Chats & Communities

It's certainly no surprise to you but different communities have different ways to approach games. People will band together into playing in a certain way, with all the good and bad results this can have.

So, something pretty interesting is when these come to clash: you can examine how different group of people have diverged into playing the same game, but differently.

Community building

As I'm sure you've noticed already, the prime example of this in Eclesiar is states population. While some states work somewhat organically, with native population and extra participants for example, others are mostly comprised of a strong core group and relations focused rather than nation focused.

France and several other countries, especially European ones, fit in the former. The USA is a textbook example of the latter, as has been openly stated several times.

I expect this schism occurs primarily due to the relatively low amount of players -- and that if there were suddenly a few thousands new players, these expectations might end up challenged. We've seen it happen repeatedly in RivalRegions over the years, even though people would make many custom states rather than sticking to real life ones.

Means of communication

These difference don't stop at composition, they extend to practical habits aswell. The most obvious other one would be communication.

On Eclesiar, the broader community mainly keeps to their own in the game. You can see there is little activity in articles other than to poke fun at each others, with some extra RP or informative ones.

Most of the community interactions happen in private chats, or out in the open on the main public discord. This is likely for a few main reasons:

1. It's overall more practical as a messaging platform (images, pings, replies), with broader history
2. There is no global chat. The Admin has said before it's not realistic currently, but hopefully that might change with Chat Rework in coming updates.
3. The chat is burried at bottom of dashboard page on mobile, it is not very engaging. It is also locked to Cores which can be a problem for bigger nations.

The French case

On RivalRegions, the community mainly uses Telegram for communication, as an import from the Russian playerbase (with hardcore Russians using VK). While it's very practical for closed groups and messaging anyone, it is underwhelming in terms of new player engagement.

New players will be reluctant to participate in the community outside the game. They don't want to have to install, or bother with, an external application. They don't want to be stuck in closed groups with no view on broader community. It's overall not friendly or forthcoming for them.

This resulted in a few of us, over the course of past 7 years, pushing aggressively for chat and article activity. The idea was that the more active and friendly the game can seem to be, the more likely people are to push each other into actually making it that way.

So I wondered if any other group was doing it and pulled Eclesiar's chat stats since Day 1. The result was even more surprising than expected:

Does it work though?

I like to think it does, but it's a bit early to say still, and it's also worth noting that only a few people are making articles. This aspect did not transfer as well as chatting did.

Still, it's worth exploring different ways of keeping players active and receiving newer players.  I think everyone should encourage a baseline level of activity on chat, and more importantly, articles. You can already see "French Articles" is becoming a meme, for better or for worse, for example...

I don't expect most people will read through all of articles like this of course, but hey, if the point gets across, it's really all that matters!