Specifically, I'm of the mindset that if you try to lure people in with candy (*), you're going to get people that are looking for an easy game. And frankly, if people wanted an easy game where success is more or less a function of time input, we're not going to out-World-of-Warcraft World of Warcraft at that.

My mindset here is that we should be aiming at a particular niche-- the kind of player who is bored of what typical commercial games can provide. World of Warcraft can't crank up the difficulty, or allow 'real' PvP where losing has real consequences-- their customers pay a monthly fee, and includes a lot of kids and very casual gamers who aren't cut out for that.

While I think we've done a lot to make CF a game that you can play once in a while and remain competitive, I don't think we're going to reliably rope in people who aren't skilled at games in the general sense. We are, for lack of a better term, a "serious" game. Being good at PvP here is extremely intricate, as is being recognized as a good RPer.

I think there's an opportunity there-- I know I find most mass-market games fairly boring. The successful strategies tend to be narrow, and "losing" generally means having to walk for 10 seconds to 5 minutes, and maybe having a meaningless number on your profile tick from "Losses = X" to "Losses = X + 1".

So let's say I'm an outlier. Maybe only 1% of gamers think like that. The thing is, if we selectively reach out to that 1%, we stand a very good chance of retaining those people. And at the end of the day, CF doesn't thrive on drive-bys-- the key is to retain regular players. (Beyond that, the key is to retain regular players who aren't assholes, but that's a topic for another thread.)

Doing that is fairly challenging, but it's possible. A few years back, I spent a lot of time trying to craft a certain image over on Top Mud Sites through advertisements, and they were reasonably effective-- people mentioned the ads on the newbie channel, and we saw modest upticks in new character generation.

Right now, I'm hesitant to invest that kind of time-- in part because I don't have a lot of free time recently (new house, demanding job), and in part because I know people will check the game out via the web site first. (I got a lot of feedback of the form 'Just keep writing a couple paragraphs like that.', but some of those ads took a large amount of time to craft. Until you sit down and do it with a serious eye towards the effect it will have, you probably don't realize how much time it takes.)

Right now, the incomplete web site will probably turn a lot of people off. I like the direction it's going in, but for the time being directing people to "Under Construction" isn't effective.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

(*): As a more extreme example, consider the games that advertise "Free Awesome Upgrade for New Accounts!" or "Join now and get one Prestige Class FREE!"