Okay, so we know the server is enveloped in war right now. Okay cool beans.

I was talking with some fellow alliance-mates and had an idea.

Has anyone considered making a facebook app for this game? I know it sounds trivial, but if we want to grow the userbase from the dwindling 700-800 members it is currently teetering at it's a possibility. I know we have some very smart people who play this game, and I think we could really make something out of it.

I'm sure this has probably come up before.

Farmville takes less time to play per day than this game. If people end up liking it the would be able to access all the Alliance main page/applications via sidebar links. This could potentially lure in a lot of new players.

I essentially envision the project as something that essentially brings the user UI into the facebook platform. Easy to use, easy to understand.

If we were able to somehow sink some ad-money into it as a community thing it could really take off and not cost an extra time to those who run the game, yet they could potentially see a boost in membership/gamership.

Just an idea, but we all love this darn game and want to see it continue and grow. I'm also drinking. So sh.

like

http://forums.earthempires.com/...mp;z=bugs-and-suggestions



lotsa times.

is this a troll post?

from what i remember, when this game first got created, a facebook app was a priority, but the developers saw a similar game go live on facebook and some fluffed up fluff happened, so they backed out.

i could be wrong here, but that is what i remember happening.

Mrford, not a troll post. I was legit interested, but couldn't find the post. Sorry for the rehashing of an old idea

This idea gets posted at least once every month.

just scared that if ee made it to fb, then zynga will buy the app..

Guys... someone should develop a facebook app for this game.

What kind of fluffed up fluff?

A shamefully embellished line from the one man around here who is supposed to remain perfectly objective at all times.

I bet once every two months, tops :p

The dev team has been phoning it in for the last year. The game has long since been transferred from ICU to hospice. QZ is only keeping it alive out of pity, so that the pathetic EE community can continue to distract its self from self reflection. The next significant hardware expense will probably be the end of days for Pang's little experiment.

FWIW, nobody plays FB games anymore anyway, that ship had sailed.

Wouldn't hurt to try. Secondly millions of people play facebook games. Thirdly this is mehuls experiment not pangs. Fourthly sim city this is more like sim fluffty!

hehe ya archaic - actually, over 235 million people played games on facebook last year, my man :p

just a few peeps, right? :p

i would never do it.
and i deactivated my account over a year ago.

but 235 million fluffing people played games on that fluff last year.
wrap your mind around that

Whooptee doo. That's under 4% of the world's population. Facebook is over.

235 million is the new dozen.

archaic is full retard

never go full retard

That's probably my fault. My campaign to smear PDM on the boards lead to turning him into one of the biggest trolls on these boards. Prior to my campaign he was a quarter retard at best.

- Requiem: Turning quarter retards into full retards since 1999

Make it for MySpace instead.

Then we'd get all the cool kids.

Aren't mobile apps the hotness now instead of Facebook?

I've said it a million times -- I'm not content putting it on Facebook or anything else until I think it's ready to take on new players because we only get one shot at it.

I don't think it's there yet. we lack documentation to get going on solo servers and the community for alliance servers have a VERY steep learning curve and SEVERE penalties for not following the "rules" to the letter of the unwritten law.

the design is very dated and the mechanics needs to be refined and in some places flat out fixed. additionally, the game needs to not just be a FB game, but also a cross-platform app that hits ios+android+bb platforms, which basically requires a redesign with multi-device support.

so that's what we need to do to get it to the point where I'll be happy enough with it to put it out there and start pushing it. we've been spending our time catering to the existing community, putting out fires or trying to optimize/refine the existing code. with qz and I being busy with work, zarc being so consistently busy he's never really ramped up and slag leaving we're left with limited progress on large, public-facing projects. qz did a nice rework of the backend framework, but that won't have any game-changing impact.

archaic is also right, fb games aren't the rage anymore. it's just about making games that can be played on (m)any platforms. btw, we just paid a significant hardware expense and here we are. we run this thing in the black without charging anyone a dime so we're better than Jolt! :p

so we got work to do but not much will to do it right now compared to other stuff.

