The Derp Force

Well, no grievances have turned up in the discussion so I thought I'd take the time to explain the current status of the project for those who are interested. Feel free to leave feedback on this.

1. Our attempts to grow the core audience with regular footage are going well. Audience growth and retention are steady.

2. Lia has made artwork for me and Vel and the next stage of this is to produce avatars for Jade, Pinkie and Rasta. To that end, he will be requiring pictures of you that accurately reflect what you wish to look like. Feel free to communicate with Lia so he can begin work on this.

3. Pending the completion of a banner with all our heads on, the website will soon be ready to launch. Ideally I'd like this to take place late May. When this happens it would be helpful to have as many of us active on the forums as possible to build up a core userbase there too. Any help is appreciated.

4. Our Youtube hub and spoke model needs expanding. It would be nice for Pinkie to finally sign up to Youtube so we can link him in and also very handy for the spokes to start gaining a trickle of single player content. Vela nd I are happy to help with the technical side of this which will in turn improve the commentary skills of those currently not participating.

5. In early May we'll be launching our Lara Croft series. With this under the belt it's time to try and expand by bringing more of you into the videos to further enhance the hub and spoke model. For some of you this means you need to start thinking about equipment upgrades and jsut how deep you wish to participate (recording self POVs to include in the vids for example) or whether you initially wish to remain a guest extra. We'll also need better communication regarding scheduling considering many filming sessions are around the three hour mark. Which brings us onto part 6...

6. We need some more behind the scenes help. Peatear, whilst not part of the Derp Force officially, is willing to try and provide us with some incidental music. There may also be a song in the works that requires a male vocalist. On top of that, we could really use someone with lots of time on their hands to trawl the minecraft mod forums to find adventure maps that they could then test to make sure they work with the current version of minecraft. This is something Vel and I do not have time to do but would obviosuly massivley increase our ability to pull the collective together for such a recording session. With Minecraft being so popular this would drive views and contribute massively to the hub audience (in turn feeding the spokes).

7. Videos released into the Steam activity feed can easily be the top rated video of the week with as little as 5 thumbs up. The difference between a video not being top rated and one that is is currently 20 views vs 300. Obviously with such a drastic uptake it is beneficial if you can thumb up a video as soon as you notice it in the feed. You do not need to watch the video on steam, merely thumb it up.

8. A decent chunk of our views also comes from Youtube's recommendation system. This currently works by favouring videos that are watched in their entirety, then thumbed up. You can massivley help increase the number of viewers who have our videos recommended to them by simply logging into youtube, watching the video entirely, start to finish, then thumbing it up. Likewise, we will support the spokes by doing likewise, increasing two way traffic. The more active spokes we have, the better this system will work.

I hope this has been helpful in giving you an overview of where we stand, what needs doing and how you can help become more involved. :)