Productive Discussion on Population

[Xog]

Ephemeral I appreciate your approach however the SSCouncil is in full support of the community taking charge of things like this. I have the full support of several SSCouncil members, and they definitely do want the population to increase, however it's not something that they are going to be taking charge of because they have other things to do. So please give your ideas as to why people are leaving the game, unless you think we have covered all the bases in 5-7 lines.

[Pressure Drop]

during the boom in popularity the game diversified into many diff sub games and arena's that ppl found fun and ultimately became the reason they logged in.

as the population declined , due to competing games both stealing new players and current ones as well as the normal retirements we reach a threshold population where there isn't enough to run these arenas and thusly ppl have even less fun and leave at a quicker rate.

i don't have any stats that just been my experience off friends etc ... that affected euro times first and now the threshold has also dropped even in american time from what i've seen.

another factor would be the strange lag that i sometimes get :/ as do other euro's where the s2c has ploss

this has never been that much of a newb friendly place, "pubbers" are looked down upon and yet thats were they will start. They are now so empty it's basically whatever the first pub is that will be their experience and it's impossibly to keep everyone happy as there is a conflict between pure pub and LT pub ... yet if we want to bring players into TWD pure pub would be best imo. It would be harder now for new players to get used to the skills and practice in as there is less squads and less competition and less activity in the sub arenas ?go base ?go javs ?go elim etc

[Ephemeral]

No one has ever been misled nor has anyone ever been promised that this game would evolve. Those who control the game have never had a mission statement (or desire) stating growth is an objective. SS simply ‘is’, existing on its own original merits. Be thankful that they are willing to support its continued existence.

Unless or until this ^ changes, nothing else in this thread matters. Discussing, debating, or yapping about the state of the game is useless until/unless those who control it decide that change is somehow is desirable.

[Fit of Rage]

I have said this plenty of times and I will say it one more time. Instead of spending 10 dollars to advertise here and 10 dollars to advertise there on sites and other crap where we don't hit the target audience for people who would be ok to play this game, save up the money and do a huge one month advertisement orgy fest.

Advertise on websites where people go to play old games or don't mind playing games with old graphics or think that old graphics are nostalgic.

I can't tell you how many comments I have seen on armorgames and kongregate that people enjoy the old 8bit graphics on the flash games whenever people use them.

SO all you have to do is target people from the golden age of gaming in your advertisements, showing a picture of a cool 3d HD ship flying isn't going to get the right people to play because its false advertisement.

---

1. Heres what you do, zone messages periodically throughout the day telling people were saving up for a huge marketing campaign where we advertise HARD for a month. Ask for donations and ask people to create a banner that explains to our target audience what TW is really about. A small community, free game, old graphics, great leagues, amazingly easy to use chat function etc etc etc you know the stuff that keeps us all playing.

2. Setup an advertisement site that clearly outlines where we are going to advertise to and that 100% of the donated money is going to go towards this advertisement campaign.

3. Try to strike bargains with websites like www.armorgames.com, www.kongregate.com (which is reallly game friendly), and websites like www.romnation.com, basically any website that hosts games and has games for download from the NES/Sega/SNES days where people cared more about the game than the graphics. Offer something like a discount on advertising on their site, or having our game listed as their "special game of the month" in return for having a banner and link for their website mixed into our twsites banner. See if we can't get it a bit cheaper if we do this.

----

So basically the idea is really simple, advertise on websites where people don't play games for amazing graphics, advertise to people who want to play a game with a great community over dealing with doing automated quests given from a NPC 24/7.

On top of this maybe if anyone here runs their own IT firm or works in Management at an IT company you could even offer a job reference to people who are willing to help us write code for our game, they would get some experience and get a job reference from a credible IT firm or manager of one.

Come uo

This is all great stuff, well written. If the campaign is structured in this way, I'll probably donate to it.

[Epinephrine]

We need to bring back Philbo! or was that Filbo... either way.

