"VCMP is dying"
I strongly disagree with the premise that "VCMP is dying". This is just something everyone likes to say once in a while because they're no longer as interested in VCMP as they once were. A pattern I've been noticing over the years goes a little something like this:
Player A player loses interest in VCMP. Causes? Pick from the list:
- Banned from popular server
- Kicked from a clan
- Involved in some other VCMP drama that had a bad outcome to his side
Player A now starts claiming "VCMP is dead" due to their discontent with how things went while he was an active player/member of the community, but not because of an actual playercount drop ( Because who cares about actually backing up your statements with data, right?). And this is the most common pattern I notice about people who say vcmp is dead. There's also one other cause but which doesn't seem to happen as often, which is when a player moves on to different games, leaving the VCMP community but somehow still has enough information to claim vcmp is dead, even tho he's no longer here to see it.
The reason why I dont believe vcmp is dying is simple. I've been hearing this same thing ever since I started playing. Every single year since I joined this community in late 2007's people have been saying "VCMP is dying" and every single year some new VCMP event hits record breaking numbers, even this year with VCDC and VW hitting 80+ players. There was no event back in the day who was even close to these numbers. This alone goes to prove that the people who say VCMP is dying are obviously just discontent with things in the community or due to some of the causes mentioned above and dont actually know if VCMP is dying.
Now, with that being said, I'm not dismissing any of the problems pointed out, but as Charley said there really is no point in discussing stuff you can't change. So I'm just going to focus on the other ones.
VCMP ForumsTake a look at the official VC:MP forum. This is the first point of contact for anyone new to the mod. It is a graveyard. It's a boring, semi-forgotten wasteland of half-literate randomers. I put it to you that this is the main problem.
If by graveyard you mean inactive, I have to disagree. There's alot of cool new client side libraries being released there (sometimes weekly), perhaps this is not noticeable for people who are not into server development or people who dont even use the VCMP forums, but I assure you there's alot of interesting stuff going on in that section of the forum. Now if you say the forum is "boring" I guess that debatable, because boring is relative. For server developers I guess its not that boring, but for the general player or newcomer it may seem to be a bit boring indeed.
Your suggestion about community leaders is already happening I believe, just in a different way. Whenever there's a VCMP event people usually post on VCMP forums about it. I think its best to let this be handled by each server staff and event staff than to appoint people with empty titles and ranks to do something that they're already doing. I always like to avoid more ranks/positions since that further splits up the community, not to mention the drama that comes with it ( ex: why is player A leader, he did _BAD_THING_ why not me instead, I did _GOOD_THING_). Another thing is that what you call community mods/admins already exist, in the shape of beta testers. All beta testers are forum moderators. Many of which belong to different clans. VCMP devs themselves dont really do much when it comes to moderating the forum. All of that is usually done by the beta testers. And if you say say the beta testers are all inactive then you really dont use the VCMP forum at all. Because last year there about 6 or 7 new beta testers that were recruited (myself included) and they're the ones who have been moderating the forum for the past year and testing private vcmp builds. There's alot of stuff that happens behind doors that people dont see, when it comes to moderating the forum and testing new builds, detecting bugs/testing bugfixes/creating reproduceable bug scenarios, etc...
About contacting storm or maxo, you won't able to reach them for the time being. Maxo was around a few months ago and after many conversations we were able to convince him to give control to AdTec of a few more VCMP resources, to avoid the forum/update server/masterlist dying everytime maxo or storm are MIA. Things like the client update server and some other stuff are now accessible to AdTec since seems to be more reliable (being always around and whatnot), Which is why we were able to get the forum back up (with some help from VRocker aswell) and also restore some dead links on the forum but not all unfortunately, like the wiki and a few other links are still down since only storm and maxo are the only ones with access to that sort of stuff, that is another thing which AdTec should have access to aswell as moddb too.
Promotion
We (beta team) actually had a way to promote VCMP after rel007 was released but since that was pushed back because of some game breaking bugs that was held off aswell. There's been alot of testing going on, as I said theres alot stuff that happens behind closed doors that people really dont see so they just default to "VCMP is dead". The beta testers are active (when it comes to testing and moderating the forums). Not every single one of them of course, but enough to make a difference.