Population increasing ideas?

Just don't mess up our gunner/assault sumo or we have to get our hax's out.

every game has arseholes, more and more everyday, especially since most of the newer generation are complete idiots and very low skilled. Have you ever played heroes of newerth? game is seething with bellends, however it is a very popular game, which leads me to believe that it doesnt matter if your playerbase are a complete bunch of odious cretins, as your game can still be very popular. So the problem must lie elsewhere.

LoL, HoN. It's pretty much the distinguishing feature of the MOBA genre second to only the learning curve. In fact, the two pretty much go hand-in-hand. (Though this correlation is not seen nearly as often in SC2, though the communication in that game tends to be limited to, "gl hf, gg, omg, fu, cheese, lol proxy gate", and the game is focused on 1v1)

If the skill-gap wasn't so wide in every server, the problem would probably go away or be far less rampant.

This game is not so hard to pick up.

If you have excellent aim, you will do well here without knowing wtf you're doing. If you suck at fps, well there are classes where you don't need to aim well, and just have good timing/strategy.

They should give everyone who owns MNC 5, 1-day passes, so they can get their friends on, and play a full 6vpub game which I think is the ideal learning experience, hopefully against another 1 pro + 5 complete noobs.

haha, yeah you are right, beat someone who is trying to cheese you though and you will see the abuse come in.

I do like your idea about the 5 free guest passes, that would be cool, and i really think it would work. Playing games with friends is the best as we all know.

I'm sure it's been mentioned many times already, and I admittedly didn't read through this thread. But....

Population seems pretty stable at this point. The only way to increase it is to give creative freedom to the community. It's not about keeping games fresh with new content that attempts to appeal to everyone anymore, it's about giving the players and communities the power to keep it fresh for themselves. You can't make everyone happy, but you can let them make themselves happy. Get it?

tl;dr: Proper Admin/Mod Tools.

P.S.: Minecraft should serve as the biggest example of this to all developers going forward. I'm not saying every game should be a sandbox, but the concept is sound.

I agree with this. And I have agreed with this multiple times in this thread already. It's really the only point that keeps being brought up.

Not really keen on the minecraft comparison, closer to TF2/CS:S if you ask me. Neither game would have nearly the fanbase if it weren't for the mods. There are people content with the vanilla game, and occasional dev content adds some spice, but mod tools are mandatory in any game that wants to survive.

After we get the tools though I would like to see another promotion of some sort though. Not before, not during, after.

we need match-making

That's what the Star Rating is supposed to be but It just doesn't work very well.