Thanks for that.

Any idea on what happened on April 30th, 2015?

Some interesting stuff to gleam from there (a year ago we were peaking over 500 on weekends, now we fail to peak at 400). Some of the earlier data seems incorrect though (periods of weeks where the playerbase stays at the exact same quantity).

To the extent that parts of the early data are accurate, it's painfully obvious to see how quickly people lose attention in the game, leading credence to the idea that we should be focusing on player retention more than advertising right now.

As an aside, we always peak on weekends and enter a slump during the week. It might be worth looking into ways that we can maximise that peak (could mean hosting even more events in game on weekends, could mean occasionally running double QI/double TC weekends).

Why should we focus on maximising the peak? The 80/20 rule (AKA the Pareto principle). If we're getting the best results on weekends as opposed to all the other days, we should aim on trying to make as many people play on the weekends as we can.

What we really need is more variations of the public servers maybe add a satirical mod or 2 to the official servers, Remove the tc reward on said servers or lower them a bit

Keep the rest the same tho ofc

Totally
I like thesemideas but who do we go to to make them reality

Since Sir came back updates started making more sense but I'm afraid it might be too little too late. Surveys and general staff evaluation should be one of main tolls of communication between staff and userbase, I have brought this up several times, both in public and behind staff curtain, even writing up some kind of a guideline how it could be done, not to mention several other suggestions about advertising, steam, trades aaaaand so on. Unfortunately, most of the times what you get in return are comments like ,,We'll discuss it" (with no discussion following it or nothing coming out of it), ,,It's not my area of expertise", ,,We can't do that without Hampa, it's his game", ,,Try talking to X instead" and so on. General attitude of higher staff varies between ,,don't know" and ,,don't care", with some notable exceptions, but those guys usually face a wall of ,,no can do" pretty quickly.

Add that to the lack of bigger changes in gameplay since the very beginning, one bigger visual update (3.6, was it? can't quite recall), focus on items behind considerable pay wall, stale community events, updates to certain areas that get stuck in limbo forever (clan system) or get done half-assedly (ranking changes), very little quality control over lower staff teams (MS haven't had an active lead since Solax resigned and that was like uh, 2 years ago?) and tons of other issues and you can't really be surprised that the user/player base declines over time.

The game is over 10 years old and it shows, the potential of initial success and later steam greenlight was mostly wasted, players who had invested a lot of time and work in the game, developing play styles, meta, tutorials and guidelines, legendary artists and great video makers, hardworking staff members, mostly moved on with their lives, as you can only really bother yourself with such activity as toribash for so long.
This means there are less people for new players to look up to and motivate them to get good, oldfags that still linger around stick to their own, which makes some clans hard to get into and even if people do get in, the amount of clanmates that still play the game is usually pretty low.

I could jump from the topic to topic for another 10 paragraphs but I have better things to do. I hope that the game will surive and expand its userbase once more but that would recquire certain major changes which I don't really see happening.

Tl;dr enjoy it while you still can, if you still find some fun here.

Damn thats depressing
So we should just sit back and domnothing but hope?

yes. But don't hope. Games die, that's just how it works.

jeez. time to take a shit load of anti-depressants.

Imo everyone is more concerned about the school now, activity usually picks up in summer

If you were around in like 2010 you could see that off-topic was pretty dead for the most part since everyone was just shitposting in wibbles.

It was only once wibbles was deleted that people started to use offtopic as a new home to regular wibbles enthusiasts. This, in my opinion, was why off-topic thrived so much in 2012-2015ish because the shitposters had no where else to go really.

Once wibbles did come back however, many flocked away from off-topic for the more "fun" posts in wibbles. I think the staff could probably solve this predicament by having local moderators start up fun discussion threads like "what is your favorite so and so" or "which sport is the best in your opinion", etc. I think generally people are too embarrassed/shy to make their own thread in fear of being scrutinized which has become the norm in discussion, so they don't bother.

tl;dr forum is the same, albeit there are less members