Hey everyone! As you've probably noticed, the number of managers in the MG has dwindled over the last half decade since its peak. Each year, we struggle to get enough new managers to fill the CT division. This has detrimental effects on every manager's experience, as it exacerbates inflationary issues and leads to less than a page of comments in some discussion threads. But it hurts CT managers the most because when there are only 5-10 other active managers in your division, it can feel like you are on the outside of MG looking in, rather than a part of the bigger scheme. This leads to high CT manager turnover, and may spiral sooner rather than later.
In the past couple of weeks, Nemolito, Eden, and I have started a working group to discuss ways to recruit new managers to the game. It is our belief that doing so will benefit the game greatly, and this initiative can be done successfully with a little help from the community.
Tl;dr: We want to coordinate outreach to other people and communities to attract new MG users. We have created a working group, and we are asking anyone who has ideas or connections to people/communities who may be interested to join the group.
Why?
PCM.Daily is not the hub it once was. I think we can all see that. That is no knock on the admin team or the site's quality. It's just a display of the shifting trends in internet communication over the past decade. PCM and cycling fans don't gravitate to independent forums anymore. They flock to Reddit, Discord servers, and livestreaming communities. Once upon a time, an English PCM player looking for a database would eventually find their way here and discover everything Daily has to offer. That era is unfortunately over.
However, the audience for something like the MG has not shrunk, it's expanded. There are undoubtedly a lot of people out there who would love the MG, but they just don't know about it. MG is a complex, unique experience that has been built up by 15 years of history, and it's the type of experience that still benefits greatly from a forum format. If we can convince some of the users in other types of communities to check it out, surely some will stick around.
I anticipate some concern here regarding recruiting new users to Daily specifically for MG. Why should we be looking for outsiders who don't know or care about our community? How can we be assured they will give the game and site the amount of effort it deserves when they don't have a vested interest in our success?
The short answer is we can't. But I implore you to consider that MG entry has never required one to show much dedication to the site beforehand. Even in the days when over half of MG applications were rejected, a particularly thoughtful application from a new user could win them a spot over a Daily veteran. Moreover, these days we already allow brand new users to join without any real application scrutiny at all in an attempt to make up for the disbands. Nothing would be changing for the worse in our policy.
If all goes well, we should actually see an increase in new manager activity and retention. For the first time in years, we may actually have the opportunity to scrutinize applications and accept only those we feel are sufficiently dedicated to the premise. This would not be an infallible indicator of manager quality - it never was - but it would certainly let us screen out those who are not actually that interested in the concept and just signed up on a whim.
Nonetheless, it is my personal belief that the game would benefit from 10 or more additional CT managers even if they are not particularly active. That's why we had amateur teams for a few years. The game functions better when 1) riders are spread out over more teams, counteracting inflation, and 2) CT and C1 races have fuller fields. As long as we don't need to add more races to accommodate more teams, more teams to fill out the CT division will be a plus in my opinion.
How?
There are still a lot of ideas in the works, and that's part of why we need your help with ideas and implementation. But the short of it is: outreach. There are potential great MG managers all over the web because MG is still a great game. People just need to be made aware of its existence. That is the purpose of our working group, which is currently located on Skype.
We know that many of you are active or have been active in other spaces. Are you a discord admin? Or a contributor on another cycling website? Or part of another management sim community? Or a content creator? Do you know any of the above? Are you even friends with someone in real life who may be interested in a cycling management sim? Those connections may be very valuable to recruitment, so if you have them, please let us know and join our group. Recruitment works better if new users already know someone in our community that they trust and feel responsible to in some way.
Of course, this must be done tastefully. We don't want to give the impression that we are spamming other communities with cheap advertisements, nor do we want to come off as particularly desperate. We also need to convey that our outreach is not designed to replace or compete with any other community or platform. Rather, we see MG as a way a PCM/cycling/management fan can supplement their other experiences in an exciting and productive way.
