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- Mar 17, 2007
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At least once a year, and often more than that, I read a thread that alternately proclaims that the forum (either C&C or Civ3 in general) is either dying, or in a renaissance. While there's always a few to argue either way, usually the only consensus is, "we don't have as many members as we did in the hayday." So, I decided to make use of the Wayback Machine, and see if I could get some more definitive answers, as well as to compare the trends across versions.
First, let's take a look at CFC in general. The below chart shows the total number of posts in the Civ forums over time.
Growth was ever-increasing at ever-increasing rates until about July, 2006. That's about 9 months after Civ4 was released, and the time Civ4 Warlords was released. After that the growth has been more linear in general. Two data points stand out. There's a noticeable increase between July and October 2007, almost surely due to Civ4: Beyond the Sword's release - further evidence of that expansion's better reception than Warlords. Immediately after that, there's a drop in the number of posts. This isn't due to a moderation crackdown and massive thread deletion, but rather, the move of Never Ending Stories from Civ3 to Other Games, and with that, over 300,000 posts being moved.
But that doesn't tell a whole lot about any particular version of Civ, beyond that BTS was well-received. So let's look at the number of posts for each Civ version over time.
This tells a bit more. Civ3 grew at an increasing or steady rate until the beginning of 2005 - for about 3.25 years after its release, and more than a year after Conquests' release. Thereafter, the growth began slowing, at first gradually through about April, 2008 (the exact timing is obscured by the NES move and lack of data points in late 2007), and since then, it's been at a noticeably slower rate. However, the rate of growth did actually increase between 2010 and 2011. There have been almost 42,000 posts in the past year in the Civ3 forums - more than 100 per day. It's a far cry from the 1200 per day in 2004, or the 200 per day in the mid-2010 to mid-2011 revival, but still fairly active.
Civ4, meanwhile, experienced increasing or steady growth until about April, 2010, about 4.5 years after its release. Although now growing more slowly, it's still a significant part of CFC traffic.
Civ5, unlike previous versions, is showing noticeably slower growth less than two years after its release. Fewer recent data points in the Wayback Machine makes it impossible to say exactly when the decline began, but it's significant. Whether the recent Gods and Kings expansion will change that, we'll find out.
Now let's look at the individual forums to see what's driving growth.
The forum that immediately jumps out is Stories and Tales, with its drop of over half when NES left. Nevertheless, it's since regained over 40,000 posts.
We can see that while Civ3 General Discussions dominated early, since then, Creation and Customization has become king. It's also noteworthy that most of the new posts today are in Creation and Customization. 22,000 of the 42,000 posts in the past year have been there, and 27,000 of the 89,000 posts in the year before that. Multiplayer also continues to grow, having surpassed the slow-growing Strategy forum. With this closer view, we can see that an influx of posts in the Democracy Game forum was responsible for most if not all of the 2010 post increase, with 37,000 posts from mid-2010 to mid-2011, but that forum has had only 4 posts in the past year.
We can also see trends such as the flatlining of the Game of the Month, and if the graph were larger, a similar, though slower, decrease in the number of Hall of Fame posts, though from a much slower rate of posts to begin with. Odd spikes in the General forum are also seen when expansion pack forums are merged in.
It's also interesting to look at the story for Civ2:
Civ2 has clearly reached the stable phase of forum activity. Growth was fast until early 2003, and by August of 2003 had noticeably slowed. Most likely, Civ3's PTW and Conquests expansions were significant factors in this. By the July 2005 to July 2006 period, Civ4's first year, activity averaged 10 posts per day. By the direct comparison, it appears that Civ3 has more than 10 times as much activity in its 10th year of release as Civ2. However, it must be considered that computers were much more common by the time Civ2 came out, as well as that while CFC is popular with Civ3 players, Apolyton seems to be more popular with Civ2 players Extrapolating, it appears likely that Civ4 will be more popular in its 10th year than Civ3, although it's questionable whether that will be the case for Civ5, which had 89,000 fewer posts in the past year than Civ4 despite being much newer. However, this could also be due to the effect of 2K's official forum.
Looking at Civ2's forum activity does give some more insight.