Ive also said this before. 'Most' of us have jobs, and whilst some i am dead set are unemployed, I would not think twice about donating to this game if i had a roadmap and knew things would get done with timeframes and the right team.

We all have r/l stuff that takes priority. So i don't think anyone here expects pang and the team to do it without charge on their own time.

I don't think twice about shelling out $90 for a new pc game. If most of us chucked in some cash, we could pool a decent amount to really put this game where it needs to be.

We all agree the game needs new players for soooo many reasons.

You're an idiot fazer.

Let's say there are 1000 players on EE (there are far less countries than that on any server). Each donates $5. Now EE has $5k.

That might pay salary for 2 people for 1 month. Cool beans! A big facebook/ios/android undertaking is something that would take several months.

If anything, no plunge will be taken unless the admins are willing to quit their jobs and take the plunge with their savings (it will be a gamble whether it will pay off), and I don't see this happening.

Agreed. Fazer is an idiot.

Xin you are an idiot for calling me an idiot over my comment. Pull your head out of your own ass, i was not offensive, only offering a suggestion to HELP the admins and this topic. So fluff off and pass on your own fluffing sad life to someone else.

And a $5 donation? Are we in kindergarten?? Take the 1000 players and each donate $100 we have $100,000 and a good shot at making something great. Take half the players who have a job and donate $100 and we still have $50,000 to work with. That is no chump change.

And have you never heard of outsourcing? Its not what it used to be, take a project manager role for the guys and outsource the gruntwork.

Anyways kill the game, revamp it, we all spend far too much time on here to do nothing with it... </out>

EE is barely in my top-5 of things I would dump my savings into and/or quit my job for :p
EE is a hobby and it used to be a cool testing ground for some web stuff. Just like Boxcar was before that :)

The likeliest scenario is that I take the money i have saved up from ad revenue + additional money as an investment (not looking for investors :p) and spend it on a new graphic design for the game with a professional (who I would know and approach IRL). The design would be responsive to devices and able to work with multiple resolutions/devices using a single codebase, allowing for streamlined development. Then I would build that + all the app wrappers (which would be much easier with the design being responsive) and qz would fix mechanics/back end stuff (which I'm not going to go into). i've posted on the staff board before about a content roadmap; qz also wants to integrate the forums with the rest of the framework/site which would tie into this effort (content creation) as well. With all the additional work and potential investment, we'd probably open up patron features to remove ads, get more countries in FFA, maybe a restart bonus, maybe I'll send you an autographed photo of Niels Bohr, i dunno....

Once that is complete, the game can relaunched as a nicely wrapped retro game done with modern technologies. that has to be our niche. That is achievable as a hobby, but tbh this game has brought me far more annoyance than enjoyment over the last year and a half so I'm hesitant to do more than make posts from the periphery once in a while. :(

oh and no need to call fazer an idiot for suggesting the only way to get development is to pay the developers... as a developer, I appreciate that sentiment. :)

Oh crap how did I just got the news to not play FB games anymore? *sigh*

The fact that Pang responded to my post makes me feel really important.

Pang, I totally understand with everything you posted about. Thank you for clearing that up and giving a glimpse into what will/could be happening :)

can we call him an idiot because he wants people to play the game his way instead of him adapting to the way they play the game?

the developers should just try to enjoy their hobby until it's capable of making money. plenty of ideas get money thrown at them, yet still fail.

Does MySpace still exists?

I've thought about this a lot, and honestly the best way for this community to grow is for it to grow via word of mouth. its how I came here 10 years ago and I have come back on and off. by bringing this game to mass social circles it'll kill it off more than anything because this community is what keeps the game going.

Pang, I understand the need to pay the developers. But donations is not the way to go about it, and is not a valid business model, and definitely not sustainable. It doesn't even approach anywhere close to KickStarter (which is really a donation trust-based system). And that is why fazer is an idiot.

If anything, an easy way to monetize, can be things like Patron status (say recurring $5 a month) for example, which could automatically credit bonus points to your countries daily without you having to actually go and vote.

Damn by the sounds of it all we should all just quit and play dota?