For this purpose, we have workshopped the creation of a streamlined MG elevator pitch. This would effectively be a condensed and updated version of the MG FAQ. Something short, sweet, and easily digestible that we can spread around easily. Potential managers don't need to be bombarded with every detail of MG the first time they hear about it. They just need to be informed of the basic structure and community, which will prompt them to investigate further if they have interest. We would obviously want some degree of community input about this summary so we can be sure we're conveying what everyone loves about MG properly, but this would mostly be written in a smaller working group.
Want to get involved?
Obviously we can't (and don't want) to do this all ourselves. We're not better representatives of Daily or MG than anyone else here, nor do we have all the ideas or connections to make it happen without help.
So, if you would like to help, please let me, Nemolito, or Eden know.
Please also specify in what specific ways you want to help.
We're not trying to keep this off the public forum because we don't like or trust you guys. We just want to make this process as efficient as possible as we quickly prepare for the new season, and history suggests that efficiency require a smaller team.
It's tricky to recruit people outside the PCM.Daily community and to be fair having non-Daily managers in the MGUCI-verse will be a mess. But...that doesn't mean that we shouldn't at the very least try.
One solution is for Daily members who have registration in another PCM community to act as some sort of pigeon posts to have some communication between communities. But that unfortunately doesn't gurantee that there will be interest from other communities, who have manager games on their own and perhaps facing their fair share of issues. I may try to contact some of the admins from Le Gruppetto (PCM France) to see if there's some interest.
Courting people from outside the PCM orbit will be IMO even a bigger hurdle as those people may not be interested in the PCM series (though to participate is not required to have the game per se). But there could be some potential for crossovers though. I've taken part in another manager-based competition, that was Global Endurance Masters which used GeneRally (if anyone has heard it before). There was a 2022 season that started, but was ultimately canceled due to lack of entries
Thanks for taking the initiative on this. I think it's a good step to look outside of daily itself, and I think there are lots of people who could become as passionate as we are about this game if they get to know about it. Forums may not be the main place for more mundane interactions anymore, but I'm not sure you could find something like the ManGame on a Discord server.
Speaking of, I'd be happy to ask the admins of both the official PCM Discord as well as PCM World if they'd be okay with us posting an ad of sorts on there. Both have hundreds of members, so I think the chances of at least a handful truly interested people catching on aren't half bad. I think Le Gruppetto is probably another good place to contact, like ivan said. If someone were to come up with a good "ManGame leaflet", perhaps even actually as an image file (not sure if that can do it justice, but just a thought), that would indeed be nice
cunego59 wrote:
Thanks for taking the initiative on this. I think it's a good step to look outside of daily itself, and I think there are lots of people who could become as passionate as we are about this game if they get to know about it. Forums may not be the main place for more mundane interactions anymore, but I'm not sure you could find something like the ManGame on a Discord server.
Speaking of, I'd be happy to ask the admins of both the official PCM Discord as well as PCM World if they'd be okay with us posting an ad of sorts on there. Both have hundreds of members, so I think the chances of at least a handful truly interested people catching on aren't half bad. I think Le Gruppetto is probably another good place to contact, like ivan said. If someone were to come up with a good "ManGame leaflet", perhaps even actually as an image file (not sure if that can do it justice, but just a thought), that would indeed be nice
Basically what Bbl has said, that’s one of the main purposes of the working group. We wanted to gauge how many other managers would be interested in growing the game and work together over eg. Skype to come up with a condensed and easily digestible blurb/image/whatever to be able to reach out to other communities
I would say the first thing that needs to be done is perhaps to set a deadline for the continuation signup. I know there isn't specific timeline about this, but IMO it'll be better to have all managers that will continue next season as early as possible - so far 28 managers (as far as I've counted) have confirmed their participation. From then on we can calculate how many spots would be availlable before starting advertising. But as I've said before - it's not a guarantee that there will be interest at all from outside communities.
ivaneurope wrote:
I would say the first thing that needs to be done is perhaps to set a deadline for the continuation signup. I know there isn't specific timeline about this, but IMO it'll be better to have all managers that will continue next season as early as possible - so far 28 managers (as far as I've counted) have confirmed their participation. From then on we can calculate how many spots would be availlable before starting advertising. But as I've said before - it's not a guarantee that there will be interest at all from outside communities.
