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Helping Achaea grow
Tecton
The Garden of the Gods
I posted this in-game as well, but I'm going to throw it up here for those that check the forums more than they check the in-game news:
People often ask me how they can help support Achaea in more ways than just making purchases. A fantastic way to do that is to bring in new players, many of whom come to us via internet searches or website listings. One of these is TopMudSites... yes, the same site you get those periodic announcements from us (and have may have turned off, gagged with triggers, or learned to ignore). But hear me out! TopMudSites is a very popular MUD listing, which appears right up the top of Google searches for text games, MUDs, and a slew of other terms that would normally lead people to us. All it takes is two clicks every 12 hours to keep us up near the top of the list; that has been proven to bring new players to the game. So if you're willing to help, just click on http://www.achaea.com/vote and then click on the "Vote for this site and enter" button (you will need to click on that button for your vote to count)! If you check the forums regularly, there's a "Vote for Achaea" button at the top of the page, plus the Nexus client has a button for voting. Alternatively, you could set your browser's homepage to the vote button page, then simply click every time you open your browser! Sadly, the rules of the site forbid any form of rewards for voting, but wouldn't having a wealth of new allies and foes to enjoy the realms with be awesome?
*ETA: Wrapping, for @Blujixapug
10
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Edit: in all seriousness, can I vote on mobile and pc? I always forget to vote, but if you guys kept a forum thread up like this it might help to remind me. Also, how frequently can I vote?
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
Clementius once wrote a thing for cmud that would do the whole voting process for you silently in the background if you had it. Maybe someone could cook something like that up again for newer clients.
It'll open your browser to the vote window. You'll still need to click the Vote for this site and enter link on the webpage, but when you close mudlet, you'll see it
Here's the regex for the trigger:
Now vote, you filthy animals!
Connect to bars wifi.. Vote.. Connect to neighbors wifi... Vote. Maybe be good idea to tell you to vote if you connect from IP that hadn't voted yet?
I like your idea.
This gets you booted.
So who asked you to do this to yourself?
Problem solved.
2. Build a site that provides the best information for those keywords, be the ultimate provider that answers the search intent.
3. Boom, you rank #1.
I do that with my business. In business, it's all about domination and monopoly in every way you can, upstream downstream, even using multiple identities.
SEO is close to worthless for us. We dove into it for years. Waste of time/energy/money for the most part.
Being #1 on google search is also not of much value to us due to the relative paucity of people searching for MUDs, nor is it particularly achievable as the nature of sites like TMS and Mudconnector, where other MUDs have created hundreds or thousands of listings and which have hundreds or thousands of incoming links from other MUD sites.
Most of Topmudsites' traffic is incoming votes from other games, which is also the most valuable traffic as those are existing, qualified, MUD players. Better targeting doesn't really exist.
We've considered building another top muds-style site, but doing it right is not a small amount of work (much of the work being creating a site attractive and useful enough that many, many other MUDs will want to join in the voting, and working to recruit those MUDs) and as always it comes down to doing X or Y, not X and Y.
In any advertising marketplace you're competing with other advertisers for eyeballs. The more you can afford to pay for those eyeballs (ie the higher conversion rate to customer you have, and the more those customers spend), the more you can pay for ads. We're in a position where we can't compete on that front.
To give you a completely ad hoc example, I go to games.slashdot.org right now. The four advertisers I see there are IBM, Slack, Scottrade and Stitchlabs. So, one megacorp, one multi-billion dollar tech startup, one multi-billion dollar financial services firm, and one tech startup that raised $15 million 3 weeks ago.
See the problem?
Games discoverability is the #1 challenge that virtually all games companies face, and in a highly-saturated games marketplace like today with a billion choices for free online gameplay (vs in 2000, when being a free online game was a rarity) it is very very hard to profitably acquire new users through any kind of paid acquisition method, as all of those methods will be flooded by the huge amounts of money that the top of the food chain can pour in.
Most people quit quickly because "oh my god what is this wall of text". The Nexus client helped a little with that, but not very much, since regardless, the main game is still a giant wall of text, even if it's slightly easier to follow on Nexus than on a default mudlet install or any client using more or less vanilla telnet.
The second big place we lose people (big being the operative word, as the nature of games is the longer the time period measured, the more people will have quit playing) is actually after the newbie intro, when people go from completely structured goals to much less structured goals. The task system, much of the city and House reforms, etc were driven partly by a desire to guide newbies more after the newbie intro (as it's not really feasible for us to create a good range of structured experiences past that point that make sense in the face of the six factions, different Houses, different Orders), but it's still very much a "What the hell do I do now?" situation for many newbies.
It's just a very tough and not particularly tractable problem. Achaea was designed for people who already played MUDs, and it does a poor job generally of onboarding new players across many, many axes. It's everything from the fact that the equipment collection mechanic that drives the core of many RPGs at the low-medium levels is essentially absent from Achaea to the fact that most of our skills were explicitly designed for PvP only (which isn't accessible for a lowbie). It's a problem that we can only chip away at. There's no feasible way to "solve" it, whatever that would mean.
Having friends in the game is the most powerful factor in players sticking with the game they're in.
A year or two later, I decided to make a new char since I forgot my old one. Found out that person got shrubbed (weird how I could remember another's name, but not my own char
#memories.