That title though... First things first, no I'm not going to kill off Raid anytime soon (quite the opposite, actually). As everyone is well aware, our servers, forums and Discord haven't exactly been the most active. As a result, I've been wanting to diversify our community a bit, introduce new games and generalise it a bit more rather than just "we host servers". In this post I'm going to be laying out my current plans. Anyone is free to give feedback and introduce new ideas (any help is welcome, I want to see this community shine like it used to).
Game/Community Hubs
Hubs will act as a place of discussion for a game. They'll be run by Community Managers (more on these further down the post) who will moderate, organise events etc. Since we can't just create a hub for every game in existence, I want people to actually come forward and request to add a new hub when they have a group of people interested in said game. We'll have a dedicated section on the forums for hub requests with clear instructions on how the process is handled.
Community Managers
If these changes are effective and bring in more people, we're going to need some people to manage each hub. This is where Community Managers come in. These individuals would be community-elected (we into politics now bois) and serve as the primary administrators of their respective hub. They can run their hub as they wish, so long as they listen to the community of said hub. Basically, they're like moderators of a subreddit, for those familiar with Reddit.
Discord
The Discord server will get a serious overhaul to be more in line with the whole hub thing. We don't want to make it too crowded though (not have 100 different text channels for a singular game) so we'll have to impose limits on hubs based on popularity and the type of game. You'll be able to assign yourself groups through a bot based on what hubs you want to be in. Once you're in a hub's group you'll be able to see the channels related to the hub and partake in discussions and events.
What of the servers?
Our CoD4 servers will continue to be run as normal, nothing really changes here. However, once the overhaul of the leaderboards, servers page and Echelon are done, we might start putting up servers for popular hubs. More details once we're actually ready for it.
So yeah, let me know what you think. If you have any ideas worth sharing, don't hesitate. All of your opinions matter to us, we want to provide you with the best possible community experience we can.
I've attached a poll to the post so we can get a bit of an overview on the amount of people that like/dislike the idea. If you vote (especially if you vote no), we'd really appreciate if you also explained your choice.
As a final note, I'd like to thank everyone that's been there with us up to this point. You've all been wonderful and it means a lot to me that there's people who genuinely care a lot about our community.