I can actually think of ee as a zynga app :p where turns are energy points and you have max number of energy points. Haha just like mafia wars haha

mmm i wasn't saying that we were looking for donations, just that I don't think we should be calling people idiots for trying to rally support to help dev. if we wanted to get "donations", we'd do a kickstarter project. your patron idea is great and definitely something we would plan to do if more dev is being done... i already have working code for paypal :p

If Pang/qz took half the time they take posting about how busy they are and imrpoved this game....

Also, if solo servers are so important for new players, why were alliance-based rule changes just forced down the throat of a primary community that almost unanimously was opposed to the changes on that server.

While it would be nice to have a sudden explosion in membership - I fear that we might end up losing what we have. With Facebook you obviously can't cap the number of members. Right now we have a community. Sure, it's shrinking, and sure half of us hate the other half, but when it comes down to it we're all a community. Most of us have been playing this game together for well over a decade. Imagine what would happen if suddenly 2,000 new players joined this game. Would we be able to incorporate all of them and train all of them and teach all of them to play the game by our rules? Would they conform to our culture? We wouldn't be able to control anything or dictate anything. And maybe things will get better, maybe they'll stay the same, but maybe they'll change so much to the point where none of us will even recognize it anymore.

As much as we love to complain about the game and the politics and the people, we all love the game and politics and people; that's why we're sticking around. Opening this up to potentially thousands or tens of thousands of players will basically be the end of Earth as we know it. Just something we need to consider.

I disagree, and would welcome change to the stale politics that haven't really changed for the past decade. If a thousand new players come in and want to shake things up, I think that would be great.

They should not have to conform to our way of doing things, and should be encouraged to innovate and push the boundaries within the realm of game rules.

Thats not a bad idea, taking up a donations thing for maybe another bonus, like a turn bonus or something. Maybe like $5 for 16 extra bonus points only valid once per set, but on all countries.

I'm just basing this on the other forums I frequent where people spend like $15-$30 on a badge that does nothing besides give cool points, but for earth it seems like a bad, bad idea. With people complaining about suiciders and wanting their money back and whatnot.



Seems like it when I type http://www.myspace.com

some people will even pay money to get rid of the captcha's...

but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Kalick, I don't disagree that it could be a huge benefit - but most FB games have tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of members. Our community would be drowned out. Not saying it's positive or negative, just saying that the change would be significant and it's something we need to think about before just jumping at the idea of "more members = good."

OMG awesome.... That sounds great!



Ummm... wow.... did you just say you love the politics as it stands today?

No I don't love the politics as it stands today, but I'm sticking around. There's something about it that's keeping me around, and you, and all of us.

I love ya pang but just to be honest and upfront with you it turns me off to hear you blame us for not caring about the game. I think you might be getting your admin role mixed with your player role?

And to be clear that's not an attack on you. You should be more grateful for your loyal core community that still supports you and plays.

kickstarter?

Who nerco'ed this thread from 3 years ago??!?!

hawkeyee,

a FB/APP version of the game would probably be played on the Primary server, at which we recruit out of.

I doubt the Alliance Server sees a dramatic change, maybe a good influx of new members.

At least that's what I'm hoping it is....

The game itself isn't hard master. In the end it's numbers + strategy. You are right about one thing hawk and that is there is a community here, good and bad. And as it sits the server really sits on 2 sides.

I don't know how that community would handle another say 5k players. I think alot of the alliance leaders love to control and manipulate to stay on top. If an influx of players and potentially 100+ alliances opened up that control might not be so easy to keep.

I think new players can only be a good thing.. . More land, more opportunity for fresh game mechanics and a different story. Same wars blah blah

I also want to point out the flaws of putting a game onto Facebook.

I know friends who own multiple Facebook accounts, just so that they can "gift themselves daily stuff" from their various Facebook games, eg Mafia wars, Farmville, etc. If you have 10 accounts, you could gift yourself 10 free stuff daily.

Likewise, these same players would run multies with different Facebook accounts - you simply cannot and do not have the resources to monitor for this and delete them once your game surpasses a large number of players.

To put it simply, the game mechanics would have to change to be suicide proof, because once players find out any country can be lemminged or killed by someone with 10 Facebook accounts, people will just leave in droves. Netting would be chaos.