I know I can speak for myself having less excitement for playing Blizzard games after the whole HK-Blitzchung affair. Not sure if that might skew the Heroes of the Storm bit. I do know that wanting a JA match and finding one has been tougher than I like.

Countering NHC (I love that, BTW) is a tough thing to do. Apex and Dauntless are key examples.

Lots of “we want this, give it to us” for platforms that die within hours of support. Or games that were shoe-ins that never made it out of testing.

WoW had a chance. ESO had a chance. Apex was given a chance.

At what point do you either raise the bar for support or limit supported games by category? We have a shooter. We have an MMO. We have a card game. We have a moba. Maybe that’s enough. One per category. No more.

Just random musings.

I would argue that raising the requirements for supporting a game may look unfavorable in some people's eyes, but it would bring home the point of why support is needed as we have situations of new games getting attention and not maintaining activity past 30 days or so.

But shrugs

I don't see the point personally in limiting how many games are supported, even if they have only a little bit of activity. Sure, it means people don't play them as much, but there may be things outside of the game that make it low activity. For example, I was never going to play Dauntless because I was never going to install the EPIC Games launcher.

I think part of it is that we're trying to grow our gaming community inside a set number of games. But that doesn't exactly work out. If you want to grow the community, you need to go through the games that are popular regardless. So Overwatch is a good example. It has popularity still, and we could be actively recruiting from there, but it simply doesn't work out because of a lack of a guild system and the OW competitions here are few and far between. Plus, the ones that have existed have stunted the purpose of the game itself (last GJW had a 1v1 mode for it...in a 6 person, team-based FPS game...1v1...).

Halo: Master Chief Collection just came out on Steam. It's an FPS game, super popular, AND has a massive following with multiplayer. Why aren't we working on that? We can't grow a community with people only here. That community needs to come from multiple places.

Once games don't become as played as often, that doesn't mean we should get rid of them. It means that we should keep them, because someone who might be a future part of our community might have that game, has found no one to play with, and now suddenly has a whole group of potential people to play with. I also feel like if the game is free, then we sure as hell should not be eliminating it. Apex is free game. It gets some plays sometimes. It should not be eliminated.

Great breakdown of the survey and the avenue for feedback is certainly welcome. However, I'd be curious to see a year-to-date comparison of cluster/pvp submissions and GMRG competition entries for 2018 and 2019 similar to what Drac has done in the past. I won't speculate on the data, but anecdotally gaming activity feels like it's gone down and it would be interesting to see how the submission data lines up with the survey data.

The other comment theme that got my attention was that people feel that it is hard to find others to group up with. I can’t address this alone.

I think we've fallen into a trap of thinking solely in terms of platforms, which ones we support, support thresholds, etc. Something I haven't heard discussed as much is the size of our player base and how we bring in new players. "NHC" certainly is a thorny issue that's been around since we as club started supporting non-SW games but the more thought I gave the issue the more I began to believe it's a symptom of a larger problem. We've grown to rely on a slowly, but steadily, shrinking core for our gaming activity and community and as people naturally move between games or get busy we don't have enough members/players to sustain activity.

tl;dr, perhaps we, as a club, should start thinking in terms of expanding our player base through sustained and intentional recruitment to sustain activity rather than always focusing on platform adoption.

I agree with the statement regarding recruitment. If we have a concern regarding maintaining gaming, then the gaming part of the club needs to be advertised and it needs to be emphasized that gaming by itself is tolerated and accepted. I see people try to push for people to be involved in all three aspects of DB (art, fiction, and gaming) and undermine the individual desire of the said member by constantly pushing for a "jack of all trades" attitude. Some people just want to game and that is it. That is fine.

I would like to comment about one thing, and Kalan brought it up WoW never stood a chance to being a platform we use. 11 years ago I played it vigorously and tried to get it an approved platform and I was told, and I quote - "We will never support a game that requires membership or service fees and that anyone can buy leveled up characters, gear, weapons, etc."

