Overview of Donation Funds - aka LET'S SPEND ALL THE MONEY

[qan]

Just wanted to remind everyone to bother your local upperstaff & sysops to spend more of your donation money. We now have $6.2K unspent -- quite a war chest. Let's start thinking of some creative uses for it, especially to generate a buzz for Steam.

See where your money is spent (or not spent) -- it's yours after all: http://trenchwars.org/donationdetails/

Staff is holding a meeting this Sat regarding marketing. We have $2.1K that can only be spent on marketing! We've spent around $500 so far ($2.6K total donated for just advertising). The 420chan campaign was quite inexpensive and gave us quite an influx. Steam is now giving us a greater influx. Let's capitalize on it.

OK, time for a quick rundown of the funds (F-U-N-D-S, F-U-N-D-S, F-U-N-D-- god damnit, 3rd earthquake in a week!).


CASH EVENTS - $148
So we've spent a lot on cash events. Players like these. However, IMO we do it too infrequently. We also tend to only do it for "pro" events, or in other words ones I can't win unless it's 13 years ago. In the interest of making me money, I recommend we start:

• Adding more small cash prizes to regular, newbie-friendly events, especially weekend events. Massive game of multi-tiered zombies? (Speaking of, when was the last time someone hosted a good game of zombies? Used to be the lifeblood of the zone. Now it's all javufc, go base and 2hardc0r4u)
• Adding gift prizes for TW merch, with a choice of options. Hat with SS logo, hoodie w/ one of the ship logos/icons, or some design on a t-shirt. (Need designers; yes, we pay.)

ADVERTISING - $2125
We've had some small campaigns in the past, and now we need to change it up, especially with Steam. A lot of people have ideas about where to do this and what places to advertise, and it's really helpful to hear roughly 400 different options, especially if you talk about why they'd be such a good place to advertise, or you even figure out their rates. Other ideas that haven't been talked about a lot:

• Do tabling events at conventions & schools. I'll man a table, gladly, if you pay my hotel fee and it's nearby! Any attractive female players want to table? :P Seriously, nerds love attractive women, and also old video games. If they see attractive women play a video games they'll be much more likely to play that game. And you can table anywhere really. Even at Fred Meyer if you tell them you're a nonprofit org! Schools might be best, though... start a Continuum club at your school, get your friends to sign on, then get a budget and start the drive.
• Pay designers small fees to create professional-looking logos to support the Steam launch. Any designers? Ask for specs after this weekend.

CHARITY - $706
This is an odd category. A lot of people gave for this category, perhaps imagining they were saying, "Yes, this donation is charity to TW." We have a lot of people whose first language is not English too (not that there's anything wrong with that). Basically the category is for us to give money to charitable video-game-related causes:

• Child's Play, giving kids with cancer, AIDS and SuperAIDS video games before they die alone in the hospital Good cause! Except we should request the money goes toward internet-connected laptops with SS installed.
• Extra Life 2013 (Nov 5), where you play video games for 24 hours and get people to sponsor you. TW could sponsor TW players in this endeavor.
• Ablegamers Foundation, a charity helping the disabled, handicapped and other ne'er-do-wells have access to videogames.
• GamesAid, a UK gaming foundation for kids.

DEVELOPMENT- $146
My favorite category. $0 spent in the history of Trench Wars! Here are a few ideas:

• Bounties for difficult bugs: we pay coders bounties for bugs that have plagued us for years now, such as the bot disconnection bug. Also bounties for cleaning up the database and so forth. All the tough jobs that nobody ever does because their time and skills are worth way too much money to bother doing anything but what they'd like, rather than what the zone needs! At least that's how I've seen dev work over the years.
• Prizes for map refurbishments & new high-quality events: when it's done well that is. People don't put the time or effort they could into maps. I don't see excellent but tactful LVZ work much anymore. New maps + the event code to go with are rare. Why not give the map designer and coder $10 for a brand new event? Something to show it's appreciated, the enormous amount of time, effort and creativity put into it. People have no idea how long dev takes; it's... a lot of time. And it's not easy.
• Advertising for new developers: We need devs badly. We need good devs. We don't need them to have played SS if they're good. Video game devs get a great education via TW. It's a great learning environment and you can even put it on a resume... we just have to find the right people with the right skills who are willing to work for free for what ordinarily they would get paid around $40-120/hr for. In other words, we need very intelligent idiots, or just very nice people.
• Fixing this forum so when you use bold/italics/underline it doesn't jump back when you press Home, End or Ctrl to jump over words and then hit backspace. God that shit's annoying.
• Just give it all to me. For nachos. All the nachos.

