WDA Expansion?

Let me clarify the question: should WDA expand its memberbase to more than just a YGO community? (E.g. LoL fans, Pokemon Fans, Anime fans, etc) The staff and I have been discussing this topic for some weeks now (even before I brought up the "Service Improvement" topic.) We are willing to expand this community little-by-little/baby steps such as adding specific sub-categories to the forum that are dedicated to any certain TCG (such as Kaijudo and CFV,) MMOs (such as LoL and TF2,) Multi-Media (anime fans mainly,) Console and Mobile Gaming (such as 360/PS3/WiiU gaming, iOS/Android market gaming like Angry Birds.) Hold your specific suggestions until after this poll is over. I will open up another poll concerning specific requests. For now the staff just wants to see if you are all in support of this movement.

If we are talking about changing the name of the academy and unspecifying this academy as yugioh related then I would have to disagree.
I voted to a certain extent.
If it is small things such as adding categories or w/e they are called such as a pokemon category and anime etc. then that's fine, but my question would be is yugioh still going to be the base of the acade...site or is it going to be a community site point black.
So simply put is it going to be yugioh with add-ons or a pile of different things assorted into a community?

EDIT: My biggest concern would be if everyone stopped with yugioh topics and left it alone to fill the other topics .-.

Like I mentioned: we will begin by adding sub-sections by sub-section to say Entertainment Discussion firstly. This will be done to give you guys something more to talk about/do here. If the demand for a specific game (be it a video game or a TCG) is high enough we will start adding specific sections in relation to said demand. So overall, we will be doing "add-ons" before doing anything too major.

i said no, if people want to talk about anime they can open up a new thread in the off topic section, as for opening it up to more TCG's and such, i think what will happen will be more people coming on not playing yu-gi-oh and playing something else, which will take away what this site was for in the first place, also it might put up some friction with people saying other games suck and such.

with the other stuff like gaming, this can all be done in off topic could it not? or you could add sub sections but u dont think it would make much of a difference to the fanbase.

The thing is, all of these topics are able to be talked about on the forum but simply opening up a topic in one of the Off topic section (Entertainment Section for relevance) you don't need to change the forum to allow for these topics to be talked about. Keep the forum based on Yugioh because that is what it was made and designed for, it's community may have other interests and activities and they are free to talk about them on this forum in the right sections, that doesnt mean you take the forum to a level that appeases all forms of interests (even if done slowly). These changes don't need to happen when they are already things people are able to do freely.

Am I the only one who knows that the Admins dont get a cent from the google Ads as they are run through forumotion and this site is classed as forumotion property so forumotion gets all the ad revenue

Changing this site is not the way to go about this, you change the site to attract a wider variety of people, people who have nothing to do with yugioh, and you pretty much become a site like 4chan and reddit, where you have people insulting other peoples likes and hobbies because they a trolls, you ostracise the original members of this forum who are here for the yugioh community and not for MMO's or other card games that they arent interested in. Sure, you can affiliate with other forums that emphasise on things like LoL or MMO's or other card games but that should be the extent of it. If this site become nothing more the a Hub for all variety of Hobbies then I would rather look else where for something that focuses on the reason I am here and not just appeasing to all crowds that they can.

As long as it doesnt stray from its main purpose, which is YGO, I suppose it would be good for encouraging forum use, but only if it doesnt generalize the site away from its YGO-based orientation

to a certain extent
as much as i'd like to have more branches i think it should be clear that this IS a ygo forum
i think just making a section specified for these kind of things would be good enough

but if you really want to expand it to it's limits and make ygo not the main thing you might lose some of the members and it'll be hard to do and manage afterwards
and gathering people might not be that easy and we could end up having the same thing as we do now or even lose some members

i think if you do this as in remove the ygo main theme all together you should concentrate on universal activities
like posting games and something close to create a card and etc

i say just the sections and if it does well you can go through with removing the ygo theme if that's what you want to do with this place

i think it's good that 16 people voted for this

also the more you expand this the more you'll need to expand the staff and you might want a test or interviews and have a person be in charge of mods and be less than admins or w.e and etc so it'll need an entire re work of the system in my opinion which might not be worth the effort and could cause problems

and finally the chat might become a problem if we actually do get a bunch of people here which could possibly make people leave or require u to make a pm chat like system or separate chat for mods who will probably be a bunch of active old members

I'll start by answering things.