Tbf the CT is an "unlimited" division, so there is not really a limit on how many people can sign up. We can always add new races if we end up with 30+ additions. Or, as we used to do back in the day, even say no to some people.
Although on a more realistic sense, continuation is important to see where we are for the CT and establish how many managers are needed to continue with the three-tier structure. Don't want the CT to drop too far below 15 teams, so i think we're angling for ~5-7 new managers. Even if recruitment is tough now given the relatively short time frame (why do we not even had a New Managers thread yet?) we should be able to fill in the CT enough by bringing back some version of "amateur" teams for 2022.
ivaneurope wrote:
I would say the first thing that needs to be done is perhaps to set a deadline for the continuation signup. I know there isn't specific timeline about this, but IMO it'll be better to have all managers that will continue next season as early as possible - so far 28 managers (as far as I've counted) have confirmed their participation. From then on we can calculate how many spots would be availlable before starting advertising. But as I've said before - it's not a guarantee that there will be interest at all from outside communities.
Tbf the CT is an "unlimited" division, so there is not really a limit on how many people can sign up. We can always add new races if we end up with 30+ additions. Or, as we used to do back in the day, even say no to some people.
Although on a more realistic sense, continuation is important to see where we are for the CT and establish how many managers are needed to continue with the three-tier structure. Don't want the CT to drop too far below 15 teams, so i think we're angling for ~5-7 new managers. Even if recruitment is tough now given the relatively short time frame (why do we not even had a New Managers thread yet?) we should be able to fill in the CT enough by bringing back some version of "amateur" teams for 2022.
Indeed, I don't think setting a deadline for the continuation thread is related to how many people can sign up. In an ideal case we would be able to say no to some people. Of course it would be great if people posted in the continuation thread asap, as it helps the off-season crew a lot.
New manager thread will come very soon as well, I think it's nice to have it around the same time we have the 'MG pitch' we spoke about in this thread. If we can divert new possible managers to a thread that is brand new instead of to a thread of one week old with no comments it might make a difference (imo).
Concerning this, as soon as the new thread is there, it would be great for everyone to post a 'hype comment' in there as well, trying to convince people to actually sign up
ivaneurope wrote:
I would say the first thing that needs to be done is perhaps to set a deadline for the continuation signup. I know there isn't specific timeline about this, but IMO it'll be better to have all managers that will continue next season as early as possible - so far 28 managers (as far as I've counted) have confirmed their participation. From then on we can calculate how many spots would be availlable before starting advertising. But as I've said before - it's not a guarantee that there will be interest at all from outside communities.
Tbf the CT is an "unlimited" division, so there is not really a limit on how many people can sign up. We can always add new races if we end up with 30+ additions. Or, as we used to do back in the day, even say no to some people.
Although on a more realistic sense, continuation is important to see where we are for the CT and establish how many managers are needed to continue with the three-tier structure. Don't want the CT to drop too far below 15 teams, so i think we're angling for ~5-7 new managers. Even if recruitment is tough now given the relatively short time frame (why do we not even had a New Managers thread yet?) we should be able to fill in the CT enough by bringing back some version of "amateur" teams for 2022.
The point is I'm trying to make is that we should have clarification who will continue in the ManGame next season and which teams will be moving up a division as soon as possible before starting adding new managers. This should make preperation easier for teams that have chance to be promoted by technicality.
Adding more races is a no-no IMO. In fact my take is that we should decrease the number of races - there aren't enough reporters to justify that many races on the calendar. But that's a story for another topic. I'm also against saying no to potential new entrants, because it will look as closed shop. It won't be reasonable (though it's highly unlikely the CT division will be oversubscribed anyway).
