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Pwnyboy-Curtis
Joined: Fri Nov 07, 2008 2:15 pm
Posts: 302
Location: West Coast Canada
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 Re: Advertize the server/mod somehow? I've thought about PR before, and Orange is right, it's not an easy prospect.
First, fresh Freelancer players can only come from a few sources. First there's the "new player", someone who's just discovered (or more likely re-discovered) Freelancer on his own initiative and is looking into the mod community. These days this kind of player is rare because the game isn't exactly accessible, and so they can mostly be ignored as a source. The second is the "referenced player"; similar to the new player, the referenced player is getting into freelancer because someone he knows has gotten him into it. The referenced player is virtually the only source (as far as I can tell, I haven't done a study or anything) of "new meat" in the Freelancer community as a whole, and these players will often try out a few different mods before going back to mainstream gaming. The third source is the "established player"; the established player is an individual who plays Freelancer and its mods, and usually has on and off for some considerable time. The established players seem to find a mod they use as their "core mod", and they play this mod most often, generally keeping to its community. They usually cross over to other communities as well, playing several mods at a time even, and sometimes participating on Starport. Knowing this, what kind of strategy for advertisement could be effective? There are a couple of possible strategies, but there are investments involved (mostly in time and effort), drawbacks, and the very real possibility of ineffectual returns.
There's one thing I want to say upfront relating specifically to the 88flak community. The fact is our server sucks. Mad props to Jay, he's a totally awesome dude for all he's done low these many years, but respect isn't going to make his bandwidth any greater. Laggy game-play is annoying, sometimes frustrating, and possibly joyless. Until we have a server that can handle at least 9 or 10 players without issues, there's little point in attracting new players. All we're going to do is drive off new players who may have potentially enjoyed the game, but will now be soured towards it. A while back we had a proposition for a new server, but that fell flat. Before that even, when we did have a fast server for a brief time, players online skyrocketed, and it wasn't uncommon to see 9-12 players on (4-6 now) with lows of around 2-4 during non-peak time (0 now). A fast server forms the cornerstone of a strong community, and unless this can be addressed no advertising strategies will work to full effect. That said, I still think that our community is smaller than it could be, so I'll look over a few possibilities regarding attracting new players.
The first strategy that comes to my mind is to take advantage of the "referenced player" as the primary source of new players. This strategy is simple, everyone in the Flak community simply asks anyone they know who they believe might be interested to sign up. I'm certain between all of us we could come up with between about 5-10 new players. The first pitfall with this is the difficulty of attaining the game these days. You can only purchase it online, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Beyond that, how many people are going to actually buy a game just to play a mod they're not even sure they'll enjoy? With buying the game eliminated, that leaves the alternative (you know the one). Some people have difficulty with the "second option" as we'll call it, usually because they're not the most savvy with computers. This all adds up to make the game relatively difficult to propagate, and thus cutting down on even the number of referenced players we can expect. Regardless, let's assume we can get a fair amount of referenced players. The second difficulty is retaining these new players. The reality is that Freelancer as a game can get pretty tedious, the action isn't the most intense, the graphics are dated, and the game-play is quite repetitive with only limited "interesting choices" (in a Sid Meier sense). Even if we can get our friends and siblings to join us, how many will want to stick around in the face of, quite frankly, better things they could be doing? Nonetheless some of these players would decide the game is great fun (maybe 1/20?), and could even go on to eventually become established players. When you boil this down you'll see it's unlikely we could get many new players this way, and when we do get new players it's unlikely they'd stay, but still it's a solid option and I think it could be worth our time. In summary, this option is easy to do, has no real drawbacks, but wouldn't be terribly effective in the end.
The second strategy that comes to mind is to bolster the core of our community by trying to draw in more "established players". Since these players invariably reside in other mod communities, this strategy involves convincing them that flak is a better "core mod" for them than what they're currently enjoying. This kind of poaching has a lot of problems involved with it. The first problem is that flak isn't a better "core mod" for them in most cases. What they like about their core mod is generally threefold: first, their mod has an already large established community to play with, giving it a lot of variety and life, second that their mod has a server that can handle all those people, and third that they themselves are already established there, with friends and credits, etc. This will make Flak a secondary mod for most them at best, at least until we can get a better server, and reach a "critical mass" of players which will keep them on board. I stress most because these is a chance some of them will cross over, and this is an important concept. If we intend to reach that "critical mass" we have to get it from somewhere after all. Also advertising on other servers may poach some of their newer players who may yet become established, though these numbers should be fairly low (I think?). The next problem with this strategy is a pretty major one in my opinion. The fact is that if we poach players from other mods it will create no small degree of animosity with other mod communities. The relationships between mod communities is fairly important for word of mouth respect, and for collaboration between modders for resources, etc. Right now Flak has a reputation as a bit of an underdog and a "niceguy" mod community that sticks to itself and doesn't step on anyone's toes. The kind of aggressive poaching we're talking about here would strip us of this reputation and its benefits (a lot of crossover with other mods, good repartee with other modders). We'd have to think long and hard about whether or not the benefits would outweigh the loss of respect. Nonetheless this is a viable option, though I would argue it would only be worth it after we have a faster server, and a slightly larger core community. There are also two ways to really go about this, upfront and covert. Upfront, we just go onto their servers and advertise, register accounts on their forums and advertise, all in the open, plain for all to see. The upfront option would be risky in some communities, perhaps less in others, and some feeling out would be necessary before anything was committed. The covert option would consist of sending some of our trusted core players to infiltrate other communities, play their mods for extended periods (say 6 months or so), make good friends there, join clans, participate on the forums, and then when it's strategically sound to do so start creating some dissent. I imagine this would consist of convincing core players they've become friends with over the months to jump ship back to Flak with them, thus quietly making off with some of their established players without creating quite the fuss that an all out advertising campaign would. These two options would necessarily be deployed strategically depending on the nature of the community in question. Less organized communities with less harsh moderators and admins could be more susceptible to quick and dirty advertising campaigns, while more disciplined and authoritarian communities (disco?) would probably demand a more subtle approach. In summary, the poaching strategy could be the most effective strategy at our disposal but it's quite risky. It could be disastrous as easily as it could be effective if not done carefully. The drawbacks to using it are harsh, probably even if done carefully. Finally, I'm personally uncomfortable with this strategy, and so even in the best of cases I'd be wary giving it recommendation.