First of all, digi was not clear enough on it, and I understand why even though I disagree with the reasoning, but she did say it guys. This is a yugioh forum which will add sub-sections (note the word sub, it has multiple meanings in the context) for other things we are interested in as well. And because it will be asked again and again because after clearing it out it was asked again and again: This is a ygo forum where we are considering to add a couple of sections for other things. This is a ygo forum where we are considering to add a couple of other games. This is a ygo forum where we will add discussions for non-ygo things.

Now the reason digi was not clear enough is because we are getting waaaaaaay ahead of ourselves. The changes that are discussed are some new sections in. Not a complete transformation because we have neither the knowledge, the activity nor the helpers for it. I may go ahead and add 10 new games, but if people aren't interested in them the sections will just die, the idea will flop and wda will have lost something in the end. So just a couple of them are being discussed at the time: do a bunch of kids from our current members play vanguard? Tell us about it. Do a bunch of people from here play LoL? Tell us about it. That.

The reason a "for now" mindset keeps coming up is because things may change in the future. But that happens after it gains popularity, after the activity everyone is taking for granted comes, and if that ever happens. We are talking about considering a larger change in a year from now or more, and we will once again be putting it on the table for a serious discussion and a decision by the community when and IF that ever happens, and that's a giant "if". No we are not about to throw out a ygo forum. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a month, and I will not mention a year because we never should discuss things that will happen a year from now in such a forum, simply because there is a good chance it will not even exist then and even if it does, the members it would have would be completely different, most of you would not be here and it would then be a place for those who are here at the time.

Moving along.
This should have been obvious but I'll clear it out here. No one is getting paid. The sentence is too broad so I'll make it specific. People here may be getting paid by their jobs, their parents or anything like that, but no money goes to anyone here from WDA. Everything goes to forumotion and that is because they pay for the servers. We don't pay for stuff other than the tiny cost of the chat. I am sad that we have to pay for something in an otherwise free community but we have failed to find another solution yet, I am sorry.

MangArmand.
1) You can use social media for advertising when you have an already decent activity (or whatever term you use for traffic in what you want to advertise). We have an average of 10 members active a day, and that's by making a stretch of the term active when referring to these days. We can advertise on fb or tweeter or whatever, but it will only be a joke, and to be honest quite an embarrassment for WDA. This is not a solution for this time.

2) We stopped rp'ing an academy ages ago. Even before april 1st, when the system changed, and even in TWA, the idea was slowly fading away. Note that now we do not have tests or dorms, which are the roleplay element of an academy. There is no academy roleplay element in WDA at the moment, and no one acts as such.
Discussions happen when there is enough activity to support them. When people are here we are using the forum properly, but when there is not you are just talking to yourself, or one or two guys, and if you do that, might as well tell them personally. Other than that, yes the chat is being used when you want to directly communicate with other people. We cannot ask people to give up on direct communication to increase the post count or forbid them from doing so. There are things the chat is appropriate for and things the forum is appropriate for, when there is enough activity to hold a discussion. Additionally, a discussion has to do with interest as well. When interest in ygo is dwindling then discussions will be rarer.

3) The initial plan and what I pushed for, was to have 2 portal pages (it's very possible). The actual newcomer introduction thingy and half of the other portal as the gadget portal, which I do like and often make use of (it is good to have both dn and the wda chat next to each other for many things). It was decided but then they were randomly mashed into 1 and I kinda didn't do anything to stop it because I was running out of disagreement points...

DD, you are getting way ahead of yourself as well. We understand that WHEN and IF we get more activity on other sections we will need more staff. We understand that WHEN and IF we get more activity we may have to manage the chat in a different way. WHEN and IF it gets popular we obviously will have something to discuss about. We are talking about things in the far off, low chance future, so we will cross every bridge when we get to it. And that stands for everything in this topic, we cross every bridge when we get to it.

And now I'll ramble.