To be honest I'm a bit skeptical that we'll get new managers, let alone from outside PCM.Daily. We could try, but how things will be coordinated? We can't force people outside this forum to have an account in PCM.Daily while moving the ManGame discussion exclusively to Discord will isolate managers who don't have Discord. Of course, there is the possibility for some Daily forum members to act as messengers between communities should for example some non-Daily member is willing to help with reporter duties which could be a huge plus since, as I've mentioned, we're short on reporters.
ivaneurope wrote: We can't force people outside this forum to have an account in PCM.Daily while moving the ManGame discussion exclusively to Discord will isolate managers who don't have Discord. Of course, there is the possibility for some Daily forum members to act as messengers between communities should for example some non-Daily member is willing to help with reporter duties which could be a huge plus since, as I've mentioned, we're short on reporters.
To be clear, that's exactly what we plan on doing. We're not moving MG off of Daily in any way. We're simply inviting people from other communities to join Daily for the purpose of participating in MG. If they're not interested in making an account, then they can't join. If nobody is willing to join, then our efforts were pointless, but there's no harm done imo.
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
How many people in the Daily Discord are not already daily members, would it be worth putting something in there as a start?
Have you considered seeing if there is a PCM Reddit? Would it be possible to post our monthly updates over there if there is one so there is a steady stream of content over the season so it doesn't feel like you are spamming just for recruitment purposes.
sammyt93 wrote:
How many people in the Daily Discord are not already daily members, would it be worth putting something in there as a start?
Have you considered seeing if there is a PCM Reddit? Would it be possible to post our monthly updates over there if there is one so there is a steady stream of content over the season so it doesn't feel like you are spamming just for recruitment purposes.
Will also post in the daily discord like we did last year, and am also looking at the different pcm/cycling related reddits
I anticipate some concern here regarding recruiting new users to Daily specifically for MG. Why should we be looking for outsiders who don't know or care about our community? How can we be assured they will give the game and site the amount of effort it deserves when they don't have a vested interest in our success?
I haven't read the comments yet, but to adress this - I have never been invested or interested in the PCM.Daily forum outside of the Man-Game. It was by pure coincidence I fell over the game, and I have been heavily invested (more so than in any other gaming experience in my life, despite having also played Football Manager A LOT). So it's definately possible to stay very active in the game, without really checking other parts of the community.
So I fully agree with you guys that in order to keep a healthy Man-Game culture we need to spread out our perspective and hi-jack some members that will thrive in the game, rather than be invested in the PCM.Daily community.
I think within PCM it makes sense to post ads on other channels. Cunego mentioned like those are good. i think Steam might also be an option.
Outside, we may also want to attract cycling fans themselves, mainly through twitter, reddit or perhaps CN. Passion for cycling might be the one who drives ppl to the mangame, less the passion for PCM per se I think.
"It’s a little bit scary when Contador attacks." - Tommy V
If we do make a "leaflet" of some kind, I think it would be a good idea to have 3-5 short statements from long term managers on the list to explain what the game have meant for them. Not me necessarily, but I'll be happy to write a short passage about how my experience have been, and why I haven stuck to the game for that many years. Could have a short notice below about the manager:
SotD, Denmark, joined in 2008 (for example)
Managers like SN, Roturn, Roman and many more would be interesting to ask - and maybe some sort of mixture so it isn't met with (Oh okay, they have all played this for 10 years or more. Maybe not something for me then). So adding managers from 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 or so to show the versatility.
SotD wrote:
If we do make a "leaflet" of some kind, I think it would be a good idea to have 3-5 short statements from long term managers on the list to explain what the game have meant for them. Not me necessarily, but I'll be happy to write a short passage about how my experience have been, and why I haven stuck to the game for that many years. Could have a short notice below about the manager:
SotD, Denmark, joined in 2008 (for example)
Managers like SN, Roturn, Roman and many more would be interesting to ask - and maybe some sort of mixture so it isn't met with (Oh okay, they have all played this for 10 years or more. Maybe not something for me then). So adding managers from 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 or so to show the versatility.
First of all, agree with your previous post as well as what Shonak just wrote.