Game like WoW, SWG, UO, Everquest, and others that required monthly payments will never be supported because not everyone will pay for it. But then again, We are missing out on a lot of players who play these games. Jedi Academy, SWTOR, and other games have become stagnant and boring and most people only play them when it's a GJW type comp. Dauntless I was surprised allowed because people can buy their gear if they wanted too, I found it boring as to fight the same creature over and over and over and..... you get my drift.

SW games like Arena, Galaxy of Heroes, Commander and such I am surprised are not supported as many do require team efforts especially in wars or seize battles where it takes entire teams of players to beat opposing factions.

As I mentioned on the above platforms and games, many things can be gotten from them if done right. Clusters and Pendants especially. Of the 2 events I didn't do in the GJW, both were gaming and both were mostly playstation or xbox gaming platforms. Even trying to learn them in such a short time on my sons PS4, I found it confusing and difficult to play them, i.e. Apex and BF2

Instead of limiting us to certain games, we should expand our selections and include them, especially all the SW games available, including the mobile games. If not, we are going to get sick of the handful of games we can play.

What a great turn out for the survey! Great report boss. Appreciate everyone's comments and concerns and we do and will take into consideration. Keep them coming and don't be afraid to email as well. Keep in mind there is a certain process of a platform getting supported. It's not just at a whim and shouldn't for good reasons. Bestest reason is, you are earning clusters. Whichever platform gets the approval to be supported it needs a way to verify who participated within the "session". The screenshot not ONLY verifies that but helps the FIST and staff to help regulate how many clusters should be awarded and differentiate between different modes etc. Problem we ran into on mmos (like WoW) was the lack of a proper screenshot.

I myself do not see that changing for there needs to be a way to regulate how clusters are earned. And the system works for that. As fiction is regulated, gaming is as well, for a reason.

I thank everyone for their comments. Game on!

Lots of discussion about using platforms as recruitment tools. Not a lot of discussion about the amount of work that is required to truly manage an in-game guild. Whether an MMO like SWTOR or a shooter like Destiny, you have to be almost solely focused on those individual communities in order to use them as recruitment tools.

I haven’t met anyone that is willing to put in that kind of work in recent years.

So, what should the Fist focus on? I’d argue that the Fist already has a guild to manage and provide gaming activities for.

It’s called the Dark Jedi Brotherhood.

I've bounced into a couple "mild" bouts of activity since I transferred to the Rogues some years ago, with my most recent stint being last summer. As you can see by my dossier, I am once again on the Rogues roster. Before I say anymore, I want to be very clear that my choice to return to the Rogues each time has simply been because I do not have the RL bandwidth to juggle the DJB into my daily routine. So, it is of no fault or lack of effort by any member of the club for my inactivity.

That being said, the easiest part of transferring from the Rogues into activity was gaming. It's the one thing that I could do after being transferred back into my home Clan without having a large paper trail of fiction to catch up on in order to participate in DJB-wide competitions. I'm already a "casual" gamer IRL, so hopping into the Telegram chat, re-reading the Rites of Combat and getting some CF's while interacting with club members is simple, easy and fun.

However, that too became somewhat difficult to participate in because there didn't seem to be much interest in gaming overall. That could have been the time of day that I was logging on, or perhaps the games I had were on a lull in the club at that particular point in time... whatever the reason, it felt like a chore to try and get matches in anything that wasn't SWTOR.

If I were an active member today, I would appreciate the opportunity to see some sort of time-table for when players are the most active and on what games/platforms so that I could know when the "hot" hours are to play.

I would also love to see more tie-in for gamers as being validated for their contribution to the club for gaming other than awards, which at times feel like chump-change. Perhaps a running ladder, or weekly/monthly standings that show a visual representation of activity in the Fist' reports to give gamers more of a face. People want to be recognized, or at least feel that they are part of something bigger. Give them that, and don't elevate the games themselves as being more important than playing the games with real people.