Quite noticeable is that soon after April of 2004, the Multiplayer forum, until then the most popular, slowed to a crawl. Its rate of growth had been slowing, though much slower, since early 2003. While this doesn't indicate a huge immediate impact from Civ3: Play the World, the numbers do show that Civ3's multiplayer numbers began increasing quickly as Civ2's decreased quickly in mid-2004 (the huge popularity of Civ3 General Discussions obscures this on the Civ3 Forum graph). Thus, it can be postulated that Civ3 Conquests' multiplayer, combined with more people having PTW or higher, contributed greatly to Civ2's multiplayer decline.
Also worth noting is that while C&C has become a primary activity area for Civ3, Civ2's Scenario Creation forum has been mostly dormant since July 2005, about the same time Civ4 came out. The recently added Civ2 Scenario League forum is now more popular than Scenario Creation.
Some trends aren't visible in the graphs, but are in the numbers. Civ3 was the only version of Civ to ever achieve 90% of the Civ forum posts, doing so in late 2004 before Civ4 was imminent, and is likely to remain the only one. Less than a month after its release, it already had 56% of the Civ posts at the then-young CFC. Civ4 passed Civ3 in mid-2008, and broke 50% of Civ posts in late 2008. Surprisingly, Civ4 has actually increased in percentage of Civ posts in the past year, with a small increase from 53.36% to 53.44%. The only other increase seen for a not-most-recent version was when the Never Ending Stories left the Civ forums for Other Games, which boosted both Civ1 and Civ2 by a small amount.
Finally, the notion that no one ever comes here except for Off Topic can be disspelled. When comparing the Civ forums to Off Topic, the Civ forums have consistently had 60-70% of the total posts.
While the numbers would be slightly closer with World History and Sports Talk included, even if we threw in the whole Colosseum and All Other Games (which includes Never Ending Stories), Civ would still have a comfortable lead. It's also worth noting that while it appears that Off Topic is in decline, the last datapoint does not include the new split-off Off Topic zones, which would give an additional 77,000 posts to the Off-Topic side.
Attached you'll find the spreadsheet I used for this in .zip format, unzippable to a .xlsx file (I can also modify this to include a .xls file if someone's interested in that). This has been updated as of February, 2013 (after one view for the original version).
First, let's take a look at CFC in general. The below chart shows the total number of posts in the Civ forums over time.
Growth was ever-increasing at ever-increasing rates until about July, 2006. That's about 9 months after Civ4 was released, and the time Civ4 Warlords was released. After that the growth has been more linear in general. Two data points stand out. There's a noticeable increase between July and October 2007, almost surely due to Civ4: Beyond the Sword's release - further evidence of that expansion's better reception than Warlords. Immediately after that, there's a drop in the number of posts. This isn't due to a moderation crackdown and massive thread deletion, but rather, the move of Never Ending Stories from Civ3 to Other Games, and with that, over 300,000 posts being moved.
But that doesn't tell a whole lot about any particular version of Civ, beyond that BTS was well-received. So let's look at the number of posts for each Civ version over time.
This tells a bit more. Civ3 grew at an increasing or steady rate until the beginning of 2005 - for about 3.25 years after its release, and more than a year after Conquests' release. Thereafter, the growth began slowing, at first gradually through about April, 2008 (the exact timing is obscured by the NES move and lack of data points in late 2007), and since then, it's been at a noticeably slower rate. However, the rate of growth did actually increase between 2010 and 2011. There have been almost 42,000 posts in the past year in the Civ3 forums - more than 100 per day. It's a far cry from the 1200 per day in 2004, or the 200 per day in the mid-2010 to mid-2011 revival, but still fairly active.
Civ4, meanwhile, experienced increasing or steady growth until about April, 2010, about 4.5 years after its release. Although now growing more slowly, it's still a significant part of CFC traffic.
Civ5, unlike previous versions, is showing noticeably slower growth less than two years after its release. Fewer recent data points in the Wayback Machine makes it impossible to say exactly when the decline began, but it's significant. Whether the recent Gods and Kings expansion will change that, we'll find out.
Now let's look at the individual forums to see what's driving growth.