To comment on this post. At the moment we're more looking at a 1 slide(/page) leaflet that has like 2/3 small pics and clearly and quickly gives an introduction to MG. As we all know, the attention span of people is short, so coming with more will most likely not lead to much. I do think writing such passages like you suggest can be very useful to write in the sign-up thread itself. As managers who make it to the thread after checking out the introduction leaflet will most likely look at the comments there as well. If there are then some nice passages from long term and short term managers, that might make the difference.
Now I think of it, adding some of those passages to the FAQ might even be very interesting as well
SotD wrote:
If we do make a "leaflet" of some kind, I think it would be a good idea to have 3-5 short statements from long term managers on the list to explain what the game have meant for them. Not me necessarily, but I'll be happy to write a short passage about how my experience have been, and why I haven stuck to the game for that many years. Could have a short notice below about the manager:
SotD, Denmark, joined in 2008 (for example)
Managers like SN, Roturn, Roman and many more would be interesting to ask - and maybe some sort of mixture so it isn't met with (Oh okay, they have all played this for 10 years or more. Maybe not something for me then). So adding managers from 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 or so to show the versatility.
First of all, agree with your previous post as well as what Shonak just wrote.
To comment on this post. At the moment we're more looking at a 1 slide(/page) leaflet that has like 2/3 small pics and clearly and quickly gives an introduction to MG. As we all know, the attention span of people is short, so coming with more will most likely not lead to much. I do think writing such passages like you suggest can be very useful to write in the sign-up thread itself. As managers who make it to the thread after checking out the introduction leaflet will most likely look at the comments there as well. If there are then some nice passages from long term and short term managers, that might make the difference.
Now I think of it, adding some of those passages to the FAQ might even be very interesting as well
You guys make the decision
I just know for myself, that whenever I'm looking at a movie or book I don't know, I tend to read these brief one-liners by people I can refer to saying something like "The part about xx had me at the go, and I couldn't let the book down again" or "A beautiful movie that touches the viewers throughout".
I may be the odd-one-out, but I expect them to have an effect since there are basically such stuff on all hardcase medias
I do agree though that it shouldn't be as part of the main focus. It's mainly for some small fonded stuff at the bottom or so.
SotD wrote:
If we do make a "leaflet" of some kind, I think it would be a good idea to have 3-5 short statements from long term managers on the list to explain what the game have meant for them. Not me necessarily, but I'll be happy to write a short passage about how my experience have been, and why I haven stuck to the game for that many years. Could have a short notice below about the manager:
SotD, Denmark, joined in 2008 (for example)
Managers like SN, Roturn, Roman and many more would be interesting to ask - and maybe some sort of mixture so it isn't met with (Oh okay, they have all played this for 10 years or more. Maybe not something for me then). So adding managers from 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 or so to show the versatility.
You mean doing something like testimonials from managers? That could work
I'm all for reaching out to attract new MG members wherever we can get them. Hopefully some of them decide to stick around and contribute to other sections of the forum. If they don't, oh well.
I would like to point out that cycling's popularity is usually at its highest point this time of year with the TDF starting soon and the latest PCM recently released. So if we are going to do anything, this is the time to do to reach the most people. But that could also backfire when a handful of those people slowly lose interest in cycling when July passes. And could raise a potential red flag during the application process if the applicant just bought PCM for the first time. But I'm also positive there are people who haven't even played PCM before that would find the concept of the MG interesting enough to stick around and become long-term managers.
For me the issue with starting the Man-Game (for outsiders) is the long wait from subscribing until the game actually begins. This - to me - is the biggest risk of losing new members.
If they sign up, and there’s Daily progress with new things to deal with and then Kick-off with FA’s then I think we Can keep many. But otherwise I fear that those showing interest will lose it before it starts. We saw it last season where some were interested at first, but as nothing happened there was no point in logging in anymore.
For us, it’s part of the game, but if I joined a new game with that much wait I would probably do the same.
![imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg](https://imgur.com/KlJUqDx.jpg[/img[img]]https://imgur.com/yUygrQ.jpg)