STAFF CHOICE - $3111
Here's the big daddy! The open fund. Spend it on whatever we want. So any and all of the above, of course. My personal picks:

• Merch designer/manager: Hire someone on to design all the TW/SS merch, give them a small bonus after a significant body of work is produced (maybe $100-200) and then a percentage on the back end (% of all profits). Good motivator to create high quality stuff, no? Then we can sell it, which puts MORE money in the fund, AND we can give away the merch at-cost.
• Hookers 'n' blow (all the fund)
• Advertising, advertising, advertising. Every dollar spent is a dollar well-spent. Especially if we use a lot of variety and target the right populations. It's also cheaper than you think. In particular I think we've underutilized both the teenage angsty market, and the old man living in his mother's basement and still playing old computer games market. Both are ripe for plunder.

Please add any ideas you have for how to spend our community's massive pile of cash.

[qan]

Forgot to add:

• Servers: Would be great to see Dev, Teamspeak and a few other servers paid for by the fund, and hosted on a reliable server so that the gentlemen who DDOS'd the last one can't repeat their wacky little whiny kid antics.

[Ephemeral]

... The 420chan campaign was quite inexpensive and gave us quite an influx. Steam is now giving us a greater influx...

Is this a 'gut feeling' or is there some real empirical data that most of us don’t know about?

When it comes to money, whether it is the donations or the fact that some of us actually paid for this game, accountability is important. You can't just wave your hands in the air and say something 'gave us an influx'. Show us actual numbers, show us the how 'the influx' is being measured so we can all see if this stuff is working or not. How is it determined if the 'influx' is the result of donation money being spent vs. other things that are simultaneously being implemented?

My opinion is that no one really knows if there has influx other than casual observation. I am betting that no one can say with assurance how many of the 'influx' are sticking with the game vs. how many just came in for a look. In my opinion it is time to stop blowing smoke up our asses like this and start delivering some real metrics and accountability.

If development of meaningful population metrics had been done and published to the population we were have something other than smoke to talk about. Instead we got endless ‘good ideas’ implemented without any population context or other way to measure their success or failure. And now you expect everyone to gather around and support the application of money based only upon cheerleading? Sounds like ‘spend and hope’ to me.

My ‘idea’ is to develop population metrics (hopefully ones that can be used with existing historical data) to get a baseline for TW activity. Publish this information for everyone to see and understand. Stop implementing/changing multiple things at the same time. Require that any new ideas or features show a positive effect on the metric within some period of time. Keep only those that have a positive effect on the game. Developing good metrics is tricky but not hard and frankly any metrics are better than smoke.
eph

[qan]

The influx was measured via a script that showed who visited our site from where, and if they downloaded the game, and if they also entered and played the game, and if so what their in-game name was. No metrics were made but a lot of new players came from 420chan, at least. Steam I can't say for certain, but it's bringing back a lot of old hands.

If you're into doing metrics I think that's an amazing and extremely useful idea. That said, I don't see myself doing it, and I don't see anyone else on staff doing it, because essentially we are all lazy except about the things we are passionate about, like most humans.

Also, trying to link metrics to specific changes is extremely difficult unless you also survey players. That's a task in and of itself. You also have to trust that they are not lying, like those drug studies where they trust 12 year olds not to fill in the box that they've done heroin because they think it's funny.

