Daevryn covered a lot of points that I wanted to touch on here, notably the difficulty in getting consistent results from staff members. The problem is that people who play CF and join the staff are guaranteed to enjoy talking about gameplay, roleplaying, etc., but don't necessarily have the skillset or motivation to consistently churn out marketing material, artwork, or website design. Some of the people with those skillsets do it at their day job, and aren't real pumped to come home and spend 4 hours working on our needs for free.

I think people want to chip in here, and have good intentions, but for whatever reason I could probably get people to write a 100-room area before they wrote 5 effective ads for us. Hell, we have trouble getting new text for our own website, and that's free and relatively easy.

I covered us for a little while there, but I have no training, web skills, artistic talent, etc., and I readily admit I'm winging it when I punched up the text ads we've sprayed all over TMS, TMC, and maybe a dozen other gaming web sites. (After a while, I got burnt out on it, especially since I wear other hats here and generally have a lot to do. We've done little since.) I will say that when we were being aggressive in those communities, the newbie channel visibly perked up, and we got good feedback on those sites. I think those ads helped, but after a while you saturate that market and need to do more.

That said, marketing is a topic we've asked incoming staff about, and it's probably becoming a mandatory topic once our "ImmTerview" standards get cleaned up and formalized this week or so. It would definitely be a big checkmark in the plus column if someone applied to the staff with interests and skills in that field.

(Note: This isn't necessarily a case where someone is always better than noone. Poorly conceived, obnoxious, or misleading ads can give CF a negative reputation or association in certain circles. I occasionally pop in on other games to see what's new and exciting elsewhere, but I know there are games where I think "Nah, they're run by clowns. I'll go check out someone else with my time.")

A simple screening process (post ads internally before they go live) can guard against the worst of that. It can be a challenge to tell volunteers that their work isn't suitable for use, though, let me tell you.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com