There is a visible wall in online ygo. For one, ygo in general is a simple game if you take metagaming seriously and take the time and have the determination to study it along with the structure of the game itself. The other issue is that with the real game you have the additional task of gathering the resources to actually play the game, and that is on every format, which makes it harder to play, a factor which, I will say for better and only for better, does not exist in the online ygo for obvious reasons.
I have been able to see that wall for a while now, meaning that I stopped the leaps of improvement I have felt in the past and have since then been moving with the steps of a crippled penguin. And I mean it when I say "for a while now", because it's been quite some time, yet I stuck around even if I don't play that much online anymore (I do play irl and do follow the metagame of both TCG and OCG while also continuously deckbuilding for some reason though...).
Other people may come across their own personal wall, which while it may be in terms of skill (I know that many of my former SA teammates have significantly less passion for ygo than they once did), or not, because simply one may get bored of something. Which is fine and all, it's a simple game and you won't be playing that and just that for all your lives.

Forums like this have a simple solution for this issue. Recycling. Some will lose their interest for ygo, others will pick it up from the beginning, while outside of the recycling process some are just stubborn and stick around. By this process we accept that we discard time after time members or accept their extremely less activity while changing the entire community little by little over time. There are issues with our kind of forum considering its structure and with that process, and that's issues in the way its kept together, but I won't get into it and will try not to speak of any dangers. In the end it could be alright, solutions are always there and whatever happens happens.

We are currently seeing a great drop in activity because of a combination of 2 factors. One is that mentioned above, dwindling interest in ygo for existing members. The second may be school, which is always there however. What we know is that we have been through such times of inactivity before. As mentioned in another topic, most of the times we just didn't go paranoid, were laid back, stuck around and managed to deal with it later one way or another. This time, it may be serious, and we may be witnessing the end of the forum. I may be pessimistic because I see the interest in ygo dropping, not just right now but for quite a while. Activity has been abysmal these days, until digi brought up the change issue, at which point I was surprised to see inactive members who themselves were not doing that much ygo stuff, at least in the forum, either appear just to, or simply have their first word be against the change of the forum for a needed activity boost (a point I do not agree with but I will say how I see things later).

One, may be asking to just let it be like that, regardless of activity, and simply let it die with dignity over time. I respect that point. A community has the absolute right to end itself as a community, all things come to an end and if people just don't play ygo anymore, then the obvious outcome is for a ygo forum to close down while maintaining a certain small history behind it. If the place dies, it's not the end of the world. Bye guys, cya around, stuff like that, the people are always there so it's ok. I may have been surprised with many people suddenly popping up, but only perhaps pleasantly and I do not blame those people regardless of their reasoning. Whether they were saying we'll be fine as an exclusive ygo forum, or saying that we should be an exclusive ygo forum no matter what, it is an opinion I completely respect either way, while to be honest I will not get behind changing the place just to get activity. I will not say "we either change or disappear", because it simply isn't true. We may as well get through it, we have done so before. I have seen opinions which refer to this change as an upgrade or evolution, but I disagree, it's just a change, more of a "side-grade" if you will.

At the same time let me put down a small thought. I have talked many times about how an academy is the community, but now I will contradict that point, and say that it may not be the community in a certain sense. Is perhaps, in a way, WDA first its theme, structure and set of rules? If the community does something other than ygo, either as a whole or as big seperate parts which may be considered together as a larger group clashing with the theme, does that reflect upon the academy in any way, or are the aspects of the community which contradict its main theme, which is ygo in our case, partially or wholly excluded? Whether ygo comes first or the directions of the community may perhaps be something for the community to decide, something that may seem contradictory at first, but it should be another absolute right of the community to decide and put something above the human factor of it, in a way. Just food for thought there I guess.

I'll be now reaching my main point.

I don't see eye to eye with many, many people. As high chances would have it, that happens with the other staff members as well. We are only human, that much is perfectly natural. However I take notice to take certain steps back and make sure I support the opinions of others, even if I have small disagreements with them, only wherever I deem acceptable of course, simply to make the managing process easier, or at least not block it.
Like that, I probably have different goals and ambitions, in regards to WDA, with the other staff members, and I am not just talking for the current staff members, but that could be true for most staff members I have worked with over time.
In staff exists a goal, and that is to have huge activity in this place, several levels above what we have experienced. One may want to have a place full of people, and I understand that, activity is always welcome so such an ambition does in fact help.

