Dr. Migration or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love J2

[scobywhru]

[narwal]

get fucking smoked woskls

@ikri: I can fit a whole 1 more person!!

[Ian7]

LE BUMPAGE

[mbaxter]

Status update: I've been busy, other staff have been sick and busy. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

[Django]

Status update: I've been busy, other staff have been sick and busy. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

How many of the senior staff are still active? In other words, bax i think you do too much

You are not superman, dear

[KoD]

About 3.5

[Django]

fucking hire me then
my tower arrives next month

[Ikri]

fixit remix actually isn't bad. also, who still uses Xfire, scoobs?

[scobywhru]

I don't but I plan to leave it.

[Neelpos]

Just a note: Man my "View New Posts" feed has been pretty darn empty today,

If only there was a thriving community based around common servers to promote discussion.

Bax plz. Activity is decreasing.

[Bao]

I don't think I've seen joe.to mega mega active since maybe 2002-2003 but even I've noticed a real slow down lately.

It feels weird, like I shouldn't be posting. Like my posts would stand out too much and I'd be the odd one out, like the weird dude still posting on joe.to.

Not doing the Hoodedsniper thing though, slow and calm isn't necessarily bad.

[Sanvich Hoovy]

Generally speaking people have been trickling out lately, haven't heard from Nightwolf, Parasyte, Cheddars, Hooplah, Walrus, Tzeryushi, or a bunch of others in a while. And that's fine, people come and go, but I also can't remember who the most recent person is either, since we don't have anything attracting new people. This has been true for longer than the servers have been down, and we should probably figure out how we're gonna fix that.

[Bash]

To My knowledge, Me Katana and Jox are the newest members that actively participate. And I started playing on the servers almost 4 years ago now.

[Neelpos]

We need a server for a high-activity game to pull in new members really, there's never been much community interest in the big titles like CoD or Battlefield, which tend to push away from dedicated servers anyways so those are out. Battlefront is getting a lot of mixed reactions and probably handling DS's the same as Battlefield, Unreal Tournament has low activity as I think it's still not officially launched but there's no knowing if that will increase. NS2 has been DOA, Planetside 2 only has a small amount of active J2ers and can be a bit overwhelming for new people, so is unlikely to bring in many new people.

To be honest our most active server atm is CS:JO in terms of the playercount for the overall game, and even then we're not a listed server accessible through the browser. And even then everything's on fire and isn't regularly active, we fill it with events and group announcements, there's no daily playerbase.

We're kinda just kicking around maintaining what we have and waiting for a new TF or MC or other game that we can play regularly enough to attract new people. Twiddling our thumbs and shouting WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOR? And then 1/4 of us being only active in Mumble for DotA, or even worse, LoL. People like Fisch, Yatta, Zomb Bomb, and the other Mumble regulars don't even do anything else in J2 anymore.

We need a game.

[Bao]

There's been a huge huge revival of CS 1.6 in the last couple years if you guys want to take a swing at that and go down memory lane in a more than half hearted way.

Its worked extremely well for the Latin gaming community, MXS is just one of like maybe a hundred very active Latin servers in like a sea of thousands of multinational servers.

The servers are also dirt cheap to rent (less than a dollar a slot) if you don't want to use the joe servers, or would just want to try it for a month.

The big problem you'd run into of course is, instead of it being the generally American audience you're used to it would be a pretty mixed bag of basically anyone from anywhere that happens to know some English. Which to me personally is great, but if you don't have experience handling truly international crowds it might not be the best.

Thats just one option though.

Another could be to go into Minecraft, yet again, but in an organized orderly fashion where drama isn't likely to spark.

---

I kind of also think a part of the problem is that the internet and the world in general has changed a lot in the time between when Joe.to was the happeninggg place to be and our current cyberpunk dystopia of centralized, corporatized social media.

For example, on MXS Sina(my "boss") wanted a forum, I guess because he was a bit old school himself. He had already multiple active facebook groups for MXS, but he decided to shut down the most popular of them because he hoped it would migrate people to the forum. It didn't really happen, the forum is about on Joe.to level of activity despite having four servers be full nearly 24/7. I think the time of forums has passed in a way, we get a lot a lot of people who come in and have no idea how to even use one despite being very much so able to use facebook and STEAM. They don't even know how to make a thread, but completely know how to do things like change their IP, pirate games, organize on facebook, etc. Also news sites like BBC, Aljazeera, etc often describe message boards as "what people used before the dominance of social media", indicating people see it as a pre-social media thing they didn't know existed and need it explained to them.

I'm not really sure what you guys could do about that because thats something even MXS is wrestling with and we have a huuuuge playerbase. Just a huge playerbase that are basically tourists and aren't interested in actually being in the community beyond facebook. Though an interesting thing is that the forum is like the place where the big active members and the top admins are always at, kind of like our "office" while the facebook is where the masses go. Something that could be done is opening a Joe.to group on Facebook and using the forum as a place for a much more involved, much more regular space. Once you guys get servers running again, the facebook could be where people go to talk about ordinary shit and whats happening in the servers and the forum could be where all the old fucking nerds like us hang out. That's basically what happened on MXS by accident.

As a side note, I'm not really sure but I think most of the like "hardcore gamers" that play the BIG games of today tend to not really go beyond STEAM in terms of socializing or community building. Its a similar thing like with how Facebook works for MXS. I feel like also what is a "gamer" has changed a lot since Joe.to's hey day from like community-building nerd on the internet to like dude who just wants to play some LoL games before his next class. I could be wrong though but I feel like the former has definitely been replaced by the latter, with some exceptions of course. Either way I think its something more to adjust to.