The Pulse: Community Catch Up | 2WC 16 Oct

[Pollux]

Gmod had 18,678 average players in October 2023. That’s the lowest numbers since December 2013. Just something to think about when trying to populate a forum website to a new generation of kids who use discord for everything they do.

Not too involved with the discord/forum debate, but I feel like this is slightly misleading towards the "gmod is dead" narrative. While the figure is correct, it isn't significantly different to previous. There was a drop at the end of summer, but there was also a large increase at the start. This is likely due to summer holidays, and is normal from what I can see. Average isn't even too important for us as the NA gmod population is significantly less than EU which isn't reflective of FLs target playerbase. FL has always primarily targeted EU players, so we can ignore the NA dip. While the hour-by-hour tracking is limited to the past few days, there's a clear trend of a strong EU peak followed by a large dip into US peak hours. Gmod is not as popular as it used to be, but it still gets more players than most other games.

Source: https://steamdb.info/app/4000/charts/

Either way I don't think what we use (forums or discord) matters too much as we have both options available. Things such as player reports and applications aren't well suited for discord, even communities that primarily use discord tend to have some other platform or system for these things such as google forms. There is definitely quite a bit more friction when it comes to the forums vs discord and that is likely why discord has slowly replaced it for more and more things; we allow steam logins but there's no much else we can do if people simply prefer the more convenient platform. I think the way we've used both platforms (forums for longer/formal stuff, discord for pings/quick stuff) is fine as the choice is up to players. You can definitely get away with only being on one platform if you wanted, as most things are posted on both. I know there have been plans recently to streamline the forums even more, with some categories already being removed/replaced due to inactivity (for example, we removed hobbies and a few other sections as they were never really used). For any further changes, we'll likely just monitor how both are being used and adjust accordingly. There isn't really any useful data we can get right now, as both inactive due to the server being down.