A Time For Reform

[Adam Griffin]

Participation always drops when the kids start getting ready to go back to school/college. It happens every year. That's what happened this year. It was booming during the summer and right after the reset, and then began to trickle in August. It'll pick up again during the holidays when people are cold/depressed/on vacation, and will increase slowly over the first seven or eight months of next year before dropping off again.

If you look back through history, most of the instability and activity woes occur between August and November. This is also when a lot of the chaos tends to occur; takeover of regions like the Mideast due to low activity (2014), Tuesday Night Massacre (2014), OpCot (2012), last year's rebellions, etc. Last year's rebellions and subsequent drop-off in activity was what finally got the ConCon off the ground in a meaningful way. Sometimes, there are events that spark interest during the lull times and I'll admit that 2012 was a busy time, but this pattern is largely cyclical and totally predictable.

[Adam Griffin]

^^^ I'd note that in 2012 specifically, there were like four or five power-players all recruiting immense numbers of players into the game simultaneously, and that definitely helped with making the game far more active during that time. I can't remember if we hit 200 players or not, but we were very damn close regardless. Basically, the game increased in size by like 50% during 2012.

This is a presidential year and so if the parties/power-players actually want to do the hard work of recruiting, there are plenty of people out there to bring into the game. Many of the people who were brought in during the wave of 2012 are still here (I'm one of them). There's no real evidence that there has been any huge surge of recruitment efforts across the spectrum this year.