Publish a marketingplan

[Summa]

when the person you hired as sysop calls the playerbase a waste of space, you know you hired the right person!

[Lee]

Let me know if u need any help with anything. I am actually working as online marketing manager for a pretty big company and can help out.
I think what most of ss-community does wrong is the constant rivalry between zones, everything would be so much easier if target was to increase the popularity of the game itself and hope that people find the way to the zones naturally. I mean this is how the zones grew in the first place.
I had a campaign in EG trying to get people setup some donations to have a simple google adwords campaign for "free online game", but eventually it came down to fight, where people would just claim that getting traffic to game means they will spread out between zones and thats it.
I think Continuum is pretty much the only game i know, which is dying, but still cannot get zones working together in bigger scale like marketing for example.

[Exalt]

Not to derail your otherwise constructive discussion, but Kickstarter may be a viable marketing and fundraising tool. For those of you who don't know, Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform whereby developers, entrepreneurs, or anybody with a project that needs funding can ask the masses for donations. Kickstarter is probably well known among the intrawebz community for completely funding the Veronica Mars movie as well as Star Citizen. Recently, LeVar Burton raised $1 million dollars for Reading Rainbow in a matter of days. Granted, we are Continuum and Star Citizen is a next-gen game that will have Oculus Rift compatibility, but I have seen many pixelated games receive funding in the thousands of dollars; that meager amount would go a long way for a game like ours. We could set our target fundraising amount to $1000 or even $2000 to start. There are a litany of logistical issues that would need to be sorted out, but Kickstarter does a good job streamlining the process from what I can tell.

https://www.kickstarter.com/

Not to derail this otherwise constructive discussion, but anyone who donates on kickstarter would have to know their money is going somewhere useful. Clearly, nobody in TW is capable of doing that, because there is no central power that makes the decisions and gets things done. There have already been multiple reports of theft and embezzlement as it stands, so it's pointless to even try.

Oh, and kickstarter means you have to be transparent, which nobody in TW Dev is. The few good ones quit long ago anyways, and the "trusted" ones turned out to be thieves. Let's all be honest here and admit that $1500 is a lot of money to show absolutely nothing for. Anyone with common sense should've brought down criminal charges to regain some kind of trust, but this never happened. All we got were excuses to why "we can't finish this, although we will keep the $ thanks!"

Apparently, it's okay to pay a contractor in advance and when they don't finish the job, that's okay with everyone. So when you go pay for a construction company to build your new house later in life, make sure to be okay with them building only half of it, and then saying it's "too difficult" and "we have other obligations, sorry!" and then run off with your money. Then let them start a fundraising campaign to build more houses, and make sure you tell everyone how great a company they are.

[Lee]

Not to derail your otherwise constructive discussion, but Kickstarter may be a viable marketing and fundraising tool. For those of you who don't know, Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform whereby developers, entrepreneurs, or anybody with a project that needs funding can ask the masses for donations. Kickstarter is probably well known among the intrawebz community for completely funding the Veronica Mars movie as well as Star Citizen. Recently, LeVar Burton raised $1 million dollars for Reading Rainbow in a matter of days. Granted, we are Continuum and Star Citizen is a next-gen game that will have Oculus Rift compatibility, but I have seen many pixelated games receive funding in the thousands of dollars; that meager amount would go a long way for a game like ours. We could set our target fundraising amount to $1000 or even $2000 to start. There are a litany of logistical issues that would need to be sorted out, but Kickstarter does a good job streamlining the process from what I can tell.

https://www.kickstarter.com/

Thing with kickstarter is that the investors at some point want money back. Unless TW has some sort of way to actually earn profit, i will find that hard to use. Usually free games have 2 ways of making money. 1) They are not completely free and in order to actually play it, you need to pay money (i am sure this would cut playerbase more if you would actually have to pay real money in order to use shark in bd game for example). 2) Advertising. IN order for advertising to work, you need enough big numbers, so that you would cover at least some target group for some advertiser, for your ads to be in a relevant position.

[LF]

Honestly all trolling aside, I do have a serious question that really does deserve an honest answer... At what point does someone just say "Ok we screwed up, I'm sorry"? Granted apologizing isn't really going to mean shit in the grand scheme of things, but its better than just taking our money and spending it on nothing and saying nothing about it for 4 years. Letting FieryFire walk away from this was the biggest mistake, letting 24 take over it was the 2nd biggest mistake. The plan to get the money IN (FieryFire) worked as planned, but there were no contingency plans and no leadership to take the reigns when FF shut the door on his 'baby'. Has anyone decided what to do with the $12,000 we have left? Or what we're going to do with it when there's no players left in the zone? Realistically speaking, at the current pace of 20ish players leaving per year we have about 1-3 years MAX of sustainability left before we are playing 1v1 twd games and 3v3 TWL with Thunder/Pandora still having a roster of 86 TWL caliber players and claushouse.

