The problem is chat rooms with Steam in general. If everyone in the group automatically was placed into the chat room in stealth (aka in the background), chats would be used so much more. But the extra hassle of having to join the chatroom everytime you start Steam, makes it a pain really.

To this reason, is why virtually all steam groups with the exception of a handful (even official ones with tens of thousands of people), have empty chatrooms.

Not that you asked, but I figured I'd say it here anyways. The TG L4D group has a pretty healthy population in it (just look at the numbers of people, online, and playing games). I know we can easily get 16 people to join in on the L4D2 fun by pinging the group when events are setup to go on a regular basis without any admin intervention. Sure we aren't L4D Japan that has some 15,000 players and about 50 active servers, but you get the picture.

I have given some thought as to motivating people to actually join the chatroom, but then it doesn't make sense once the Teamspeak 3 server goes gold, and when group announcements will serve as a better way of alerting people of when stuff will be happening.

For now, many people simply start up games and can generally find enough people to invite more people and get a FO (friends only) game going within a reasonable (for L4D anyways) time.

One thing to remember about L4D is that people generally don't have the game started unless interest is generated around getting a game going. With all the rage quitting and bad people (like myself) out there, its almost as if its better to not play L4D unless you have someone else to share that special gaming experience with.

And with that said, currently Valve has banned me from...doing stuff in Steam Community. So until then, I actually don't have control of the group (needless to say I could just ask Kebab to do stuff of course).

That does make me wonder though, the game has been out only for what, a month and 2 weeks? I had put up these polls to gauge activity on when we need to organize to keep the interest alive. Are people burning out on the game? Or are we in need of getting organized now?