Subject: # of users

Something that made my initial feeling sink, after logging in for the fist time with this team: by accident or not, I was put in the same series I found myself in with my first team four years ago. One of the first things I did was to check the league forum, and what did I see - the most recent thread was the one I posted in before I promoted to B with my previous team four years ago. That is disheartening.

This doesn't add to the conversation though, as I am only reiterating the problem, but I felt like saying it anyway :)

I also agree that there has to be something added to make everything a little more interesting. I was in the ML for a couple of seasons and even got the silver medal twice I believe and thats when I got really bored and sold my whole team now that I'm in the c league I started training gk's just to switch it up and not get bored again.. I've been thinking of running for NT coach next season but I'm going through hard times in RL so idk..

Follow the national teams, train a national team player

Well, that's a surprising statement coming from you :)

But, seriously, that's hardly something people expect or hope to do when they sign up for a team.
Once they become seasoned managers, training NT players certainly can become a way to extend their interest and stay in Sokker, but the biggest problem is how to keep those new to moderately new managers interested enough that they don't leave. You can hope and dream as much as you can but telling them "follow the NT team and train NT players" is not going to work, period.

Yeah unfortunately you need to have plus to join the association. But for those who are interested and enjoy the game enough to purchase plus what could be better than a whole association to mentor you in how to train a player and to see how the coaches prepare for the matches, tactics, line up choices, conditionals.

I know its not like the oTHer games federations but we have nearly as much activity as the USA forum. And we are still growing.

USA U21 association

---

the problem, as i see it, is community. its hard to feel like this is anything but a drone filled simulation when you first start out thanks to the lack of lower level human teams. the bot/C leagues are a horrible introduction to the game. there is no sense of camaraderie, which is definitely true at the B and higher levels.

i think it all goes back to a need for contraction of the c league back to 32. more people playing people. responsible to each other for keeping their leagues together and competitve.

i think it might up the retention rate.

we will never be able to replicate the Euro's love of Sokker. but we should be doing better than we are.

i mean, there are 33 users in TEXAS... for pete's sake....
(edited)

33 wow, that's more than I thought

In Argentina, one of our tutors, sends a sokker-mail with all the first steps to the users that sign up, also points then to 2 forum topics in the Argie newbie with that contains the abc for newbies, that helped quite a bit, but now we are stuck again.

At one point I have to say that we are stuck at 1400 users since the forums are very enjoyable, I hated the community in hattrick, we hade like 60k users and everything was a mess.

But I have to say that the US forum is quite dead, more users would make this game more enjoyable to the US community.

hattrick had too many people in the forums, it was impossible to really establish yourself and get to know anybody super well from there.

However I did make a couple friends in my leagues because people were a bit more active it seemed there.

Here though I definitely know everyone from the forums and I'm pretty sure most everyone knows who I am lol

everyone knows the Llama... :)

building the sense of community was why i sent a welcome message to new players for so long. really kind of ticked i had to stop. getting those relationships started is huge...as well as getting help with the start up. does anyone know if the mentor program still going?

There are official tutors and promotors now in sokker. As far as i know the "help me" functionality is so hidden noone uses it, so the tutors by itself are a huge failure, but even if noone sends messages, they can still do other tasks, like welcoming new users and offering themselves to be mentors.

I take the time to mail users with potential U21 players and try to steer them in the right direction.

yeah. i used to say welcome, check the newbie forums for information. contact the leader of the mentor program if you would like one, ask me questions if you want help, and offer a friendly from time to time. i was amazed, though, at how low the response rate was. something like 2/3 never even opened the note and most of those never even logged their account after getting it approved. it was really depressing.

I brought a few people in. I'd literally go back and forth with them by sk mail for their first season, telling them who to sell, showing them who to buy, etc. It is a bit of work, but they stuck until they got going on their own.

Maybe we should try that mentor program again?