TWD Player Retention

[Kassius]

Not sure if this is something that's already done, but looking at the list of Free Agents on the TWD site makes me wonder if any steps are taken beyond some of the e-mails sent out for TWDT signups to get players back.

Something like, 'We've noticed you haven't played TWD for a while...', maybe a one-question survey, 'WHY?', with some multiple choice answers for feedback, and a space to write a comment.

Maybe some big pubbux reward to return and play 3 games of TWD within a week too.

[qan]

This is a cool idea, but we'd need someone to take it on. We also don't have emails for many people.

Attaching a TWD account to an email address might be interesting. Everyone else does it... kind of standard these days. Could still play with it unverified, but then provide some kind of bonus for having a verified address. Maybe being able to earn spacedollars for playing TWD matches, something like that.

[Rab]

As always, the TWD retention issue comes down to:

1. TWL always destroys TWD, so the community you make never lasts.
2. There's no tooling for players and squads to find each other, e.g. "This squad is open, click here to join it".

[Nipple Nibbler]

Some good ideas here. Touching on Rabs second point there, An idea if there is a way for squads to post somewhere the ship types squads are currently looking for, and players can post ships they play for squads to find. For example I know awhile ago suspiria had tons of players but lacked sharks (not looked at roster in awhile they might have found some). I have tons of ideas like this for our TWD site if qan or Wirah ever find the motivation to work on it.

[qan]

Will do my best to avoid mild annoyance here, but I work more than full time, am the head sysop managing the upper staff team, do a lot of the bot maintenance, handle settings, maps and server maintenance, head up the Steam efforts, am working with folks to get the Discord made official/used as another distribution platform, and to top all of that off, I'm not a webdev. (What I do with web is pretty limited strictly to what are called "hacks." Dirty fixes that are not best practice and can often cause things to break if too many are piled on top of one another. The TWD site is a large succession of hacks, really.)

The site really needs a rewrite at this point, especially to be adding on more features. That's a large project. Every active dev is a grown adult with a life, and as I said in another thread, any time we allocate to code for TW is cut from the margins of an already packed schedule. If you want something done, ask a busy person, they say, sure. But at some point it's just too much. If someone wants to pay a 3rd year college kid to redo the site over the summer, that's probably the best bet. I'll bet you someone would do it for $1-2K and the resume padding. Get a collection going?

But if you expect to snap your fingers and have it done, you have to realize that we're just not kids anymore and the time just isn't there. Not while maintaining sanity, at least. And there's a lot of finger-snapping going on. The easy stuff goes in. If you want something more complicated done, maybe put together a precise design for exactly what you want and why. Think of all the little things that could go wrong, and how it could be handled. (A very simplified example is the game cutoff for recognition on TWD maps. Think of the details, basically.) That's half the work right there. Would remove a decent chunk at least. Or, yeah, hire Braden at $20/hr over the summer. I dunno, man. We're all just doing what we can. I hardly even play anymore, and if I do it's usually on an alias so people don't bother me.

[Shadowmere]

Will do my best to avoid mild annoyance here, but I work more than full time, am the head sysop managing the upper staff team, do a lot of the bot maintenance, handle settings, maps and server maintenance, head up the Steam efforts, am working with folks to get the Discord made official/used as another distribution platform, and to top all of that off, I'm not a webdev. (What I do with web is pretty limited strictly to what are called "hacks." Dirty fixes that are not best practice and can often cause things to break if too many are piled on top of one another. The TWD site is a large succession of hacks, really.)

The site really needs a rewrite at this point, especially to be adding on more features. That's a large project. Every active dev is a grown adult with a life, and as I said in another thread, any time we allocate to code for TW is cut from the margins of an already packed schedule. If you want something done, ask a busy person, they say, sure. But at some point it's just too much. If someone wants to pay a 3rd year college kid to redo the site over the summer, that's probably the best bet. I'll bet you someone would do it for $1-2K and the resume padding. Get a collection going?

But if you expect to snap your fingers and have it done, you have to realize that we're just not kids anymore and the time just isn't there. Not while maintaining sanity, at least. And there's a lot of finger-snapping going on. The easy stuff goes in. If you want something more complicated done, maybe put together a precise design for exactly what you want and why. Think of all the little things that could go wrong, and how it could be handled. (A very simplified example is the game cutoff for recognition on TWD maps. Think of the details, basically.) That's half the work right there. Would remove a decent chunk at least. Or, yeah, hire Braden at $20/hr over the summer. I dunno, man. We're all just doing what we can. I hardly even play anymore, and if I do it's usually on an alias so people don't bother me.

The cold never bothered me anyway...

[Nipple Nibbler]

qan I never meant to offend, I am aware people have lives, IRL > old video game. There are still a lot of bugs with the old TWD site and just about everything (bots, sites, etc) with the game desperately needs some quality of life improvements. We all appreciate the work that does get done and I didn't mean to imply that those doing said work are lazy or anything like that.

I am a stay-at-home stepdad at the moment, I only work part-time. I have more time on my hands then I know what to do with. Feel free to PM me on discord if there is some monkey work I can help with to save you or Wirah some time, I am no dev but I am sure I can help with things like any data that needs to be manually input or updating dt rosters with trades, stuff like that.

[qan]

Heh, don't mind me. Was just venting a bit. It's an old story with dev. The problem is, as you say, many people would like to help but aren't sure how to do that.

Roster updating might be a possibility. Not sure, could see what Wirah and WingZero think about that one. Everything's pointed to you being a very trustworthy guy so that wouldn't be an issue. Maybe those guys can think of other small but necessary tasks that could be taken on.

Really, even just detailing what the problems are can help. For example, the several issues you pointed out before. I put them all into one ticket at the time, though. Ideally they would be in separate tickets. If you use :robohelp:!bug and give a brief description when you come across something, that would be helpful. That sends to our Slack and we're able to fairly easily make a ticket from it. Need to start making webdev tickets, though, as right now they're just attached to the bots repository.