[Xog]

If you read my entire first post, you could have summed that whole post into:

"No tutorial arena"

[Turban]

ANSWER: there's STILL no fucking tutorial arena. and it's a false claim that "no new players joining the game"... several new players join this game, rather this zone, on a daily basis. the problem is that they simply don't stay here long enough (from minutes to hours to days).

reason? no good tutorial arena to teach them how this zone works and why it's so awesome (?!). it's not the stupid racism policy we have, it's the tutorial arena!

sleep. why did i wake up (after 10mins of sleep, rawr. euro online at 6am) to reply anyways.

ps: not sure if that made any sense, but whatever. :wub:

[Xog]

Kthx that's what we were planning on doing. L.C. has already agreed to take charge and be responsible for the donation fund and PoLiX also agreed that he would send biller messages once in a blue to do assist advertisement funds. In fact I've already made a post about that kind of advertising however it's nowhere near cheap at all and is extremely pricey. We're still in the works with getting prices together and we're still brainstorming on which sites would be best to fit our needs. If you'd like to discuss that I ask that you send it in a private message or make/find another thread for it.

Thanks for the post Kthx, we've discussed most of this in game already and would like to make a note right here and say that this thread is not about ideas for advertising or ideas on how to increase population. The only purpose for this thread is to come up with any type of idea about why the population is declining because it's not one simple answer. I'd like to hear any type of factor anybody here has.

[kthx]

I mean shit if you have to make us of our games creator when talking to websites about advertisement, tell them this was one of Priitk's pet projects and tell them the history of the game and how he cracked the code and what not. Explain that he went on to code shit like Kazaa and was someone high up in the creation of Skype. Im certain his name still holds some weight and he did create this game technically after all.

[kthx]

I have said this plenty of times and I will say it one more time. Instead of spending 10 dollars to advertise here and 10 dollars to advertise there on sites and other crap where we don't hit the target audience for people who would be ok to play this game, save up the money and do a huge one month advertisement orgy fest.

Advertise on websites where people go to play old games or don't mind playing games with old graphics or think that old graphics are nostalgic.

I can't tell you how many comments I have seen on armorgames and kongregate that people enjoy the old 8bit graphics on the flash games whenever people use them.

SO all you have to do is target people from the golden age of gaming in your advertisements, showing a picture of a cool 3d HD ship flying isn't going to get the right people to play because its false advertisement.

---

1. Heres what you do, zone messages periodically throughout the day telling people were saving up for a huge marketing campaign where we advertise HARD for a month. Ask for donations and ask people to create a banner that explains to our target audience what TW is really about. A small community, free game, old graphics, great leagues, amazingly easy to use chat function etc etc etc you know the stuff that keeps us all playing.

2. Setup an advertisement site that clearly outlines where we are going to advertise to and that 100% of the donated money is going to go towards this advertisement campaign.

3. Try to strike bargains with websites like www.armorgames.com, www.kongregate.com (which is reallly game friendly), and websites like www.romnation.com, basically any website that hosts games and has games for download from the NES/Sega/SNES days where people cared more about the game than the graphics. Offer something like a discount on advertising on their site, or having our game listed as their "special game of the month" in return for having a banner and link for their website mixed into our twsites banner. See if we can't get it a bit cheaper if we do this.

----

So basically the idea is really simple, advertise on websites where people don't play games for amazing graphics, advertise to people who want to play a game with a great community over dealing with doing automated quests given from a NPC 24/7.

On top of this maybe if anyone here runs their own IT firm or works in Management at an IT company you could even offer a job reference to people who are willing to help us write code for our game, they would get some experience and get a job reference from a credible IT firm or manager of one.

