For those of you who have an interest in donating towards marketing, let me say that PBFs are really solid ways to get funds in. Plus, it is good for the players who aren't in a position to get their own PBFs. Over the last month, we have had 24 PBFs. That's good enough to pay to keep the mud running, but, not much, if anything left over for marketing. If we can get our PBFs up to 50 a month, that might give the Imps a little bit more flexibility in determining the avenues to spend the money on marketing.

I've long speculated on the number of active players that are actually out there, and just threw this together to see under what assumptions we could arrive at 24 pbf's per month. This comes pretty close:































]

	Month
Players	200
Hours/Player	20
Hours/PBF Worthy Death	180
Fraction of players PBFing	0.111111
Number of PBFs	22.22222

200 players at 20 hours/month, requiring 180 hours to achieve a pbf-worthy character, means that on a rolling basis 1/9 of the playerbase would be pbfing in a given month. In this model, we'd need 450 active players to reach those numbers. There was a time when that was the case, but I'm pretty sure we're not there anymore.

I honestly think the best long-term option for CF (and that's CF, LLC) would be to consider content production/licensing through other media. I'll add more thoughts on this later when I have time, but if you haven't, check out Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series, published by TOR. His world was originally conceived for D&D campaigns, and he (and his partner, less successfully) managed to develop some excellent fiction inspired by it.

T

nt

Alright. Although I haven't played for a while, I don't want CF to die in case I ever get the hankering to come back. I'll pick up 2 PBFs a month for the next few months. Reply to this post and if you look like you have an interesting char or are in some country without credit cards or something I'll pick it up.

I picked up 7 this month, in celebration of Turkey day. I'll chip in two or three more next month and thereafter, as long as I have the funds.

I know you folks all aren't broke. And it ain't like this stuff is expensive.. if you have $5 or $10 in the bank, why not buy a couple?