Osiris Fraternal Order

Kraketopia wrote:Sat Feb 27, 2016 4:04 amThis region needs activity centers beyond legislation and spam if it wants to attract a wide variety of active players. We should think about diversifying into a third type of activity. Don't ask me what that activity should be, I'm not that attuned to Osiris's culture yet.

It's a tough nut to crack, to be sure, because it's not like we haven't tried to diversify into other activities before. We've tried RP before, with little interest. We've tried generating interest in media but the response to that has been tepid. We've tried to increase WA discussion to stimulate interest in the WA, with little response. Despite the presence of many people who enjoy military gameplay, few Osirans are actively involved in the Legion. The list goes on.

I'm honestly at a loss at this point for what we should do. A significant part of the problem seems to be the absence of a significant and active contingent of people who put Osiris first, or even second or third, on their list of regional priorities. I'm not blaming anyone for that because I've been guilty of it myself at times, and pointing the finger certainly isn't going to make anyone interested in making Osiris more of a priority. I don't know how you get people to put Osiris first and get them wanting to pursue some of their favorite activities here rather than elsewhere, but I do think that is the root of the problem. We have people interested in RP, in media, in the WA, in R/D, but they are, for the most part, already pursuing those interests elsewhere.

Ridersyl wrote:Fri Feb 26, 2016 9:56 pm

Andrew wrote:Fri Feb 26, 2016 6:30 pmI generally agree with you here. I don't think Osiris has capitalised enough on it being a Sinker. Perhaps we should start shifting some of our focus to Recruitment and appeal, I see Festavo has already thought of this, but the problems I see is that people are attracted/prompted to be active by activity, which is limited here, and there isn't much to keep individuals that do end up on these forums here and active.

Yeah. Osiris needs to capitalize more on its Sinker status, and focus more on Recruitment/appeal to draw peeps into the OFO. I'm not surprised that Festavo went along with this type of thinking. He had spent a good amount of time around Nephmir, who for all his faults, is an expert at recruitment.

As for the problem you see, I don't necessarily agree with you right now, but for the sake of argument...

Needing activity to keep the people that will make us active, but needing people that will make us active to create activity?
Seem like a bit of a Catch 22. What possible solution is there for that?

When one recruits, the basic aim is to contact as many nations as possible and as we know, there is a high likelihood that most won't even bother doing what the TG suggests. The some that do, look at the forums and judge it; is it appealing? does it look nice? is it worth my time? etc.. an appealing forum is one that both looks and feels welcoming, so forum structure and activity help here. Then, the fewer that do make the leap of joining and going through other processes need a reason to remain active here. It's far easier to join something than start something from the ground up, this is specific to RPers (which we have said we desperately need). They can try to start something but seeing as there aren't too many RPers there may not be enough participants to keep it going. They can try again, try something else or shift their focus from Osiris. This is why I said activity could help retain some new members and a lack of thereof could make the process of recruiting and integrating more challenging.

As Kraketopia said correctly the region needs activity centers beyond legislation and spam to attract new players, and a lack of it may bring some through but not as many as we would like and also, retaining them becomes the challenge as they either don't want to initiate activity or receive little response when they do so resulting in them giving up.

Ridersyl wrote:Fri Feb 26, 2016 11:10 pmMy set goal at first would be to see an average of around 20 registered users active within every hour, excluding expected dead hours. It's what I've seen from other active forums.

Right now, we normally have about 5 or 6 registered users active, and only seem to exceed that when there's something big going on in the legislature.

An ideal yet very high target. And may I ask which other active forums? Is there something specific these regions/forums are doing that aren't that are making them particularly successful?

Festavo wrote:Sat Feb 27, 2016 2:41 amAs Pharaoh, I sent a regional telegram about the forum and all the things you can do if you join the forum. I saw limited success, but if do believe it should still be done consistently. We need recruitment from the game region to the forum and a regional TG is easy.

Personalized recruitment is better. One on one messaging is note effective. It would be great if people would start targeting and recruiting the RMB regulars and even the issue answerers who keep to themselves.

I've been doing some here and there, yet no responses Do you think we should have an institution tasked specifically with recruitment?

