Nickname makes an excellent point.
Kaz-Ka said:
If we could revive the PC side of the club on campus, that would be great and we would all be happy. And I would like to try a few new things and a few old things so if you guys could just bear with me and give this a go that would be nice.
I’d like to know which gamers you’ve been talking to because they either only play Warcraft related games (which don’t appeal to the majority of gamers) or don’t play online often. If you want a basis of how popular gaming styles are use the Xfire and Steam lists like Lemm mentioned. Over the last 6 years the Xfire list has been dead on with the popular games at the time and shifts from year to year as games are phased in and out.
As for campus, you won’t revive the PC section with Warcraft 3. The VAST majority of gamers hate Starcraft and Warcraft with a passion because only the elite of the elite ever have any fun playing it online. I used to play WC3, still do ocassionally, but I also hold that opinion. I like the game but hate playing online because I either get dominated extremely fast (IE not fun) or the other player quits before I win (IE not fun).
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that you somehow managed to attact all those WoW players to the club but you’ve got to keep in mind that the population of them wasn’t sought out for a reason. We could have pulled most of them in last year, probably quite easily, but I didn’t for a very good reason. The WoW gamers are not healthy for the PC side of the club. From a raw numbers standpoint sure they’re great but the games they play are directly incompatible with the games everyone else plays and while you may pull in 20-30 of them there’s a good possibility that you lose that many at the same time.
Also, I’m not sure if anyone’s actually run the numbers on this but if you have 20 people playing WC3 in a single elimination bracket you’ll have a total of 19 games. Figuring that each one takes 15 minutes that tournament alone will take almost 5 hours. Factor in getting them ready, having them find each other’s servers and connecting, breaks in between games this one game will easily take 7 hours. Unless you do something funky with the brackets to shave the number of matches down you just committed yourself to only 2 games at the LAN. That’s the direction ASU went with their PC LANs, trust me, you don’t want to go that route. Oddly enough WC3 was also their tipping point. 
Ever wonder why the PC side hasn’t sent a team to ASU in years? It’s because the drive isn’t worth only playing 2 good games. Having talked with a number of others the same can be said about the next WCU LAN. You have to make the LAN worth the 6-10 hours of driving and so far, at least for about 5 of us I know of, that’s just not the case. The ASU players we pulled in on the PC side were there for CS/CSS (and were *edited* good too) and most of the Clemson guys were there for similar reasons. I can’t speak for any of them but my fear is that once we lose the off campus players we may never get them back. You may have more overall but keep in mind this club wasn’t founded to bring people in the door, it was founded to bring people onto campus. While those goals aren’t mutually exclusive, there’s a very fine line you have to walk to achieve both.
Btw, if we’re going to be shifting to games we can’t host servers for we need to decide now because if Keith buys us a new server and we don’t expand in that direction we’ll never get anything from him again. I can’t tell Keith we need a new server when I’m not sure we’ll even need it and sure as hell can’t ask him to spend $5000-6000 on a server when the only games popular on the current one are being phased out.
Also something to keep in mind. You may not want to “pander” to those who aren’t on campus but just remember that the club you have now was directly created by us. Many alumni have continued to support the club even after graduating and many will continue to do so until you *edited* them off and they leave. We’ve all been around the block and know what works and what doesn’t. When so many have said this won’t work and you do it anyway, you won’t be garnering any pity when you fall. You’ll just be on the ground with a skint knee and have no friends to help you up.
My intention isn’t to *edited* you guys off but I find it extremely interesting that the PC side takes such a drastic change of direction once I leave and a primarily console player takes the VP slot.
Btw, I just realized we’re arguing in Ephraim’s thread again.