I however do not seek it. I'm a bit anti-social and crowds do intimidate me to a certain extend. If this place did become huge then it could be that I would have to step down, perhaps because someone else would appear out of the crowd who could fill my role, so I would just naturally pass the torch of my long overdue staff service. Not to mention that the servers we have can not support the hundreds of people some visions include, so we would have to do stuff like rent servers, advertise and manage money to support the costs and other stuff which give me nightmares.

And yet I brought up that kind of a change, the kind which we discuss now, several times, myself. I fully supported the change and even brought it up to the members in the chat a couple of months back as well, without being told to, without it being talked about in staff at the time. And that was not for activity.

I had a certain vision for it you see. I want to play a lot of games.

I wanted to learn and play all those competitive games I heard about, with people I knew (because I said I am kinda anti-social so moving to another forum is terrifying for me) and I was familiar with. Perhaps with those kids here which said they were playing vanguard. Perhaps with vaati who was playing LoL. Perhaps have Fish teach me good TF2. I wanted to learn all those fun competitive games, grow in them, face once again people far better than me, lose a lot, become a better player. And not just with one or two, I didn't want to just learn something, be good at it and stick with it, being afraid of defeat or being disputed. I wanted a bunch of games, I wanted all of the fun games.

In my vision, when this place would be done and the time came for it to die down, I would either change it if it was abandoned, or call a few kids from here to help me with another forum, or just even start from scratch with a couple of guys and make that forum I imagined. And I would wait not to get leftover activity from here, but simply because this place gets all the time I am willing to give on forums, I am focused on it and only after it is over would I be able to experiment with something.

I will say that my vision is very different from what is proposed. I wanted something that perhaps is the truest to the name of this forum "World Dueling Academy". Something that would teach, me, as a user, to play all those competitive games (World stands for the universal aspect of it: all of the games. Only competitive games, hence Dueling. Academy because it has teaching the games in its foundation, through indirect means of course.).
As it has been mentioned, there would only be games with direct competition and a broad metagame. That means no single player console gaming, mobile gaming or the anime etc. discussion stuff. And free only. Only games which you could fully play without paying for anything. Things like DuelingNetwork, TeamFortress2, LoL, PokemonShowdown etc. would be acceptable. Call of Duty, Battlefield, WoW and Guild Wars 2 for example would not be acceptable.

Coming out of my visions and back to WDA. This is a small change. The vision I described is far away for me, but I have not given up on implementing my grand ambition of having fun with many games, however not while this place can still go on. What we are suggesting, as it was said, was adding a couple of sections.

Sections because of the inclusion of certain things in them for every, competitive at least, game.
Teach: Direct players to where they can get good information of the game, help them get acquainted with it so they can get good and play good games with you.
Discuss: Self explanatory, which also expands on the other 2 points.
Play: Play those games within the community, in a smaller or grander scale.

And for the rest I am thinking simply discussion, but I am waiting for the ideas of the rest of the staff on how those will work.

So no it cannot be done in a single topic, we are talking about small change but actual change with the introduction of new sections.

I still want us to move a bit towards what I imagined, even if with small steps, because I honestly think its fun, for me and for you, I want to play all the games you talk about and I want you to teach me how to play them. I want to play with the people here even games neither knows about and get to know them as we play them. And I don't want to do that in secret or with just one topic in the off topic or just in chat. I want us to be able to support such a thing instead of turning a blind eye, as we have done many times before. I don't envision a huge discussion board community or anything like that, I just want this small community of good people, expanded a bit and playing fun games.

Okay so I'm gonna pop in to give my personal opinion as a member, and so nobody shout bloody murder and conspiracy because an admin has an opinion, and this does not necessarily reflect the views of the admin team or any particular person in the admin team other than myself.

That having been said, I'm going to do a small samba over to my little statistics board over here.

In the Yugioh section of the forums, the last post was made on September 30.

Which is just over 2 weeks ago.

Bare in mind that this post was made by Nour.

Nour has posted 72 times between then and this post.

In more than 2 weeks, neither Nour, nor anybody else on this forum, has posted anything in the Yugioh section of the forum. That's an entire section of the forum which has, for half a month, gone entirely unused, unwanted, and unloved.