I realize that these suggestions may just be band-aids to a larger issue, but I hope my point overall stands: gaming has a unique opportunity to draw people into activity and learn about one another when other forms of activity take a lot more effort and grunt work. It's not an easy fix, I get it, but those are my thoughts.

Props to you, Justinos, for drawing me in with helpful graphics, great discussion starters and some solid groundwork for moving gaming in this club forward. I enjoyed reading all of my fellow DJB'ers comments/feedback.

So, what should the Fist focus on? I’d argue that the Fist already has a guild to manage and provide gaming activities for.

@Drac, what should the Fist focus on? I'd argue the Fist, and the entire Dark Council really, should be focused on the future. And there really isn't much of a future if we aren't getting new people in the door and keeping the ones we do get. Ideally, every dark council office and unit should be thinking about and acting on recruitment; the Herald staff targeting art communities, the Voice targeting writing communities, etc. You cite in-game guilds as being too difficult and certainly, the club has a colorful history with MMO guilds but there's a whole spectrum of things beyond that we could be doing to get the word out about our community. Youtube channels with member streaming content, posting to gaming community reddits, something. The Fist office current has 5 members, would you really tell me as the former Fist it's too much work to do some form of outreach?

Love the discussion going on here.

Regarding recruitment, I not only support the idea but it was a huge part of my application. But, we have a chicken/egg problem. I can go out and recruit OW players, for example, but my fear is that they land here and experience some of the issues people have with finding matches and fellow players. I also recognize that more players on a platform make this task easier but what I want to avoid is having people join and rogue out because they don't find activity levels to be what they expected. The fact that we do not require in game guilds is a benefit. People can join two communities this way and this is something that I plan on taking advantage of when recruiting happens.

Regarding activity levels, it is my job to work on incentives, which platforms get official support, etc. But me and the staff alone cannot make this a social gaming club. If this is to be a good landing pad for new recruits all gamers have to commit to the spirit of cooperation and friendly competition.

I am happy to use my office to spotlight players, games, events, whatever it takes. However, if the Fist staff is expected to drive all gaming activity in a very hands on manner the initiative will not succeed. For example, I prefer gaming over graphic design and writing but I do both because I enjoy being part of this club, I like to win things every once and a while and it is fun to share my work even if it isn't the best of the best. Our gaming community needs to take this next step, that we participate because we are trying to grow the community. People that form groups, run comps and just generally encourage others to be active are the core of any great group.

I have a ton of ideas on how to keep our progress moving forwards, and there are more in this thread, but I can't do it alone. Who is with me?

Perhaps we should make a clan that is specifically a gaming clan first most and then those who prefer to game instead of draw or write can then be the Recruiters of the brotherhood in gaming platforms. Then once people are recruited, they will then see the other departments of the brotherhood and work on those other things.

I know when I joined the brotherhood, it was just to learn more of star wars, but then I learned to write. years later I picked up gaming and drawing to try to get more promotions. But now it is stagnant as more folks, who want to advance, are unable to get any further without leadership positions. And with the removal of the EU canon, the club to me has to recruit more "new" fans of star wars than the EU fans we all were once before.

Guilds in games should be essential to make them more enjoyable and set up gaming nights like we use to. SWTOR is the only I know that still has guilds in game, but more than 70% of the members are no longer active or even in the brotherhood any more, and finding players is like the others said, hard to come by. Perhaps a clan of gamers could fix that too.

@Brim I agree that we need to be a "clan of gamers" first and that is my focus. We have so many out of game communication tools that we don't necessarily need to have in game clans because of these tools. We have as many or more ways to coordinate out of game than many games give you inside the confines of the program.

I don't think our lack of coordination is a product of not having the means. I wish it were that simple but I think there is more to the story.

Have you maybe considered looking at how legit gaming clubs handle their gaming as inspiration?