Thoughts on Recruitment

a collaboration by the newly created Civ Think Tank

Let's take a break from endless drama and impending doom for few minutes, and take a look at how many of us players have gotten to this point today. It was enjoyable to read all of your individual journeys to how we got into playing Civ. The purpose of this survey and paper was to gauge how successful different types of recruitment were, mainly Reddit but also recruitment as a whole.

We collected over 200 responses in 3 days, in r/CivClassics, r/CivRealms, and r/CivEx. This survey reached a lot farther than much of us had expected.

All content & analysis in this post used data that was finalized at 5:00pm EST on Tuesday, January 7th. We will still be collecting responses and changing data based on any significant changes.

Preliminary Data Analysis

section by specificlanguage, Gjum, YourAverageRick

As a note, the sample size on CivRealms was not exactly the biggest. We somehow got more responses from people who weren't even actively playing Civ now than people that were playing on CivRealms. I'm not sure why, we contacted Bonkill and others to gain more exposure but not a lot of people responded to this survey. Hopefully in the future we can resolve this issue but for now the results below may not be particularly representative of CivRealms.

Introductions to Civ

Pie Chart Recruitment Sources (expanded)

• Across all generations of Civ servers, word of mouth (or friends) was one of the biggest drivers in getting people to play.
  • That's right, haters, playing with friends is actually beneficial to Civ servers.
• But following that, Recruitment posts were the next biggest driver in getting people in the door. (More on that below.)
• "Google", with 24 responses, was basically people searching for like an "economic/political/roleplay minecraft server" with no intent on looking for Civ servers but finding one randomly in the search results. Not all reponses were like what I described, but most are very similar.
• We also have some decent leverage in the algorithm, like YouTube and Reddit's "Recommended" page actually get a decent amount of people in the door too. I didn't even know there was a Recommended page until when I wrote this.

Recruitment posts get even semi-interested people in the door. But while it's only second, it's probably the most important. While word of mouth is the best, it's important to note that it's the best because recruitment works. The more effective we are with recruitment, the better the output will be as a whole. Sure, random chance does bring in a generally steady amount of people, but it's important to note that as a community, recruitment is the single most important thing that we can help with. (And I guess you can tell your friends as well, too that helps.)

First Civ Servers

Pie Chart first server by Franchise

Pie Chart first server by Iteration

Bar Chart first server vs play time

• A lot of people have stayed since Civcraft's reign, as about 40% of respondents have said that their first Civ server was a Civcraft server, despite it dying 3 years ago! (and three months) (geez has it really been that long)
  • Civcraft 2.0 alone has attracted about 21% of respondents.
• CivClassic's tenure has also left a mark, as it was about 35% of respondents' first server.
  • side note: CivClassics is going to overtake Civcraft 2.0's runtime in about 30 days
• Devoted still has some holdovers (9%) and CivRealms has attracted about 10% of respondents to the Civ genre.
• The rest come from other Civ servers, like CivEx (2.3%), RealmsMC (1.7%), and Craftlang (<1%).

A Little Deeper Dive

Pie Chart of Subreddit Mentions in Reponses

u/Squareblob and u/Bonkill did a great job with the "recruitment posts" on r/Gaming and r/Minecraft a while back. The bigger subreddit we target (and also more generally relevant), the better the recruitment from them is. However, of course, that's fraught with peril as posting on these subreddits can be a minefield of both reception and rules. Smaller posts do work, but result in less recruits overall. Both strategies are effective, but either way just results in different forms of success. Do you want a more specialized group who are more likely to respond and are more likely to stay on, or reach a wide audience, have slightly more recruits but a possibly lesser retention rate over a long period of time?

Bar Graph of Recruitment Methods vs. Civ Server

The biggest source across all iterations (except CivRealms) is recruitment from friends. Whether from a cousin, uncle, or random stranger, it's the most successful. Recruitment posts are almost always the second most source, except for CivRealms, who've made a good amount of newfriends from Reddit to surpass friend recruitment. Then again, grain of salt since they have less responses and the difference isn't all that much. As the earlier section goes, success per server is generally proportional to the graph above of recruitment methods.

Conclusions and Commonsense

section by Squareblob, cooliomoose

Some thoughts on recruitment on Reddit:

1. There is a lot of luck involved.
   • No matter how well you plan your posts and their titles, many posts simply will not do well. For example, the rising and new queue could be more saturated with posts one day and less saturated another. You can’t control this, so don’t be discouraged.
   • Evidence: First example, and second example
2. Post success is not black and white.
   • You can successively recruit even if all of your posts get few upvotes as long as one or two people see an IP or PM you in interest.
3. You can post content virtually anywhere
   • Successful civ content in unexpectated places has run the gauntlet from r/syriancirclejerkwar to the r/The_Donald.
   • This is not always efficient… although it is fun.

Do keep in mind that the opportunity cost of reposting civ content outside of r/civclassics is extremely low. To post an already made render takes perhaps 30 seconds, and has the potential to get thousands of upvotes on a big subreddit.

Thanks for reading.

Normally this is the part I tell you where the data is all located but unfortunately we've put so many notes on our responses that it takes quite a bit to understand. Added to the fact that we could tell who the respondents were in some cases doesn't help. I'll edit in an album of charts below later so you can have your data fix but understand that for (minor) privacy sake I'm going to elect to not show the full dataset we have.

That said, I am going to update the album/responses as we get more data in. Thanks so much and have a great day.

Edit: Here's your charts

Superedit: Thanks to u/Gjum, u/Squareblob, u/CivYourAverageRick, and u/cooliomoose for helping me out after I literally hacked into the Civ Think Tank to make this post lmao