Will this work for the main site: "How Do I Get Players to Post More?"

Question

Please let me know if this question fits or if it can/should be adjusted to fit within the main site and how. Its kind of long but thats because our play system has aspects I feel I need to explain so people understand the full picture but I understand if that might be a bit much. Thank you for your time and help.

I run an rp forum(thats the best I can describe it as) for roleplaying entire countries. You can make news posts, individual character stories, plan covert ops, pretty much whatever you can imagine. Unfortunately "Do whatever" doesn't seem to be to be much of an incentive anymore. Writing has dropped off and sometimes days can go by without a post.

I have suspicions about parts of the game might be contributing to an issue. We also have tech and time progression. Tech progression is where you say your country is researching a thing(usually near future tech like better prosthetics or better robots) and then give it a time to completion. This feeds into the time progression. Every IRL day is 12 in game days. We calculated it this way because a 30 day month irl is about a year in game. I quite like the research system because it gives the world a sense of progression and also gives me something to write about in the news section from time to time.

Anyway, what can I do to get people writing more? Is there something I can do to enthuse them? To incentivize them? Should I make this thing more gamey or less if that's the problem?"

Answer 1

I still consider myself a bit new to rpgSE, so take this with a grain of salt;

I expect your question might get closed

Either as Too Broad or as an "idea generation" question. As it stands there's not a lot to go on other than that you run a roleplay site, and people are starting to use it less than they used to. Your question seems to be "what are some ways I can incentivize or entice people to play on my site".

While that's a valid question, it isn't well suited to SE's style of question-and-answers because there won't be an obvious single good answer, rather you might end up with lots of different ideas.

If you still wanted to ask it

You'll probably need to narrow your focus. rpgSE might respond well if you could ask, for example, "I'm having problem with turnout, here's an idea I have, will it bring in more people?" or even "Players are losing interest in my site, here's a bunch of details about what my site is like, what is causing it?"

**Disclaimer, I can't guarantee either of those would stay open either. It's still kind of broad and hard to answer without intimate understanding of your site.

This stack is best suited to solving a specific, well-documented problem. As it stands I think your question is too open-ended to be answerable in this format.