The decline continues... Come on, donate donate donate... and you admins, spend spend spend.

has that facebook app thing gone through yet? with 400mill+ people on it you can almost guarantee that we would see a dramatic increase in numbers here, as long as all us earthers did our part and got the word out.

Aye. I literally just messaged Pang to ask about the status of marketing and such like, to see if he could give us an update of where things are at.

400Mil people...... if we get 0.00001% of people that turns into 4000 people, and that would be a HUGE start.

Also i have the feeling that now we have 6 different servers to choose from... that makes it quiet tough to keep everyone playing on EC (now allaince...)

Well, most people play all servers, but nowadays, people are getting older...

Howabout an iPhone app / mobile accessible? Get it on iTunes.... might be another approach other then the Facebook app... at least then Earthers can get on there and give it good ratings.

Forget ideas, they seem to be OK with ideas and have the will to actually implement them. Ideas aren't a problem unless the marketing campaign with free adword failed catastrophically.

The fewer players there are, the harder it will be to build the community back up... I think ALL that is needed now is to spend something like 500$ in publicity over a month and see if it does any good. Giving up if it doesn't help is fine... but money HAS to be spent or this game is going down IMO.

I don't know if many people donated, but I donated 100$ and I'm sure the rest of the game has given more than that in total... So speeeeeeeeeeeeend! No use having a game and money in the bank if "the reset ends" (and by reset, I mean the community is gone)

Could you imagine 4000 n00bs joining in one set!! That would be crazy!! missiles and ab's would be flying everywhere as standard land grabs, Net would be a dirty word, no alliance wars would happen accept tagged countries vs untagged countries, Spam tags galore, it would be Pandemonium out of control chaos.. blood would be every where!!!!

DK Official supports this idea!

I came back on the day that this reset started, I recruited 7 old vets already.

So stop with chit chatting about how the game is losing members, And start to work on gaining members.

If i can do that, Then so can you.

Hi all...

just a few notes on all those things, since I have a meeting in a few minutes :p

1) We're still working on updating the public site & ingame to help retain users we get from marketing. We pay to bring the users in here, and I'm not confident we'll keep enough of them with our current setup to warrant blowing all our money on advertising yet.
2) We're moving toward the Facebook model still -- this requires a lot of work on the core game code to make it work with both setups.
3) qz, slag and I all put a ton of work into things late last year and early this year to get the game ready on time to save the the community and keep it together. There was some fallout for all of us IRL for it, and I know that I've been dealing with that for the last month or two (thesis work ;))

So I guess the short of it is.... the pilot project we did last month showed some positive results, but we still have to do a bit of redesign and content flowing to ensure we retain a large chunk of our leads.
Moving into facebook, we will gain from social marketing through that, and IMO, that is where the future of EE lies. The expansion in servers was done partially for that reason :)

Yup, what pang said; facebook is the way forward, but there's a lot of work to be done before then, especially if we want to *keep* new players. For example, we need to get good help & instructions up and working.... etc

So have some patience, we're going to get to it, but it will take a bit of time, as each of Pang, slag & I have theses to write I believe heh... I suspect we'll each have a lot more time once those are complete.

Conversion rate would be terrible right now. People would take one look at the interface and walk away without trying it.

exactly, Paladine. That is our main worry.

We want to do this right, and doing it right means taking a more methodical approach. I do this kind of stuff at work all the time, and whenever someone wants t jump the gun and dive right into their ad spend for PPC marketing, the budget always gets bled through more quickly and with inferior results compared to a proper, holistic approach.

Also, this info isn't really public yet, but I since Tavi is getting busy IRL, I've been meeting with one of my designer friends at work to get him to work on a new template for ingame & facebook with me. His work is some of the best I've ever seen, so I'm pretty happy to get him on board to help us out. :)

The big thing is that, like qz said, we have theses to work on... once these are done, we'll be in a great position to wrap up outstanding projects quicker and not have a giant responsibility dangling above our heads anymore. :p

Like we've said all along though is that phase 1 is rebuilding the game & working on improving some of the core elements. We are in this phase now, and moving towards the end of it. The second phase is the expansion into new markets - ie developing for Facebook and mobile devices specifically, as that is where our new users will come from.