Come uo

[Crescent Seal]

lack of motivation....atleast for me, i started in 2008 and dded tons to get better...even tho im captaining a squad right now...i have no motivation at all to play the game anymore...dont even care if i go negative in dds or anything, rather troll the forums and sign onto tw to talk to a couple of friends

[Thorkell]

1) The people who grew up playing this game have grown up and gotten real lives.
2) The people that will never grow up and amount to anything plague the game and discourage newbies from starting.
3) Way too much staff emphasis on all the wrong things (More stupid events/maps, stupid rules [racism, teamkilling, etc])
4) Not enough emphasis on more productive things (TWL Offseasons, pubs, marketing, etc)
5) There needs to be a total reforming of staff, top to bottom. The one we have now obviously isn't working.
6) Lack of a usable introduction into the game, and transition from pub to TWD to TWL. (Not enough squads run by Burnt)
7) Server instability. Its an old game, but we don't have to stay ancient. Swallow your pride and upgrade to ASSS already. If you don't want to do all the work, contract some of it out to your player base. I don't know shit about coding, but there is plenty of technically savvy people in TW that could work to fix this zone. Let us help ourselves, I for one don't need somebody like lilwade or charis, who were both in diapers when I started playing this, telling me whats best for this game.

1. Agreed

2. Yes and No. I myself have grown up and own two businesses and try to help out any new players any chance I get. I do see your point though. There are a lot of "grown" people that still think that swear words and the word Newb is the cool thing to say.

3. Yes and No again. I myself am not an even person but people like them. Nothing wrong with people who are not tech savy running events. I myself think the rules are fine but are to hard to enforce. I will never let any of my kids play this game due to the racism and language. Don't get me wrong, the occasional bad joke is not a big deal but some people are flat our racist.

4. Agreed

5. Mostly agreed. I think there is some good staff still but other staff that was good has just lost interest.

6. Agreed again. To hard to learn the game without someone to help you and there are few people that are willing to help. Bring back the ZH and let the answer questions and maybe run squads that help new players learn what squads are about.

7. Agreed 1 million percent. I quit playing this game for a couple years mainly due to the fact that I could not stand the lag issues.

Other thoughts:

Pub i'm sure is fun and all but Squads are what really make this game. Maybe make more for squads to do, not sure what but maybe just change some maps around like a TWDD with walls and stuff to hide behind or a TWDD/TWJD that is a race instead of an elimination.

The more squads the better. Maybe allow people to double squad and if the game somehow grows and there are 100 squads again then take that ability away.

I know we all love the trees in space. But to someone new to the game it just looks tacky. Get rid of the trees.

[Arobas+]

1) The people who grew up playing this game have grown up and gotten real lives.
2) The people that will never grow up and amount to anything plague the game and discourage newbies from starting.
3) Way too much staff emphasis on all the wrong things (More stupid events/maps, stupid rules [racism, teamkilling, etc])
4) Not enough emphasis on more productive things (TWL Offseasons, pubs, marketing, etc)
5) There needs to be a total reforming of staff, top to bottom. The one we have now obviously isn't working.
6) Lack of a usable introduction into the game, and transition from pub to TWD to TWL. (Not enough squads run by Burnt)
7) Server instability. Its an old game, but we don't have to stay ancient. Swallow your pride and upgrade to ASSS already..

All true

1) The people who grew up playing this game have grown up and gotten real lives.
2) The people that will never grow up and amount to anything plague the game and discourage newbies from starting.
3) Way too much staff emphasis on all the wrong things (More stupid events/maps, stupid rules [racism, teamkilling, etc])
4) Not enough emphasis on more productive things (TWL Offseasons, pubs, marketing, etc)
5) There needs to be a total reforming of staff, top to bottom. The one we have now obviously isn't working.
6) Lack of a usable introduction into the game, and transition from pub to TWD to TWL. (Not enough squads run by Burnt)
7) Server instability. Its an old game, but we don't have to stay ancient. Swallow your pride and upgrade to ASSS already. If you don't want to do all the work, contract some of it out to your player base. I don't know shit about coding, but there is plenty of technically savvy people in TW that could work to fix this zone. Let us help ourselves, I for one don't need somebody like lilwade or charis, who were both in diapers when I started playing this, telling me whats best for this game.

[Jones]

time