set does, you can be a fairly successful Klingon TNG player on the tournament circuit, even without touching a single other card from this or any other set." This gives them what every player needs when they enter any new game: a beachhead. From there, they can slowly spread out and absorb the whole game at their own pace. But they need a beachhead. Starters are useful educational tools, but aren't competitive and are not as fun as the main game, so they only get us halfway there.

Okay, so let's say we told our new player to look at all the black cards in Emissary and Emissary supplemental and all the tan or black cards in The Gamma Quadrant. (A bit too ambitious, I think, but we are obviously dealing with an ambitious and dedicated player if he is still interested after all the hurdles our website has set before him. One might argue that a new player shouldn't make his first competitive deck around the Dominion, because they're complicated -- but, if that were the case, why would we have made a Dominion starter?) He's built a decent, modern Dominion deck with Reward From the Founders as his main engine. But his siblings are done with this game, and he needs people to play with.

Question Eight: "Where can I play this?"

Ironically, while this is the last question (therefore the least critical), it's the one we are best at answering. There are problems with the Tournament board -- it should be possible for someone who (1) doesn't have an account and (2) doesn't know his Decipher region name to easily find tournaments near his house -- but it is prominent, public, and smartly presented overall. The Player Map has a number of small problems, but really only one big one: it gives you no way to contact your regional ambassador. (The ambassador is easy to find, but you can only contact him if you first log into the forums -- and we can't assume our player has registered an account, since most people will avoid committing to an account until they are quite certain they are going to be part of the community... and our hypothetical player still isn't sure of that.) The Player map is also prominent, surprisingly public, and smartly presented. (It baffles me that we hide players' tournament records and reports for privacy reasons, but publish their real names and approximate addresses to the world on the player map -- but that's a score against our tournament report paranoia, not the player map. The player map is pretty good.) When there are local events, people sometimes return to the game by attending them, because they're easy to find. That's how many of us did, in fact, return after an absence.

No, the big problem we have with the question, "Where can I play this?" isn't the website. It's that the only answer we can provide is, "Several hundred miles away." And I've never heard of a single raw newbie willing to travel several hundred miles to play a game he's never seen before. Our playgroups are dying of attrition, so this problem is only getting worse while our recruitment problems persist.

...so why don't we have official CC support for Lackey? To play online -- which is, for 90% of the world's population, especially young people, the only logistically plausible way to play the Star Trek CCGs -- you have to dive into the forums and dig through some fairly messy threads just to get Lackey set up. You have to dig through some entirely different forums to actually find a game -- and, guess what, there's no orientation for new online players, no bag of tricks explaining how stuff gets done in Lackey, no etiquette guide, no "here's how online tournaments run." (At least, none I've seen, and, again, if there is one out there and a longstanding player like me hasn't seen it, that doesn't speak any better of us.) I've never played online because I'm afraid of committing a faux pas or just not scheduling enough time or not having the right software for it, and I know and like practically all of you. I just know from experience how different it can be online. So even if a player finds all the information -- buried deep, deep in the forums he (again) almost certainly hasn't registered for -- the odds of him actually playing an online game are almost nil. Despite all the other hurdles he has overcome, he's going to turn away at the very last moment, and this very stubborn would-be player finally slips through our fingers like so many others before him.

In all this, I've focused on the needs of totally new players. But the needs of returning players are almost identical: they need to know about the new games (my experience is that most returners last played in PAQ, so 2E and Tribbles are totally mysterious to them), they need to know the modern rules, they need to know the modern meta, they need to know about printing, and they need to know where to play. Returners might need slightly different content, but almost certainly need just as much as raw newbies.

If we can get a player to an O.P. event with a deck he built himself and he wins one or two games, then our odds of retaining him as a new player are very good -- maybe two out of three, in my experience. Our ambassadors are really very good at making new people feel welcomed and part of the game, and practically everyone is willing to take byes for the sake of the newbies. It's a gay old time. But we make it almost impossible to get to this stage. We don't tell people we exist, and, even if we get them interested, we make it extremely difficult for them to convert their interest to the desired outcome -- learning about us and the games, knowing the rules for one of them, building a deck, attending an event, having actual fun. This leads to attrition which, even though it's quite low, massively outpaces replacement, and which has put our game on the road to oblivion. Once you account for the multiplier effects of attrition (the smaller the player base gets, the faster it shrinks), we are looking at the death of the game within the next ten years.

I have stated the problems (as I see them) here, and will try to suggest some solutions in a future post. My solutions will not be the only possible solutions to the problems I have presented here, but these problems are all real and really do need to be fixed in some way if we are to start growing again. We have three terrific games here, as good as anything on the market and better than any other Star Trek licensed product ever released. Our product is solid gold. We just need to get better at selling it.

I apologize for filibustering; I really like OKCoyote and found the loss of his playgroup alarming, and I've been thinking about these things off and on for months now.
User avatar
Ambassador
 - Ambassador
 -  
#318303
I understand your frustration at not being able to get people together but I have to say I'm grateful that you plan to continue online. The social media stuff is 150% better since you started doing it.

I have a few thoughts about recruitment which are more general than specific to Dan who from the sounds of things may have tried all of the below:

1) Not what anyone wants to hear when 3 people is all you've got, but I've come to realise that a static group can never survive because people always drop out.

Back home there's a list of 10 people that I contact about every event. I never expect more than 4 to show, and I've never had more than 5. One of my most regular players now is someone whom I hounded for a year before he first showed up. They're also almost entirely CC era-only players. There's one who was part of my original 1e group, and she has yet to actually attend a CC event.

... I will admit that I have the advantage of having lived in this city my whole life and have a deep network of geeky/gamery types. Working as a programmer has its advantages for gaming.

2) I've learned some things from all the German hospitality I've received in the last few months. On my experimental list is a longer Trek event where we play cards in the afternoon and then watch some Trek over supper in the evening. Family, partners etc. and non-card playing Trek friends will be invited even if they don't play cards but you can bet the cards will be out where people can see them and be curious.

3) On casual play mattering...

3.1. To get a larger network of people who can't commit to a single date / 5 hours at a time: a ladder system that recognises the result of every casual game played (assuming both participants agree). There are different ways of doing points on the ladder, standard number of VPs per game OR more dramatic is that a lower winner jumps to the loser's spot and the loser (and everyone below) shifts one down. Bragging rights drive this kind of thing, all you need to do is have the ladder visible somewhere online. It's WCT but without needing an entire tournament.

For extra fun have a global ladder that allows online and offline play to be mixed.

There are lots of kinks to be ironed out, penalties for not playing, maximum number of games against a single opponent, reset after some period of time, etc.

3.2. Online tournaments are spread out over a couple of weeks. What about running RL tournaments the same way? Two weeks, and players each arrange their games individually. <- obviously this works better if you're not geographically spread out, which I understand some groups are.

OK, in exchange for these ideas I'll ask for some back: how do I get local players to care about the global game / TrekCC participation?
Question for noob

Awesome. Thanks everyone for all the help!

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