I don't think we have enough active people to add a position :p Ideally culture or the pharaoh or the vizier would do it

So it sounds we need to recruit more active people to the forum then

Koth wrote:Sun Feb 28, 2016 7:45 pmThink of Osiris like a nightclub, if you’ve ever been to one before. There are always a bunch of people having fun and talking it up with everyone, and there’s an even larger group that lean on the walls waiting for something to happen, for the "fun" to magically arrive at their feet. When this balance in energy is tipped too far in favor of those who wait, you get Osiris. This by itself wouldn’t be a huge issue, except for the fact that in the nightclub of Osiris...I, the Pharaoh, have to be the entire party

I liked this analogy when Koth wrote it back when he was Pharaoh and it's almost become the status quo of Osiris. In terms of recruitment for a pretty good amount of time I attempted to engage posters on the RMB in conversation followed up with TG conversations and then the pitch to come offsite its barely been effective imo considering the effort, on the other hand the success rate with enticing friends and people we already know to come to Osiris has been much more effective (ie Festavo with the legion and getting Stretch, NSA, Chingis etc to come to Osiris) so that may be an avenue to consider who do we know that we can compel to join us. Once they are here participation in activity does occur to an extent but generation of activity doesn't for the most part which of course feeds into the whole inactivity loop.

Jakker wrote:Sun Feb 28, 2016 7:45 pmSo it sounds we need to recruit more active people to the forum then

Exxxactly!

We probably need some kind of organization of that effort though. We really can't just have people willy-nilly recruiting people with no strategy or organization for it, otherwise we'll have overlapping efforts and people getting annoyed because they're being recruited by multiple people.

Executive inactivity is reaching a new low at this point, to be honest. I get that people are busy, but executive service applications aren't being accepted, it doesn't look like much of anything is happening in the executive, and we really need to see more activity than this from the executive or there's not going to be any hope of Osiris becoming more active.

I would not necessarily agree that the executive branch is being inactive. From what i've seen, Rogamark has been coordinating with the Elders, Festavo is keeping the Sekhmet up and running, i've shot out an issue of Oracle and have another one in the oven, and so forth. Aye, it could be more active and ideally it should be, but "a new low" is a great overstatement in my opinion.

As far as our politics go, they may seem a bit too monotonous to people who would be looking for some more excitement and some diversity. I find that a lot of newer people see the idea of parties as very fun, though i am not sure how well that would fit Osiris, to be honest. Our government does not offer a grand scale of variety that a newer player would like to find in a region, but on the other hand we do not have enough active people to justify diversifying our government into more branches or altering current branches. The main problem would seem to be, like someone has already mentioned before me, that Osiris has a lot of people that have other regions they prioritize. I myself am guilty of that, and many of us here are. So the current state of things are fairly natural considering the demographic of our regular members. A good way to combat this would be a group effort of converting active people on the RMB to the forum. Aye, it is a hard and painful thing to do, and with little fruit, but it is worth giving it a shot if we want to change the current state of affairs.

Revitalizing the temple of Hathor into something more than just a spamfest of birthday wishes and leaves of absence would also be a step in the right direction, i believe. Because if we manage to start some interesting and casual debates there, we could have an easier time moving people from the RMB to the forum. Once we have enough newer people, we could look towards starting an RP that everyone could get behind. The current RP was probably doomed to failure from the start, despite the noble effort Andrew has made to keep it alive. Because, as someone mentioned, many people here already get that kind of activity in other regions. But once we have a small base of Osi-only players on the forums, we could actually be able to sustain a cozy RP.

Another thing to let newer people engage in something else other than the legislature is to expand the foreign affairs effort and give ambassador jobs and errands to those who apply to the temple of Horus. That way they could get some taste of regional jobs that don't have centre around what they might view as tedious debates in the Deshret. I also intend on reaching out to active people on the RMB with proposals of writing an article for the Oracle so that they would be more interested in joining and participating in the forum. Basically, we should not look to make any major changes that would magically bring in activity, but a variety of smaller changes that spark more interest in newer members littler by little. It's not one giant thing that makes a region active and interesting, but a number of smaller things. That's at least my perspective on it. And this would, of course, require all of us to chip in, roll up our sleeves, and get busy with integrating newbs into our sectors and luring them into the forums.

I should have been more clear, but to be blunt, I was primarily referring to the Pharaoh's activity. It doesn't do any good to recruit if people apply for citizenship and have to wait days for their applications to be processed -- which often leads to them not coming back -- or sign up for ministries and their applications just sit there. While neither of these things are exclusively the Pharaoh's job, he needs to make sure they're being moved along much more quickly than is currently the case.

I don't mean to sound overly critical. I appreciate Tim's service as Pharaoh and we're close friends, have been for years. But things are just moving too slowly lately to attract new participants, and after the even more inactive months we had prior to this term, we really need a serious effort to get things moving.

I can understand your concern, and share some of it. We have been getting a bit too layed back, and it's something we should put a good amount of effort into correcting.