It’s the second time I write this down, I completed the post and the site sent me back to the log in screen … god… you have NO idea how much effort I putted on that post… not gonna do it again as detailed.
During the last few weeks I’ve seen some things that make me think players, especially new ones, have problems getting to know how to Schedule games and contact players.
The problems that I’ve seen:
1.- How to I Schedule games?
For me that already know a few people in here and know who I have to contact if I want to play pool, chuchu, Monaco, quake, etc. it’s easy to know when to connect and everything else, but for some new players it can be hard to get how to find people online and when.
I propose:
- Adding an explanation on the game schedule section where the “forum rules” are that says a few important things like: how to check the confirmed players on an event, how to confirm your participation on a game, how much time in advance you should look for people, things like that. It would help to have a way to tell people they should have realistic expectations about the amount of players on the community, maybe a way to show how many players every event has on average, or some other thing that helps them get that not every event at every week has 10 players.
2.- How to contact other players? Improving dreamcast now
Sometimes I see people that I don’t know on a game at dreamcast now, but by the time you put the game, turn on the dreamcast, dial up and get to the lobby the other player disconnected because he saw no one online (Eg: last week found a guy online on chuchu, I logged to check on him and he was new, first time connecting, had no idea about the discord and had no dreamcast keyboard, I guided him a little and he joined the discord and forum, nice guy)
I propose:
- A way to contact players on dreamcast now, the best way could be to have a direct msg or chat on the site, but I have no idea how hard it would be to implement. Another way could be adding a second line on the dreamcast now players card under the name, a line to add contact information like discord username and forum username (obviously optional), so if someone catches you online he/she can msg you and see if you want to play.
Please share your ideas in here so the admins and programing sages can check if any of the ideas are useful and possible to implement, after all, all I want is for this community to keep growing strong. I could write much more, but I'm sleepy and have to wake up early tommorrow, so now it's your time to write.
Do you agree with some of my ideas?
Do you disagree?
Do you have your own ideas or problems on the matter that I didn’t address?
Please feel free to share your opinion.
(Man… this post was so much longer and carefully written with cursives, titles and subtitles, everything… so sad the forum deleted it while trying to post it, so I got to ask too how to “fix” or avoid disconnecting from the forum after a while of inactivity)