[Ephemeral]

I mentioned that metrics can be tricky. They can be tricky because they are numeric generalizations and like any generalizations can be used incorrectly. People who don’t understand them are those who sit in the peanut gallery and throw out exceptions as a means to discount their value. (For example, ‘That’s guy’s .375 batting average doesn’t mean shit, I saw him strike out three times last night.’)

“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” Lord Kelvin

I am not ‘into’ metrics, I am ‘into’ the real world. In the real world nothing gets financed and new ideas don’t get implemented unless they can be measured as a success or not. In the real world no company would make 4-5 changes to a product, sit around for months arguing over the changes while sales continue to slip away, then make another 4-5 changes, then argue some more, repeat same over and over. (Ditto in the scientific world.) TW history is to ‘shotgun’ ideas (surely one of the ideas will hit) while never being able to determine their impact. Was the increase in traffic due to pub bucks or due to a holiday map? Or was it 420chan? Or????

I respectfully disagree that only surveys would link changes to the metrics. But I do agree that additional metrics derived from player surveys would enhance metrics only gleaned from traffic. But any metrics would be far better than having nothing. It is also true that making multiple contemporaneous changes in the game makes it more difficult to understand any metrics that might be in place. In other words, there is little value in having any metrics if the practice of changing several things at once does not cease.

Anyone chump can write code and develop some metrics; it isn’t rocket science and would take far less effort than pub bucks or an achievement system. Give me read only access to the DB or at least give me the DB schema and I’ll do the discovery and write the necessary queries required for basic traffic metrics. In terms of publishing the metrics I don’t do PHP but am proficient in ASP if a server is available. If the queries are deemed expensive we can simply run them once a week or on demand (before or after a change has been made).
eph

[Ephemeral]

Ok, someone sent me a link which reflects some data from the database. By tweaking the link to view the raw data for the number of downloads and visits since 2012-09-26. I charted this and added a trend line as shown below.



Does anyone know why I cannot get data before 2012-09-26? As is shown in the graph it does indeed appear that download went up 5/19/2013, was this the date that Steam came on line? When did 420chan come online?
eph

[paradise!]

As an active Member of the Bot Dev team and an active and contributing member of the TW community, I would like a portion of the proceeds for Charity to go to the Ethiopian Orphan Relief organization based in Beaverton, OR.

Here is a link to their site: http://ethiopianorphanrelief.org/. Thank you.

[Dezmond]

Ok, someone sent me a link which reflects some data from the database. By tweaking the link to view the raw data for the number of downloads and visits since 2012-09-26. I charted this and added a trend line as shown below.

Does anyone know why I cannot get data before 2012-09-26? As is shown in the graph it does indeed appear that download went up 5/19/2013, was this the date that Steam came on line? When did 420chan come online?
eph

This isn't much but it's a start:
http://trenchwars.org/dezmond/steam/stats

^^ The top table is downloads coming from subspace-continuum.com with a specific ID, specifying it came from Steam.
The second table is new players in SSCU Trench Wars, I cannot determine how many new players there are in total through multiple SSC Zones

Thanks to 24 for the graph and such!

[qan]

Nice! See, we did have some metrics, haha :> Just didn't know if someone had put in the time. See, we're not so lazy after all!

Dez, the graph also helps quite a bit in showing that the time the 420chan campaign began (think late Sep-early Oct maybe?) the population did spike a fair bit, and I think we're seeing the same thing with the difference between Apr and May of this year.

Whether the money was worth it is hard to say... I think we can target our audience a bit better and for cheaper, but that was one place I knew would respond decently -- they like quality video games regardless of age, and they're internet-savvy like most chans. Ideally an oldgames/free multiplayer games site would be the best place to put the advertising dollars, I think ... quite inexpensive for the most part, and exactly the market. That is, they came to the website to buy steak. We have filet mignon already cooking.

[roxxkatt]

[roxxkatt]

how difficult would it be to write something into a pubbot on top of the (hopefully already existing) thing that identifies new players (not new aliases) and charts the number of new players over time?

[roxxkatt]

advanced achievement:

after set intervals, track how many are still there