I'm not a fan of those who always say "Game is dying" but the topic of "where does the money go if we don't find a constructive way to spend it" question needs to be addressed. Does it get returned to the players minus whatever percentage has already been spent? Is it going to stay in staff hands and distributed amongst yourselves? Does M_M God get to keep it since he's apparently the one in control of it now? Are we just gonna give it all away in cash events to the players/squads that find the most creative way to abuse a loophole in a cash event? Even if nothing else constructive happens with this money we can attribute the current losses to human error/lack of ability and just eat the losses because we have to, but somebody really needs an escape plan on what to do with the rest of it before its too late

[Turban]

well,

we actually have $6,200.60 remaining in our current donation funds as it seems like we are using the funds on small monthly expenses, such as the server costs; this is slowly diminishing our donation pool, but it is necessary unless someone steps up and is willing to pay the cost from their own pocket.

either way, that is still plenty of money to be used for a good cause, such as promoting the game with cost-effective advertisements in the right sites or using it to outsource current projects to trusted sources; e.g. hiring some dedicated web and bot developers and paying them once the project has been completed. there's plenty of good websites that could be used for that purpose.

as for the apology, it should come directly from the person(s) responsible. there is no point for trench wars staff, as a collective unit, to send out an apology to the players as most of us weren't involved in this shit.

we are only human; mistakes are bound to happen to all of us. it's only natural. i would like to think that this screw up was caused by a human error and, thus, should be treated as such as long as the person responsible is being apologetic. yeah, it was on a much larger scale than the usual fuck ups by the players and staff, but in my opinion as long as the player(s) responsible are brave enough to admit their mistakes and are truly sorry about what happened, they should be forgiven.

however, pretending that everything is okay after making us lose money is not an acceptable type of behavior, and if you persist to act like that then quite frankly you can go fuck yourself.

that's my stance on this matter at least.

[Turban]

admitting that you made a mistake the moment it happened, instead of being stubborn and pretending that you did nothing wrong, is the right way to handle situations like these.

learn to use the word 'sorry' and you will be treated better by others. however, if you insist on being a douche then you can't expect others to be as forgiving.

[Fork]

So $1500 is spend to possibly improve the website and 0 players are working on it? Are there any efforts to actually make this happen or staff given up now? How didnt u see this happening before u purchased this? Perhaps let the public decide what to next spend the money on (if u give them a list) so part of the blame can put on the public if it fails.

[paradise!]

AFAIK, the 1500 was spent on the website shell, and that's exactly what we got. Seems to me like the contractor did his job. If you go back to that mega thread in like 2011, a forumer whipped up a perfectly fine website shell in an hour or two. But, Arobas said it wouldn't fit the specs he wants.

Why were we under the impression that a website would fix our problems?

Has anyone decided what to do with the $12,000 we have left?

I came here for this. I am 100% confused on this part. Please answer this question. Why do we keep giving cash event prizes to Turban and Ease? How many hundreds of dollars have they earned from us throwing money at retarded dueling events for an already addicted populace. The newbies know they have no chance. This is the primary reason I don't donate, that and the fact we have no direction marketing wise.

[Exalt]

Why do we keep giving cash event prizes to Turban and Ease? How many hundreds of dollars have they earned from us throwing money at retarded dueling events for an already addicted populace. The newbies know they have no chance. This is the primary reason I don't donate, that and the fact we have no direction marketing wise.

This ^^^^^^^

People didn't donate money so that staff can just hand it away in the form of cash event prizes. I realize that maybe some people did donate for this exact reason, but that should be the ONLY $ used toward anything like that. Even still, it's a waste. Those people don't deserve their money anyways, and I have a very amazing bridge to sell them!

If TW/Subspace ever collectively finds a good reason to give donations, and the entire process is transparent, then I'd have no problem giving some $ away. I just have never once seen a viable reason to do so.

Oh, and 24 should be lifebanned from the zone until he pays some of the money back. Even though he already spent it, he surely was able to take money from the pool, so I think he could donate back into it.

[paradise!]

Oh, and 24 should be lifebanned from the zone until he pays some of the money back. Even though he already spent it, he surely was able to take money from the pool, so I think he could donate back into it.

Every penny is accounted for in the paypal records. 24 never improperly spent the money. Even if he did, it would be recorded. I don't know where Rough is getting his info from.

[kthx]

So I am assuming there is a paid receipt for the coding done on the website, the professional who we paid to do it has a website of his own and wasn't a friend of 24, and I assume we still have links that show how this website looks atleast even if we can't use it due to coding issues from the tw server side?

Because 1500 dollars sounds about right for a tv back then.

[wicket666]

vote 24