No Thanks New 'Elite' Usergroup

I believe I can know what will be an incentive and what will not. I guarantee you that people care more about having a special name than any of the capacity perks. The capacity perks are passive. If you get them, cool. It is a general plus to being active.

But why would you make it a goal to aim for larger sig space or icon size? It just isn't worth making a goal out of.

I think the purpose of this suggestion is to give people an obvious and desirable goal in order to inspire activity. Everything else is just trying to market to members. I see definable status as the biggest perk anyone could want, so that is why I suggest it as the main event.

You could always add pins for each perk even though that is a hassle. It could work since it is an obvious reward for the activity.

The problem with being Premium and not making it hard to get is that once someone becomes Premium, the only difference it will make to have more posts is to have a slightly larger avatar or slightly bigger signature. It will not feel like an achievement because you might even have to measure the avatars and signatures just to tell that there was an increase.

I am all for an overhaul of Premium, but if you add perks but make it just as easy to get then the same problem of incentives is gone. Most people are not going to care about the extra 30x30 in avatars or the one or two lines of signature space. It is a very minimal change from the member perspective. You need to find out what they want and market to what they want. I posit that what people really want is to feel special.

Do you really think that just adding perks is going to boost activity?

 

There a few points I want to make about your post.

You complain about color change polls, but it's as easy as just leaving it at a single, designated color. No more fuss, no more arguing about colors. I know this isn't going to be a popular thing, but it would prevent headaches now and in the future.

Your comment about having all those perks just added to Premium would take away the whole point of creating a new usergroup, which is to create more activity in the forums. People hit Premium and just stop posting, basically. There isn't a reason for them to keep going. Giving them the perks listed for the new usergroup wouldn't change that.

Also, Premiums and Normal members have been getting along pretty well. I don't think elitism is going to be a concern. People who are going to act elitist will do it regardless of their membership status.

And Premium wouldn't be so much of an in-between. If a new member wants to rush to get to Premium, he will have to wait until he's been a member for 6 months before he can become a Noble, and there's also the rep requirement, which is 1,500.

 

I've done my own share of thinking on this and now I'm simply against having a separate usergroup. I'm all up for the perks and whatnot, but not having another usergroup added onto the site.

If you guys actually want to simply boost up the activity in khv, then just boost up the requirements for being a Prem. 2,500 posts would be perfect. As Chev has said, having another usergroup on here will only confuse other new members(or those that return from a break or something) and will only cause more crap about the colors. And just by saying, "No. This is the only color you will have." Not everyone is going to be happy with that. You've all have already seen how people are when deciding colors for Prems. Hot pink, no teal, no bring rainbow back. It's going to be exactly like that, and you're only going to end up hearing people complain and nag about it. It's only going to give people headaches, especially the staff.

Just boost up the requirements if your real reason for this is simply activity on here. By having a 2,500 post requirement(and of course how long you've been here and possibly even rep.) it will make people a lot happy. And raise up the perks as well. Give everything this "Noble" group would have had to the Prems(minus the teal color name). It's so much more easier than having people confused and fighting over this new usergroup.

 

You know, with all this discussion about the name and color, I'm actually starting to agree that maybe it shouldn't be a seperate usergroup - on the outside.

Now, I'm making an assumption here about how usergroups work from the Admins' point of view, but I believe in order to make this work, there would have to be a seperate usergroup for each tier, but they could all be the same color so that, to the outside user, it looks like it's all one usergroup.

For example, say User A has 1,236 posts, and User B has 2,078 posts. They would both have pink names and both be called premium, but in the Admin CP, they would be in two different usergroups, like maybe "Premium - T1" and "Premium - T2" or whatever.

Does that make any sense?

 

The issue with that is that it would not necessary increase activity and would be an ad-hoc apparatus. It would create several extra groups with the same name and colour in the user legend to get rid of. It wouldn't be hard to get rid of them (three to five lines of code at most) but I doubt the staff want to do that.

On top of everything, that would still leave the Premium group with the same ease of access and the incentive to post more just to get bigger stuff would be extremely minimal.

 

That's pretty much how it works, yes.

 

Is the user legend directly connected to the actual usergroups in existence? I always assumed it could be edited manually...

Also, the only difference between my proposal and the original is that we forget about a new name/title, but still keep all the tiered incentives.

 

This makes sense to me now. But I wasn't of the mindset of simply adding perks. You said it best yourself, overhaul. But needless to say, I understand your point now.

I am not complaining, merely bringing up a point which should be smoothed over beforehand. You're proposing a single color. I'm not sure people would be too keen on that? It would work, yes. But as you said, it wouldn't be very popular.

You mean more activity in general? I sort of addressed this a few posts back? You can have tiered stuff as long as it isn't system related. Meaning usergroups not made with vB. Gonna give silly examples to try ad get my point across:

As you can see my point gears around color/rank. My point doesn't really invalidate the incentive aside from color.

The claims of elitism part was a point a few members mentioned in the thread. Emphasis on claims. I don't know personally if it happens or not.

 

Has it been tried since upgrading to 4.1.11? Also, I don't think it was profile customization itself necessarily, since it was fine until we got the 5.0 styles. However, I never tried it on the legacy styles after we got the 5.0 styles, so I'm not sure.

 

I do not think so.

Yes, but if you can still get Premium at 1,000 posts and keep it and the incentives are the only change, then really nothing will change about activity.

We need to raise the bar for Premiumship in order for people to feel like they have an actual goal to reach.

 

It wouldn't cause issues with it, no. I could set it up not to.

No, but between releases there were no major changes to the system, and issues that we had since vB3 persisted. It's not coming back.

 

Issues from vB3? Are you referring to the Yu-Gi-Oh! cards?

 

How about if we just ditch Premium and have an all new usergroup instead?

I mean, there seems to be a lot of stuff going around trying to decide things. I dunno it just seems messy now.


shrug

 

The idea is fine. I voted no because I don't play by the rules.

 

Not going to happen under any circumstances. At most, an overhaul of Premium or a new group is in order. To take the original away completely would make everyone who already has it feel cheated and would actually cause a drop in activity. You can make it harder to get, but to take it away where they cannot have it at all is too much.

Focus on the goal. What will make the site more active?

 

Forgetting that most discussion of names and colors was dropped many pages ago.

That makes sense, and that's how it was originally going to work out, but it's impractical to create a whole new usergroup for each tier. I personally think that will just confuse newer members, and it won't encourage activity. It encourages you to post until you grab the perk you want. Once you've achieved that you'll just go back to forever posting in the Spam Zone.

It would be much simpler and easier to just have an entire new usergroup full of perks, rewards, and benefits for staying devoted and keeping the forum alive.

 

You do realize the poll isn't there for shiits, right? That's how we're measuring interest in the idea, instead of just the most vocal members having control of the tide.

 

Well, if we really want this new usergroup, why not make sacrifices amirite?


And about making the site active, I don't really see a problem.... I mean, what's your description of active? If things were active, how would they look than how it is now?


I would personally like something new, like a new usergroup, to spice things up a bit. But I guess taking away premium would be mean to normal members. You know, destroying their hopes and dreams of some day getting a pink name and having managed to be called a prem.

 

It looks like the community has already decided what it wants.