I don't think the problem is the lack of games with zest, but how diversified THN has become.
That's an interesting perspective and one I have fair sympathy for. Said in my own words, I feel we spend too much time trying to find the next cool game and too little time finding games with each other, remembering that playing together makes games cool.
Sure, you could caveat that to hell and back. The sentiment still stands, I feel.
Obviously the WoW partition has bloomed very well, but it's had a detrimental effect on the rest of the community as [...] for some inexplicable reason, [they] really aren't as vocal in the community as the bunch of folks that joined during the NS and BF2 days, so there isn't very much community building in that respect.
I'm of the belief that all major games that pull people into THN are beneficial to THN
in the long run. No game lasts forever, and certainly not for all its players. MMORPGs have a longer play life than many FPS games so that turn around is likely to be substantially longer. My memory of BF2, however, is that a bunch of people joined and only played BF2, only replied to BF2 posts (and some then only in private clan forums). BF2 ended, a bunch left, but a whole bunch stayed because they liked us, we made them feel welcome.
not everyone likes WoW [...] but not everyone likes CoD4 or TF2 either, which means small fragments of people play games for a week or two and then move onto the next in their own individual ways and ultimately splinter themselves from the core.
Again, that comes back to what I said above. What might help, here, is a little community direction to help pull some threads together. Sure, there's always going to be a churn of games and a search for that really cool game that comes out every so often and that's often done in very small groups or individually (though, one might argue, it needn't be so ad-hoc). But let's not forget that we can make a decent game better by playing together. BF2 was somewhat extraordinary at the time but now that concept is well used, very standard stuff; we see refinements (and botches) of BF2 on a semi-regular basis. CoD4, as such, isn't a huge leap forward and is more in the vein of Counter Strike than Battlefield.
It's a problem, because you can't force everyone to play a single game
We wouldn't desire to attempt to "force" people to play certain games. It won't work for us and would be very much against who we are as a community. But we can provide direction and additional support to a short list of "core" games, a list that is slowly changing but not at the pace of once every four weeks.
but you can't sustain several very effectively.
Perhaps not, at our current active and available community size. As noted, WoW has a number of current THNers tied up for the time being. This might give us an impression that we have more people available than we really do. There are three responses to this, I think.
- Wait 'til WoW runs its course. This could be 6-9-12 months; a long time. Not really worth considering, in my opinion.
- Play games with smaller numbers. Focus on games that support 4 or 8 people at a time, remembering that team games that require 8 man teams need a 16 man practice squad...
- Recruit.
This is a subset of thoughts I was alluding to earlier. Tetsuo called them out of me with his post. I'm reluctant to reveal more just now because I'm not quite ready; I'm preparing some ideas, letting them get some real wings, before releasing them. Too early, too new, not enough momentum, and they fall down before they've had chance to live. Little too much of that recently; plenty of enthusiasm, not sufficient momentum to overcome the inertia.
