On Growth and Growing Pains in the #ArmoredCore Community #AC_Talks

The year is 2017. There may or may not be a new AC on the horizon, and hope, curiosity, and faith are in the air. But what of the people? What of action, of activity, or more importantly, growth? Where does the AC community stand in comparison with half a decade ago?



All in all, 2016 (and first part of 17) has not been too bad. Up until late 2015 the situation had been in a state of constant decline, something which has been consistent since about 2010-ish. The only exception to this were the initial release periods of ACV and VD; but much like 4/FA, new game hype only lasted so long, and the decline continued.



There are a few reasons for this.



1. The appearance of key people who have been creating content and innovated things. While still only a handful of people, their impact has been wide reaching. BusterTBM, an avid old generation fan, Buster began his wildly popular Your AC in LR series in Nov of 2015 which gained alot of traction within the fanbase and continues to be a consistent and interesting source of content.



Moodydata, creator of Limit Release began his venture into more community focused content, such as the chat show, streams and unique ideas (dual streams, stream contents, etc.) and commentary on the community and also on the AC series (AC Lore series, let's play, etc.).



DominantLegend discovered and proliferated the use of the PPSSPP emulator which now allows people to easily play AC3, SL, LrP and also show it with built in screen capture and screenshot of the emulator. IrregularRaven also made strong discoveries in terms of finessing the technology and also developing interesting concepts.



Their (and many others) creations and content helped spawn more content (azure, knightmare, royal angel, darkstar angel, ostardva, okami, )



2. The change in congregation of the community

In olden days most players met up in IRC chats or forums. However, a shift has been taking place where people have been straying away from these and been more fragmented. As of current there is no specific site fansite/forum that the community sticks too. It's been making it quite hard to coordinate and keep people up to date on stuff, and partially contributes to the perceived "inactivity" in the community.



Probably one of the most surprising gathering spots was the Armored Core Gamer's Facebook group. In comparison with when I first joined a few years ago, it's now doing significantly better. Instead of waking up to see the occasional spam bot post and raging 4th genner, there's a constant stream of posts from player's, talking about builds, story, unique and wacky stuff and it's quite refreshing with how barren its been the past few years. That being said, the years we've spent in the dark times has kind of taken its toll. This is most evident in discussions; most of them tend to be very shallow, talking about very simple points, likes and dislikes, and in some ways more "casual."



But despite that, there is a small but genuine shift towards cooperation and smart discussion. To me, the key moment was when I stopped hearing "4th GEN IS BEST GEN HURR DURR" and instead heard people, particularly newer 5th gen players able to talk about their game and instead of being put down, were encourage and given the viewpoints (more balanced, pointed towards constructive criticism and fairness) even when they weren't fans of the gen themselves. This change in attitude is the important thing as well as the fact that it is still continuing to grow. As long as that can be maintained I see things improving in general as our situation does too.



Discord has been an interesting case where it seems to bring alot of new people... but they just tend to lurk. What you get is most of the vets hanging out and not really a whole lot else. Discussion feels sparse and often aren't too great.



3. The explosion of content



As mentioned above, the amount of content the community has been producing an incredible amount of content. four years ago if you searched AC on youtube you'd be lucky to find 3-5 videos a week. Nowadays, you can find at least 10-15 per day by different people. On top of that you have the stuff posted on the AC FB page (memes, AC images, etc). I used to have to stretch content out over a week in order to make it least; nowadays I can't even post half of it in a single day.



So basically, the community has slowly started to pick itself up (albeit in pieces) and get back into its former shape. But it's not quite there yet, and it's becoming clear we're getting to the point where we need to start being concerned about the problems that will afflict us as we reach a bit more... mid-size.



To use an analogy, the community is currently hovering right below an imaginary poverty line. Below this line we're not bringing in more people than we're losing, we don't have enough exposure to garner outside interest in our games and also our content, and we're still very unorganized and uncoordinated which prevents us from executing larger scale projects and activities. In terms of the games themselves, it means we have very few people actively playing any of the games, and for the most part there are few tournaments/events that occur.



In order to keep moving forward, there is a few things we need to do:

1. Coordinate and organize consistent play times for games. It doesn't matter which game or console, make sure there are constant times where people are on and playing



2. Support community content. Like, tweet, and share any AC content you find so that other people (both fan and non-fans). Follow and like any pages or twitters which post content. Exposure and spreading the word is key.



3. Know where to find people. ACL, RR, ACG, AC Gamers group, Gamefaqs, know where to find where the various groups of people hang out.



Be proactive. This is really a combination of everything above, but the key thing about the community now is that we cannot afford to be complacent. We need to be willing to pour our time and energy to make that final, hard push to get beyond that imaginary poverty line.



Conclusion

The AC community is on the slow and painful road to recovery, but we are still a long way off. Not enough people are active, games still have too few players, and content is still not getting enough exposure, and when it becomes more obvious when you talk to members of the community and their frustrations. And unfortunately the only way we can solve these issue is to keep grinding and pushing. Even if we host rooms with days where no one joins, or create videos with only a few views, even if it pains us that we don't get what we deserve, what have to keep pushing. We are still a community on the fringe and struggling to survive; we cannot rely on external sources but instead on ourselves.



The final push will be laborious but if we want any hope of changing our situation, we need to keep going.



-FromCheng





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