22 Dec 14, 10:26AM
As I see above from a lot of other peoples' experiences and from my own, we see that a lot of us started playing this game and only after about (sometimes a few months) a year, some maybe 2, we discovered the community and everything that is behind this game. This is what then kept us here until this day (those that have stayed). However, we've only been the lucky one's because if we look at the download statistics and then at the amount of players that are active on these forums (or we look at active players in-game, in comparison to active players on forums) we see that we are the minority.
What we need is to link the forums and IRC(maybe?) into the game. This could be achieved by setting up a login system/authentication system into the game that is the same as on the forum. We automatically force the players to register on these forums and thus expose them to them; they will most probably look through them. This would then expose them immediately to the community. On the forums we could also prepare a section with tutorials and guides that they could potentially go through and learn from, thus they see the whole picture of the game and they avoid what we ourselves experiences and what those that left this game after a few months, without even discovering the forums and the community.
So simply said, the susceptibility for people to stay and enter this community lies in their exposure to it. I do not believe we need to promote this game to a larger amount of people, that could be the next step. I think we should now focus on the 4,807 that downloaded this game on sourceforge this week and get them directly connected with the community, so they from the very first day of their experience get a feel for the community and the people.
The other day when my girlfriend first tried out this game and she was a complete beginner, I was on my own to explain everything to her and that was when I realized how poorly set up this game is for complete beginners. I saw her struggle of first understanding the basic game functionality. Therefore, I urge we set up some kind of system that forces the new players to register on these forums because if we do not expose them, they will never be exposed.
+ the authentication system would also disallow any impersonations and would reduce the amount of hackers to a minimum.
What we need is to link the forums and IRC(maybe?) into the game. This could be achieved by setting up a login system/authentication system into the game that is the same as on the forum. We automatically force the players to register on these forums and thus expose them to them; they will most probably look through them. This would then expose them immediately to the community. On the forums we could also prepare a section with tutorials and guides that they could potentially go through and learn from, thus they see the whole picture of the game and they avoid what we ourselves experiences and what those that left this game after a few months, without even discovering the forums and the community.
So simply said, the susceptibility for people to stay and enter this community lies in their exposure to it. I do not believe we need to promote this game to a larger amount of people, that could be the next step. I think we should now focus on the 4,807 that downloaded this game on sourceforge this week and get them directly connected with the community, so they from the very first day of their experience get a feel for the community and the people.
The other day when my girlfriend first tried out this game and she was a complete beginner, I was on my own to explain everything to her and that was when I realized how poorly set up this game is for complete beginners. I saw her struggle of first understanding the basic game functionality. Therefore, I urge we set up some kind of system that forces the new players to register on these forums because if we do not expose them, they will never be exposed.
+ the authentication system would also disallow any impersonations and would reduce the amount of hackers to a minimum.