The last strategy I can think of is certainly the most difficult. The idea is simple in principle, we create a campaign to promote the Freelancer community as a whole, not 88flak. The reality is, there are only so many people playing Freelancer, if more people play Freelancer, more people will play Flak. Freelancer keeps clinging to life, and every once in a while it needs a kick to keep going, and to mix some new blood in. Nonetheless quite the reverse of the poaching strategy this one could boost our reputation some small degree amongst veterans, and that in itself wouldn't hurt recruitment. This option would be quite difficult, as I mentioned earlier the game is relatively difficult to propagate nowadays and I can't think of any way around that. This would also involve organization beyond our community, and that becomes a responsibility (I know how much this community loves responsibilities). It would be best suited as a starport initiative (they tried this a year or two ago if I remember correctly?). Still members of our community could come up with an outline, open dialog with other communities, and see what we can do. A facebook or twitter campaign, a ModDB event, talking to popular games bloggers to try to get on their radar, these are all possible expressions of this, and I'm sure many of you are more creative than me. If people start seeing Freelancer all over the place, they'll get interested. The big drawback to this strategy is the likely lack of effect we'd see vs time we'd put into it. This is a big undertaking, and it would probably fail. Even if it succeeded the benefits to our mod would be limited. In summary, this strategy would be time consuming, difficult, and would probably fail. Even if it succeeds we wouldn't see that much from it. Nonetheless, the reputation boost we'd get from succeeding at it could be substantial (if we don't abandon the idea and let other communities do the work) and that alone could draw some veterans. On top of that the Freelancer community as a whole could benefit and we would also therefor benefit, but I have no estimate as to actual numbers we could expect to see (I think it would be quite low, maybe 0-2 new core players?). In the end while I like the strategy in principal, in practice.. Well...
Beyond these strategies I have a few general notes of interest that we should keep in mind.
1. A wiki does wonders:
Yes, our wiki sucks. It sucks like death. No offense to those of us who have worked on it, but it looks like a 9th grade student formatted the thing. It's disorganized, not as easy on the eyes as it could be, and doesn't contain the kind of depth of information and analysis that many games do have. The wiki isn't Fox's responsibility, it's our responsibility, and don't underestimate it's effect on new players. A lot of new players use wiki's to ease themselves into a game, to help them cut down that edge that veterans have over them, and smoothen their learning curve. I think we'd be surprised to see how effective cleaning this up could be.
2. The Homepage Issue:
We have no decent homepage. Flak is an awkward mod to get into, we have no news page, no decent media page, nothing that sells this mod upfront. New players have to dig through the forums or the aforementioned godawful wiki to get any real idea of what they're getting into. This doesn't help our case with new potentials.
3. The Forums:
I will mention this, but only reluctantly. Yes, our forums could be a little more welcoming sometimes. I want to stress a little. Frankly I don't see the depths of evil in the forums some of you seem to. Yes we have the odd dispute, but I've seen far worse (RPG Codex forums, 4chan, battlecruiser 3000ad forum anyone?). New players are almost always welcomed warmly, but where I think we could do some good is perhaps to have a little more accessibility for new players joining the forums. If I remember correctly, just figuring out how to sign up was an adventure (at least it was when I signed up, I don't know if that's still the case). Perhaps we could have a new forum "New Players Welcome" that invites new players to introduce themselves, and specifically to ask for any help they need. Still I don't think the forums are quite the issue I get the feeling some people think it is.
Well that's all I've got on the subject at the moment. Remember a lot of this is opinion and estimation, and you may disagree freely with my analysis, but I think the core principles in it stand up to scrutiny. The question now is, what are we going to do?
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Zerglings, all up in yo' base.
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