[mGGDrGooSe]

This started out as a blog, but I think now it's more of a thread, so here goes.

Grass Roots
It's always been held that the grass roots of any community is its lifeblood and its future. This is why I can remember Penrith footy players visiting my school ever year when I was in primary school. This is why sports clubs have public interaction in general. The more time you spend with the community, the more they fall in love with you as a sports club and the more they will participate in the sport; be it playing or viewing.

sc2sea.com
I think it's pretty fair to say that the roots of the SC2 community here in SEA are largely centred around clans and this website. This is where you come to get the latest local news. This is where you come to get help and to give it. There is the central portal for the majority of clans as well. This is where we organise our clan wars and tournaments - this is the town hall of SC2 in SEA.

SEA Clans
So then why have so many clans had trouble recruiting in the past month (and I speak primarily here of BSG levels, as I consider them to be the epitome of grassroots, although more broadly grassroots is everyone who isn't a professional)? mGG, FS and QED (and probably others I'm forgetting in my haste here) have all been running BSG level recruitments for at least some of the time over the last month, and the responses haven't been spectacular by history's standard. I'm running a bronze-only tournament tomorrow, and at most I'm expecting 8 people. 12 months ago (give or take) Asrathiel played in a similar one ran by others, one which filled out 16+ players almost immediately.

A few of our players have been chatting to people in the BSG leagues on ladder, asking if they have ever heard of sc2sea.com, and the majority hasn't. Why? The BSG comprises 60% of the server, so why is such a large proportion ignorant of our existence? Obviously we haven't sampled a large population of the BSG by this method, but anecdotally the conclusion stands.

Our Canary
Now my thoughts here are (and this is purely an assumption on my part) the BSG leagues are a good canary for the rest of the scene. And that in order to ensure the survival of that quality which makes the SEA scene far superior to any other, community, this is a sign that needs to be taken seriously. So with that in mind, I have a few thoughts on some simple things that can be done to encourage an increase in SEA interactivity and community.

• Cut and paste chat the beginning of a game.In a notepad document write the following: Hey! Have you heard of SC2SEA.com? Awesome place if you wanna get more fun out of SC2. Then it's simple to copy that to your clipboard before laddering and just ctrl-v into chat at the beginning.
• High quality flyers. Distributed around your city to places that will be of interest to gamers depicting sc2sea.com and some of the good reasons to be here (find help, find friends/clans, be able to chat directly to their heroes, etc etc). These can be printed locally and taken to internet cafes, barcrafts, computer shops, games/hobby shops, libraries, posted around university campuses, yadda yadda.
• Branching our reach into TL. I don't frequent TL, basically ever, so I don't know how wise/possible/already in action this is. But something as simple as creating a thread as a home away from home on TL for teams/clans. Much like mGG had with our official thread before becoming a house clan. I would update the OP with latest news and communications, while moving older stuff into a spoiler as archive. If anyone ever needed to know something about what mGG was doing for the next couple of weeks, they need only visit the bookmarked thread. A strong, concerted, effort to let people know about the amount of community involvement between clans in the SEA scene might go some way to recruiting new and old blood alike.

Making Flyers
Most of that requires little in the way of effort to at least get the ball rolling, with the exception of the flyer. We do have a number of talented artists here though, and I'm sure there will be someone willing to put some time aside to come up with some designs? I think if we can get a few designs, with each one depicting a different 'hook' as I mentioned in the point above, then we can get people to decide which ones we want to print out and get distributing. People can print them out at home if they desire, or some money can be donated to get them printed professionally on high quality paper. Maybe even individual pro teams might like to submit their own designs, they can then put in their own players and sponsors so long as the main message of the flyer is still to get people involved with sc2sea.com (Having a thread as a noticeboard similar to what I said above perhaps?).

As an aside, if nirvana is willing to provide data that could be useful in this case, that would be really good too. Things like posting rates, populations/activity by country, etc, etc. Basically anything that can be taken from the server and placed into an excel file for some analysis.

Is it just me, or am I incapable of saying things in just a few words?


Edit: Ali makes a good point. If everyone went and tweeted @Blizzard_ANZ asking for sc2sea.com to be featured in-game, maybe they will listen eventually???