Helping Achaea grow

TectonTecton The Garden of the Gods
edited November 2015 in North of Thera
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

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Comments

  • AustereAustere Tennessee
    edited November 2015
    Tecton said:
    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

    I won't tell if you don't.  

    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?
  • TharvisTharvis The Land of Beer and Chocolate!
    12 hours cooldown - ingame you'll get a prompt reply based on wether your vote actually counts or not (haven't noticed that indication on the topmudsites page yet)
    Aurora says, "Tharvis, why are you always breaking things?!"
    Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
    Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."

  • Every 12 hours.

    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.
  • TectonTecton The Garden of the Gods
    Austere said:
    Tecton said:
    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

    I won't tell if you don't.  

    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?
    You can! It's once per IP address per 12 hours, so if you want to vote on your cellphone as well (assuming it's not on your home wifi), that'll definitely help!
  • TectonTecton The Garden of the Gods
    Kez said:
    Every 12 hours.

    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.
    That's still in HELP VOTING, but still requires you to click on the "Vote for this site and enter" button manually (which is required for the vote to count).
  • KezKez
    edited November 2015
    I can't see it. I see the button, but I was thinking of a script that did it. Just remember talking with him about how long it was and he couldn't shorten it without causing memory leak by leaving invisible browsers open in the background.
  • KlendathuKlendathu Eye of the Storm
    For Mudlet, create a trigger for the voting reminder which runs the following:

    local url = "http://www.achaea.com/vote"
    openUrl(url)

    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:

    ^\[OOC\]\: Help new adventurers find our realms by voting for us at TopMudSites\! We only need (\d+) votes to move to rank (\d)\! http\://www.achaea.com/vote\. Thanks\!$

    Now vote, you filthy animals!


    Tharos, the Announcer of Delos shouts, "It's near the end of the egghunt and I still haven't figured out how to pronounce Clean-dat-hoo."
  • Vote from phone... Connect to wifi... Vote... Go to Starbucks...Vote... Bus ride home pass by Starbucks... Vote again lol 



  • Szanthax said:
    Vote from phone... Connect to wifi... Vote... Go to Starbucks...Vote... Bus ride home pass by Starbucks... Vote again lol 
    This... Might not work lol



  • It absolutely would. Shhh
  • Yep, it would work. 
  • Sarapis said:
    Yep, it would work. 
    I knew my daily commute would come to use at some point. 




  • Sarapis said:
    Yep, it would work. 
    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?



  • Honestly, we're not allowed to reward people who vote, but what if in a COMPLETELY UNRELATED manner more little non-reward things were to happen, that may or may not have anything to do with the votes. (Run an egghunt/other worldgame every 300-500 votes, say)

  • edited November 2015
    Where everyone who participates coincidentally gets credits. :)

  • We're not looking to cheat and get booted off, guys.
  • Does Achaea count the votes? Would be nifting that at certain milestones a little OOC announce comes up with "We've just hit X votes and are well on the way to beating out the peasants! Thank you to everyone who has showed support by voting at www.achaea.com/vote"
  • Yep, we do Tahquil. That's how we show the message about how we're <x> votes out of <y> place.

    I like your idea.
  • I had a little look at the #1 on TopMudSites a few months ago. From what I remember, the voting was very much "in your face". It might have even prompted me to vote as I logged in.

  • Go to mturk, drop $500 in it. Create mini gig paying $0.05 per vote. Crowdsource your votes. 

    This gets you booted. 

    So who asked you to do this to yourself?

    Problem solved. 
  • 1. Analyse TopMudsites, what keywords do they get on search.
    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.
  • KlendathuKlendathu Eye of the Storm
    Tomorrow's lesson - Octogenarian egg sucking. :D

    Tharos, the Announcer of Delos shouts, "It's near the end of the egghunt and I still haven't figured out how to pronounce Clean-dat-hoo."
  • well, we're up to 2nd, so it's helping so far


  • Not sure you guys are really understanding the market here.

    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. 
  • Ads on reddit, steam, slashdot would work to pull in people (though it's my understanding that the comments on the last reddit ad were less than stellar. If you were to do something like that post it here so we can help you with PR)
  • Sure, ads anywhere will pull people in, but that's only half of the equation. The ads have to result in people converting to become customers and spending enough to generate a return on the ad. Reddit brought in loads of users, but very very few stuck and fewer converted to customers. (The comments are mainly irrelevant.)

    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.


  • Thing is, the new introduction performs better than the previous two did. Not as much better as we'd hoped either given the unbelievable amount of work redoing newbie intros are, but still measurably better.

    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. 





  • KayeilKayeil Washington State
    What brought me here was someone asking me to play. What kept me here is them continually walking me through things, introducing me to people who knew their stuff and didn't mind hanging out with me and teaching me things as well. Having people to interact with and teach you, and someone who can help you figure out how to start making your own system to handle things helps a LOT. I know some people just invite friends or whatever and just leave them on their own, and that isn't going to help. You also have to be pretty encouraging and patient, too. At first I was turned off by how quickly things moved in this game and how many different commands and other things I had to memorize, but was asked to stick with it. Now I'm used to the speed, and have used these commands plenty of times to where I don't have to keep looking up help files or ask somebody what the command is again. Teaching people how to emote, hunt, and be independent where they can learn to take care of themselves is also super important.
    What doesn't kill you gives you exp.

  • Kayeil said:
    What brought me here was someone asking me to play. What kept me here is them continually walking me through things, introducing me to people who knew their stuff and didn't mind hanging out with me and teaching me things as well. Having people to interact with and teach you, and someone who can help you figure out how to start making your own system to handle things helps a LOT. I know some people just invite friends or whatever and just leave them on their own, and that isn't going to help. You also have to be pretty encouraging and patient, too. At first I was turned off by how quickly things moved in this game and how many different commands and other things I had to memorize, but was asked to stick with it. Now I'm used to the speed, and have used these commands plenty of times to where I don't have to keep looking up help files or ask somebody what the command is again. Teaching people how to emote, hunt, and be independent where they can learn to take care of themselves is also super important.
    I'd agree with that, yeah. There's no question that having someone personally handhold you and personally kind of bring you into the game community is huge when players start. That's the idea behind the mentor system, but obviously it's hard for a totally new player to just ask someone to be a mentor.

    Having friends in the game is the most powerful factor in players sticking with the game they're in.
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