So I guess the key is patience -- we put off a lot of things IRL to get EE off the ground, so we hope that everyone will understand that we need to balance things out a little for both EE and the staff's careers to move in the right direction. :)

sounds like gold to me.

qzjul said:

"have some patience"

Is she aware that you are offering her out like a complimentary plate of cookies? If so then I am fixing to fire up mah pay pal for you guys!

imagine an iphone app for stone walling alerts!

what other game out there is like that?

wall/news feed updates of when you get grabbed and make kills

much more fun than 'susie q planted corn and bought a pig' (farmville?) at least in my opinion...

add in news feeds of end of set milestones, that if you have a facebook it can display on there as a gift or something.

allow people to send recruiting requests in facebook, "join my awesome clan in this awesome game!" like those 'click to find out if you're a a vampire' dumbass fluff thats on there

the more news you get going to facebook feeds... free advertising right?

hell, hook the fluff up to a twitter account too, so that country update milestones get tweeted out "bobby now has the fattest country on the team server!"

i could totally see that garnerning more interest in the game from the new generation of net users without detracting at all from the actual gameplay experience, and it would be free advertising for the game.

people these days seem to love constant updates of everything thats going on

add in a graphical image of your ruler, so that when people search your kingdom they see your custom little dude you made. let people design the body and clothes and crap ? it could store to main account so it stays set after set... or have different ones for different servers.

random little graphics for attacks could be cool based on the results. add an image of a cheesy looking cartoon marketplace on the public market screen. cheesy looking cartoon fluff graphics seems to do well on a lot of those popular games out these days (evony,farmville etc)

hell you can advertise the game as an evony like game you can actually win. evony never ends... i tried it for a few weeks til i realized i wasted that part of my life... you build up an empire and once its as big as it can get, you just kinda sit there. and then go make another in a new server. so make a little graphic that expands and grows based on the types of buildings you make, your military counts and land counts, with a little missile silo showing your stockpile...

some ideas...

That is a good fund raising campaign + might get us some media attention!

"Online game promotes social interactions... and prostitution"

Bill Gluckmen is down with the beetches and hoes

Also, I just want to take a minute to thank all that have donated to us already.

We'll be setting up the patron system soon (with access to the illusive Patron board) to thank those who donated :)

lol @ advertising like Evony

Let's put bikini photos of Patience, tell people "click here to save the princess!"

There are so many other games out there that make Earth look like an ancient text based game. People are in to games with pictures and animations. I believe that this game needs a complete makeover in order to survive. I hate to be a pessimist but I really don't see this game continuing much further in to the future. If it does, it will be with the 650 or even less players.

Pang, QZ Slag,

Thanks!

As a person who came back to support what you are doing, I say thanks.

As soon as this thing is up on facebook, I will be posting that I have played this game off and on for 13 yrs and ask anyone intereted in trying it.

Keep up the great work!

lol@bellz

that would scare every1 away.

you know what they say, sex sells

I was a patron of Swirve. I demand that my 'lifetime membership' is transferred.

It wasn't your lifetime they were talking about!

ZINGER!

well, go find Mehul and sue him

i think they were talking lifetime of earth 2025... which is clearly at an end =/

i was a patron too btw heh

if it weren't for the fact that EE probably generates more ad revenue then my income atm...

i'd donate too..

we only do that if your income is actually zero......

well, my income is negative, considering all my paycheck goes to my school funding

This place needs more dead zombies.

and boobies, a lot more boobies.



. . . actually some chicks WOULD be kinda nice, earth has always been a sausage factory - but this has gotten worse then a chess club. We are spreading galleri p-r-e-t-t-y thin here . . .

income and debts are different things though! :) you make money! you just owe some to somebody else too!

but when your paycheck goes directly to paying debt, do u really have any income?

so i should go to the bank and ask them for more money?


*CONFUSED*

forgotten, if you don't know what constitutes income, that money you spent on school was definitely a waste.

lol@archaic

Gally ain't only femme at EE, there is Vintage (dating Sir Sepher), Polyphemus (single I think), Ghengis (same as Poly), Morwen (she semi-dates Flamey but .....), Kuari (dates TheWatcher), Dixiechick (no idea), Ruthless (no idea), LadyDivine (married I think), MafiaMama (no idea), Pattycakes (single) and some others.

Me and Patience are a thing. She's the Tim Hortons to my Starbucks :D

you forgot about princess fluff..

oh wait.. never mind:P

*shrugs*

Us girls are around, we just don't advertise ;)

Yeah we totally are!

You can't seriously be making a direct link between the number of players in 1a and the decline of the game popularity rofl. Everyone flees 1a cause of all the server it is the least fun to play.

In express, the amount of players has been relatively the same, considering rounds that occur during the week always have less players.

you cannot defeat.. the metal

lol@llaar!

lol@now3p'slol@llaar!

If anyone is curious, around 1300 accounts have created at least one country for the currently active resets.

ya, we're seeing a migration of users away from Alliance and towards FFA, it seems.

This is almost expected, as the politics and environment in Alliance is still toxic, which is quite unfortunate.

I personally figured that once we had a better group of developers, people would start caring more and trying to establish better order and play the game the fun way we used to, not continue the policies that lead to EC beginning to die.

it's actually up to 700 now :p

712 says boxcar.

2 dead and 8 in protection.

ya, dead countries are only counted for a short period of time