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Post by credeiki on Dec 13, 2011 20:20:05 GMT -5
So I just started playing this summer, but I glean that in the past there used to be more than 30 active players. I love this game (obviously), but 1. I keep playing the same 5 people over and over again, which is fine, but I'd rather play the same 20 people over and over again, 2. Such a small user base perturbs me--if any one person decides to stop playing, it's a significant percentage of the total population.
What strategies have people used to gain new players in the past? It seems like at some point the xkcd forums were notified of the existence of warlocks--is it time to try that again? I'm not active on any nerd forums, so I'm probably not the person to spearhead a recruitment effort. But I would encourage someone to do so...nerd forums (I'm mostly thinking ones associated with webcomics, but any board game oriented forum is going to be even better) are probably the way to go; people should be attracted to a game of perfect strategy with fantasy trappings.
I discovered this game from a friend, who probably found out about it on the Spiderweb software forums. My attempts to advertise this game to other friends have ended in dismal failure.
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Post by succat on Dec 13, 2011 21:52:03 GMT -5
I would probably have a renewed interest in this game if it had more players. Also, with so few players, it feels like you're always waiting for someone to make a move. With more players, you could be in more games at once, and hopefully that would mean not as much waiting around. I have no idea how RavenBlack advertises his game, or if he even still does. I'm guessing he did some banner deals with some other websites out there, and is still getting a trickle of people from that. I'm also curious about strategies to advertise the game because I've had similar issues advertising my own game, The Grid - celtruler.com/games/thegrid/ranks/. Obviously, I've had a lot of support from players in the Warlocks community, and the other few players who are not from Warlocks I managed to get from various gaming forums. I've had my game posted in dozens, if not a couple of hundred, forums related to web gaming, strategy, and geek games. I've heard a few comments, and these could probably be applied to Warlocks as well, like: the game needs to have graphics, and easier-to-understand game-play. Problem is, you add in the graphics and dumbed-down game play, and now you don't have a text-based browser strategy game anymore, but something else. Even if you re-wrote Warlocks to use some graphics, changed the para system that everybody hates, and made an easier playing interface, especially for new players that might let them preview the repercussions of their gestures before noobishly hitting submit... you still have to figure out how to advertise the game once again.
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Post by saypin on Dec 14, 2011 0:46:04 GMT -5
I'm thinking about the possibility of writing a small youtube video showing how to play warlocks.
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Post by Dubber on Dec 14, 2011 8:22:24 GMT -5
When there was a little more in the way of role play elements, someone (or several someones?) went and wrote warlock role play ads on several quiz sites (that's been ~8 years ago at this point)...
The trick is that most RPers these days seem to want glitzy graphics (or any graphics, really)... and warlocks ain't got none.
This (Warlocks), as well as The Grid, are very cerebral - they need to get play on strategy forums more than RP forums. (I don't follow many/any strategy forums, so not me on better suggestions than that)
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Post by credeiki on Dec 14, 2011 14:17:25 GMT -5
A reason that people might not join the Grid is that it's not obvious what the game actually looks like once you play. Might help to have a screenshot somewhere prominent. Or are there no graphics at all? I imagine there must at least be a picture of a grid...maybe not, though.
A youtube video would be a good idea; then we could post it on various fora.
At this point advertising Warlocks as a roleplaying game would not be accurate. But I can't imagine people ever played primarily for the roleplaying...did they? (again, it seems like now people mostly chat about strategy. I've probably only had a few rp-ish exchanges, all with Nivm)
Warlocks was sold to me as a pure strategy game with fewer degrees of freedom then chess, and I think that's very appealing, because you feel like you can reasonably become good at it without reading tomes and tomes of collected strategy. There are not many games like that which don't involve some element of chance. If I were writing up some sort of ad for the game, I would try to emphasize the unique combination of fairly deep strategy with limited gameplay choices. Hmm, that sounds bad. Can't think of a better way to put it other than "fewer degrees of freedom than chess".
I suppose some people want graphics...on the other hand, some people happily play angband and nethack. In a way, warlocks might have a retro appeal.
I just can't figure out a good way to tell people to stick with it and keep the spell reference open in another tab until they memorize it. Although perhaps it's more important to get more people to actually go visit games.ravenblack.net than to worry about the attrition rate. I suppose ideally both problems would be addressed at once.
_
By the way, one quick fix to help people join would be to put a link to the rules in Russian (there's definitely Russian rules to waving hands, although I can't think of the website at the moment) on the home page where there are already links to the rules in spanish. Does RavenBlack still update the website?
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Post by BioLogIn on Dec 14, 2011 15:28:49 GMT -5
Ravenblack explicitly declined to update anything related to game engine... Maybe he would update some Rules pages, but I doubt that as well.
And why on Earth you think Russian rules would help? I mean, yeah, there is a Russian translation of basic rules done by salvor and c1664 at their vkontakte group (http://vk.com/warlocks90), but I don't really think that Russian users are the best group to promote Warlocks at. We don't have as many old school games as some other countries have, and Warlocks as they are rely on old school heavily.
There were a number of discussion on this board about promoting the game, and we did a few small campaigns here and there, but first and foremost we need new, better and evolving game engine. While we're stuck with 10y old Ravenblack's implementation (which does a good job for what it does, but it lack so many contemporary things), any promo campaign will give us a very poor involvement ratio.
