Online Players

[Xel_cidx]

Arrggg Mateys,


If this is a repeat question i apologize, but i wanted to know if the website can let you know how many players are online playing when you log in.

thank you,

[Captain Jack]

Hi,

We had this and we removed this. While it is nice to have it to get an idea of how many other people play simultaneously at the same time, it does not affect the game reputation well. The people enjoy it when the see unusually high numbers but this happens rarely as you are quickly get used to each new status.

For example, let's say we turn it on. You will see 30 people online. This will seem usual to you.
The next day, you will log in and you will see 35 people online. This will seem usual to you.
3rd, day: 38, usual to you.
4th, 39, usual to you.
5th 50! You will say, WOAH, 50 players online! You will feel better and try more.
6th day: 30! You will say, wtf, only 30 players ? (Just remember, 5 days ago 30 people seemed usual).

What I mean is that many are quick to judge a game only by the numbers of people who are playing it.

A good example is facebook games. Most of them are crap and still, just because you hear of several million people playing them, you give them a try, only to end up fustrated a week later.

Also, it is never good to BELIEVE any activity a game says it have, any game. They are easily tweaked and they are tweaked just because many are quick to judge a game only by the numbers of people who are playing it. Even FB games, their activity is tweaked by fb itself.

We believe that we have a very good game here. We are developing it for 3 years now. It is still in 0.5 Version, which means that we got at least 5 major features in mind. We have never advertised this game professionaly; we only get some advertising from friends which is minimal. Still, we have managed to have more than 25 000 signups in these three years. On the newer server, (as we got one that has been opened and closed), we got about 12000 players, as you can see in the startup screen. Don't be fooled, these numbers ARE small. What is not small, are the active players OUT of these numbers. The retention rates of active players vs players registered is pretty high, real high.

Why I am telling you all these ? Because it is all about marketing in the end, or maybe not ? We are trying a different approach here. We got to be serious and acknowledge the fact that the people who judge a game by people playing it, might be correct. At this point, I want to tell you how you can get people for your game. It is basically by two ways:
A)Advertising
B)By the word of mouth

Now, you hear game A has 1 million players! That's cool, how many of them play the game after 1 week though ? How many after 1 month? After a year ? I can tell you that there are many people here, playing this game since day 1, three years now. And the game is so much better now.

I can go on analyzing and analyzing but I think I already wrote much. What is important is that we want the players to judge the game without the criteria of how many are playing it. It is true that we do not have mass numbers and we do not want to lie about it (it would be easy to lie as we could not possibly reveal WHO is online which gives us space to boost this number as much as we like) so this would turn in a disadvantage, especially for a new player.

What I can tell you, is that there are more than enough players to provide you fierce competition for the top. I will let you know once we reach at least 100 people online, at any given moment. I foresee it will take a bit of time more, but with all these new features coming in this month, this might not be too far away.

[Xel_cidx]

I dig,


thank you for the response, I admit the game is fun once you get used to it. But it takes time to learn the features and once you do it gets more interesting and yes the game has improved with many new enhancements.

[Captain Jack]

I dig,


thank you for the response, I admit the game is fun once you get used to it. But it takes time to learn the features and once you do it gets more interesting and yes the game has improved with many new enhancements.

Thank you! What you say, is also reflected by the number of people playing which has improved vastly after the voodoo update.

What I can promise, is that it will be improved a lot more this month.
If you have any suggestions to make it easier for the newcomers, please share.