I would say that the Yugioh side of the forum itself is becoming redundant, a section which is intrinsic to the forum.

Just some figures.

This needs to stay Yu-Gi-Oh!
My reasoning is... well....

1) Pojo......

Pojo literally has everything on it. JUST without our WDA chat and our role-play feature. The role-play feature for Yu-Gi-Oh is quickly dying all over. All you really need now-a-days are Deck Discussions and that goes for all card games. Pokemon/CFV/Anime forums would be cool to role-play on, but they can only go but so far and probably would die quickly too. Back to my point about Pojo. Pojo will answer all your questions too (avoiding the trolls that is...!) if your having problems with anything. Rulings/the forum itself... Face it.....Pojo has.......
Yu-Gi-Oh!
Pokemon
Kaijudo
Cardfight Vanguard
Anime
Video Games
World Of Warcraft
Even Real Life trading.

Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield, etc. already has a fan-based community. Example being Call of Duty: Elite!

2) I think even if we did do this idea and expanded the forum to lets say LoL. I still think its going to be inactive. Its all going to be down to whoever plays LoL at the time which is only just a few of you. Yes, cool, you did invite some people in here, but how long will they stay active in a Yu-Gi-Oh! sub-section base?

Sure, go ahead and add other things. But remember that this is a Yu-Gi-Oh! academy. Always has and always will be. So, if you add to it, be sure that you keep it 95% Yu-Gi-Oh! and 5% Ot-He-Rr!

we shud expand, but not to LoL.. >_>

I do agree that this has evolved to more of a community like Mina said. But what brought us together in the first place? I don't duel as often as I used to but that's because I already know who I will beat on here and who I won't. it gets boring. Ironically though, I visit WDA BECAUSE I'm bored. You're right Mina, we don't talk about YGO often, we're usually talking religion, politics, literature, or about our lives. Sometimes we are just random or fail trolls. But the thing that joined us is still YGO whether or not we always remember that.

wynchester wrote:

I do agree that this has evolved to more of a community like Mina said. But what brought us together in the first place? I don't duel as often as I used to but that's because I already know who I will beat on here and who I won't. it gets boring. Ironically though, I visit WDA BECAUSE I'm bored. You're right Mina, we don't talk about YGO often, we're usually talking religion, politics, literature, or about our lives. Sometimes we are just random or fail trolls. But the thing that joined us is still YGO whether or not we always remember that.

I wasn't going to post in this topic just to reply again, since I already have done that, but I really don't get what point you are trying to make.

Let's first mention that everyone who has talked about the implementation has stated we would be primarily about ygo. I stated it a lot, and in an obvious manner, but I guess people skipped the wall of text so they kept reminding it in every post, and as for that, yes guys, as we already said, that's how we are doing it, ygo first, that's the plan, so people, to everyone, please stop telling us to do what we are already right in the middle of doing, because it's kinda annoying and you wouldn't like it either if someone did it to you. It's like the opponent making a play, you wanting to activate Torrential and then everyone telling you "Dude, listen to me, you have to activate Torrential, do it." And you'd be like "I know dammit, that's exactly what I was in the middle of doing right now."

So to get this out of the way, if you are trying to say to have ygo first, understood, thank you for the reminder, we will be doing that.

However what I am also understanding, and I may be wrong since I cannot seem to properly extract the purpose of that statement, is that we owe to ygo. Therefore IT should be treated with respect and should be regarded appropriately, with perhaps a form of obligation towards it (excuse me for a lack of better term, it's past 3 a.m. here and I won't bother searching for it now, I hope you understand what I mean), and that this stance which we should keep towards the GAME, should influence the decisions made for the structure and function of the forum as well as the activities of the community.

I understand that the statement could have been made without any real purpose and therefore I would be reading too much into it, however this is a topic for a specific decision and due to the nature of the discussion, posts here are meant to be statements upon the subject, either expressing support to a decision, or lack thereof on all available options, and preferably the reasoning behind the poster's stance, and I assume that subsequently that one as well includes reasoning of support to a choice, any one of them (I can't really extract towards which one either).

Tbh, knowing how "convincing" works, I know I am working against myself here with this, but I'll just ask.
Perhaps just asking for help here, before saying anything else, I'll ask because I do not understand: What are you trying to say?