Apr 19th 2013, 20:10:31
I see very little of the in-game or on-board stuff having a great effect.
While there are exceptions, the FFA community is probably more willing to give new players a chance to thrive on their own than the other servers. As others have said, if you tag up in a clan, even a solo clan, and announce your presence, you'll be given a certain level of respect. Successfully retal a few hits and you'll probably be left alone almost completely (especially once the grabbing war clans like NBK and IMP find targets).
In addition, any negative banter on these boards is no worse than what is on forums on virtually any other game I've seen, so if you turn people off with that, they're the type of people who would've been turned off by such talk with ANY game.
Lastly, in-game policies aren't driving people towards or away from the game. I know Dragon had his fit last set about NBK attacking, and ESD players are mostly off this server right now, but for the most part, war clans declaring on netting clans on this server doesn't happen often enough to truly be driving people away. Sure, if NBK declares on PAN for every set from here moving forward, they'll probably basically kill our clan and drive people away, but NBK declaring on us once every two years isn't driving people away. Neither is land-trading. People don't run away from this server because land-trading occurs. Besides, as ZIP pointed out and Primeval agreed with, our land-trading and 1:1 atmosphere actually ends up benefiting the other players as well for getting to their land goals.
The problem with this game is pretty well summed up by what bstrong said: it's not a game that will draw people in that aren't already interested in the game. I don't know how far back this game goes, but I know I first stumbled across it and starting making noobish rainbow countries back as a high schooler, so probably around 97-98. Back then, this was about as good as it got for internet gaming. Current internet games have much better graphics than even the best CONSOLE systems had in 1998.
I'm sure marketing could help, but I think unless the current admins wanted to try to create some type of cheesy graphic interface for playing the game, I'm not sure how we drastically increase membership other than through word-of-mouth.
WE are the best marketers for this game because we're the ones who can tell people why it's fun and why we keep playing a text-based game. Outside that, it's a game that's likely to continue to decline unless some major overhaul happens that would have equal chances of saving the game (by bringing in new people) and destroying the game (by driving away all the current players).
Having said that, I laughed when I read Primeval's response of "tax breaks."
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