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Post by succat on Dec 14, 2011 22:16:30 GMT -5
As Bio said, we definitely need an evolving game engine for Warlocks. I would think, though, that for pure strategists, the current Warlocks engine would fit the bill, but apparently not. If I was going to re-write Warlocks, the first thing I would do is make a version of the game that is completely simplified. Right off the bat, I would cut out half the spells - that would be the normal game mode. I'd make a small spell page embedded within the main game page so that players can easily see what their gestures are supposed to do. Also, an option for tips would pop up as the players are inputting gestures, guiding them as to the better choices they could make... sort of like when you're tying a question into Google and it starts trying to figure out the different terms you might be searching for. Then I would add in some simple text 'graphics'. These wouldn't be real graphics, but just something visual using stick men/ogres to show what's going on during each turn. It might be something like this: celtruler.com/games/test/The reason I would simply things and make it more visual is because of my own experience when I heard about Waving Hands: I didn't get it. At all. Just cutting out half of the spells and making some visual aspects to the game would have helped me learn the game much better back when I started playing. Then, there could always be 'advanced' options for seasoned players that would use all of the spells and various para variations. But, just starting out, all of that is too overly complicated, I feel. Then again, I don't play any other strategy games, so maybe I just personally don't get strategy games very well. Credeiki, what you said about adding an image to The Grid so that people can see what the game looks like is a good idea, and someone else recently said the same thing when I posted The grid on a strategy forum. I did add an image a week or two ago that I started using to post in forums. I also, just now, put a link to the image here on the main page (logged-out viewing): celtruler.com/games/thegrid/I've played with the idea of doing a re-write of Warlocks, but a couple of things are stopping me. Currently, I seem to have lost some interest in the game - that's the main reason. The other reason is that it would be a LOT of work to do, and at the core, it's still going to play and function much like it does now using mostly all of the same spell interactions, depending on if you're playing in normal mode or advanced mode. And last of all, RavenBlack did a really good job with Warlocks in its current state, and it would be hard to improve on a lot of the aspects that he did so well. I might just kick back and wait for Bio to do all of the work
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Post by credeiki on Dec 14, 2011 22:53:59 GMT -5
Succat--already my desire to play the grid has increased just by seeing what it looks like. Probably don't have time for another online game commitment, though.
Biologin--it seems like a fraction of current members are playing from Russia, so I figured that there are perhaps additional potential players who got as far as the page but were discouraged by the language barrier. Maybe not.
Clearly I'm at a high point of enthusiasm for this game--winter break project is to try to recreate the game in python so that in the future I can play with the thought of writing an ai.
Should I go visit some gaming forums and advertise, then? What should I say?
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Post by BioLogIn on Dec 15, 2011 0:54:27 GMT -5
credeiki
Well, certainly there are some potential Warlocks in Russia. But there is at least as much potential players in some other countries, including some English-speaking ones (read USA). We are far from depleting US player base, and they are easier to get involved (no language barrier in-game), so basically any international campaign will be less effective than English-based, so why bother?
Tread carefully on this road, it led many good warlocks astray =) You also may want to study these forums - there are some threads with discussions of possible improvements and inclusions to possible future Warlocks, you may find some of those discussions useful.
Honestly, I'm in no position to give an answer to that. I'm no native English speaker, I'm no expert on English communities\forums\sites, etc.
And if you guys don't mind, let's keep this thread for discussing Warlocks. You have other threads for discussing Grid.
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Post by succat on Dec 15, 2011 1:03:45 GMT -5
And if you guys don't mind, let's keep this thread for discussing Warlocks. You have other threads for discussing Grid. Sheesh, wake up on the wrong side of the spires?! This is in the General Board after all, you know, "Stuff that's not about Warlocks (or Waving Hands) should go here."
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Post by BioLogIn on Dec 15, 2011 11:57:38 GMT -5
Succat I'm talking about this particular thread, where original post (and therefore the following thread) is clearly dedicated to Warlocks. Therefore discussion of other games is considered to be off-topic here.
You totally can start a topic about Grid recruitment if you want\need to =)
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Post by succat on Dec 15, 2011 12:56:41 GMT -5
SuccatI'm talking about this particular thread, where original post (and therefore the following thread) is clearly dedicated to Warlocks. Therefore discussion of other games is considered to be off-topic here. You totally can start a topic about Grid recruitment if you want\need to =) Since we were talking about recruiting new players in this thread, I didn't feel like it was a problem to make a comparison between recruiting for Warlocks and recruiting for The Grid. I'm not trying to recruit new players for The Grid here, I was simply mentioning how hard it is to recruit new players regardless of what the game is. I'm very pro-Warlocks here so if it's a problem that we mention any other game in here related to this discussion of recruiting, that seems a bit much. Suppose I wanted to mention Magic The Gathering Online Strategy game to make a point on recruitment for Warlocks. Maybe I noticed something they were doing that Warlocks could use to recruit new players, now suddenly that's a problem to talk about in here?!
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Post by BioLogIn on Dec 15, 2011 13:33:21 GMT -5
Mate, you SO overreact to a simple proposition of more structured discussion -(
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Post by succat on Dec 15, 2011 14:12:38 GMT -5
I'm not over-reacting, I'm simply curious how you think this discussion should be more structured (since you brought up the issue in the first place).
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Post by BioLogIn on Dec 15, 2011 15:37:23 GMT -5
I can only repeat what I've already said - I sincerely think that discussing (promotion of) different games in separate threads leads to a more structured discussion.
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