The forum that immediately jumps out is Stories and Tales, with its drop of over half when NES left. Nevertheless, it's since regained over 40,000 posts.
We can see that while Civ3 General Discussions dominated early, since then, Creation and Customization has become king. It's also noteworthy that most of the new posts today are in Creation and Customization. 22,000 of the 42,000 posts in the past year have been there, and 27,000 of the 89,000 posts in the year before that. Multiplayer also continues to grow, having surpassed the slow-growing Strategy forum. With this closer view, we can see that an influx of posts in the Democracy Game forum was responsible for most if not all of the 2010 post increase, with 37,000 posts from mid-2010 to mid-2011, but that forum has had only 4 posts in the past year.
We can also see trends such as the flatlining of the Game of the Month, and if the graph were larger, a similar, though slower, decrease in the number of Hall of Fame posts, though from a much slower rate of posts to begin with. Odd spikes in the General forum are also seen when expansion pack forums are merged in.
It's also interesting to look at the story for Civ2:
Civ2 has clearly reached the stable phase of forum activity. Growth was fast until early 2003, and by August of 2003 had noticeably slowed. Most likely, Civ3's PTW and Conquests expansions were significant factors in this. By the July 2005 to July 2006 period, Civ4's first year, activity averaged 10 posts per day. By the direct comparison, it appears that Civ3 has more than 10 times as much activity in its 10th year of release as Civ2. However, it must be considered that computers were much more common by the time Civ2 came out, as well as that while CFC is popular with Civ3 players, Apolyton seems to be more popular with Civ2 players Extrapolating, it appears likely that Civ4 will be more popular in its 10th year than Civ3, although it's questionable whether that will be the case for Civ5, which had 89,000 fewer posts in the past year than Civ4 despite being much newer. However, this could also be due to the effect of 2K's official forum.
Looking at Civ2's forum activity does give some more insight.
Quite noticeable is that soon after April of 2004, the Multiplayer forum, until then the most popular, slowed to a crawl. Its rate of growth had been slowing, though much slower, since early 2003. While this doesn't indicate a huge immediate impact from Civ3: Play the World, the numbers do show that Civ3's multiplayer numbers began increasing quickly as Civ2's decreased quickly in mid-2004 (the huge popularity of Civ3 General Discussions obscures this on the Civ3 Forum graph). Thus, it can be postulated that Civ3 Conquests' multiplayer, combined with more people having PTW or higher, contributed greatly to Civ2's multiplayer decline.
Also worth noting is that while C&C has become a primary activity area for Civ3, Civ2's Scenario Creation forum has been mostly dormant since July 2005, about the same time Civ4 came out. The recently added Civ2 Scenario League forum is now more popular than Scenario Creation.
Some trends aren't visible in the graphs, but are in the numbers. Civ3 was the only version of Civ to ever achieve 90% of the Civ forum posts, doing so in late 2004 before Civ4 was imminent, and is likely to remain the only one. Less than a month after its release, it already had 56% of the Civ posts at the then-young CFC. Civ4 passed Civ3 in mid-2008, and broke 50% of Civ posts in late 2008. Surprisingly, Civ4 has actually increased in percentage of Civ posts in the past year, with a small increase from 53.36% to 53.44%. The only other increase seen for a not-most-recent version was when the Never Ending Stories left the Civ forums for Other Games, which boosted both Civ1 and Civ2 by a small amount.
Finally, the notion that no one ever comes here except for Off Topic can be disspelled. When comparing the Civ forums to Off Topic, the Civ forums have consistently had 60-70% of the total posts.
While the numbers would be slightly closer with World History and Sports Talk included, even if we threw in the whole Colosseum and All Other Games (which includes Never Ending Stories), Civ would still have a comfortable lead. It's also worth noting that while it appears that Off Topic is in decline, the last datapoint does not include the new split-off Off Topic zones, which would give an additional 77,000 posts to the Off-Topic side.
Attached you'll find the spreadsheet I used for this in .zip format, unzippable to a .xlsx file (I can also modify this to include a .xls file if someone's interested in that). This has been updated as of February, 2013 (after one view for the original version).
