I've got the site up and I'm looking at it now.

I haven't time or inclination or talent to be a more active part of the website/marketing team(s), so please feel free to disregard my commentary if you've decided to go in another direction.

1) I think it would be important to stress our relatively unique PvP system. What I mean by that is, I think most (not all, but a lot of) games that have player vs. player conflict tend to fall in one of two molds: either competition is very structured with evenish teams and everyone pretty much knows it's on from the start (similar to our arena, most team FPS games, RTS games, etc. etc.) or you've got some kind of anything goes model (possibly with some safe or safer zones) where your newbie can and probably will be ganked down by a team of max-level players.

Our PvP is pretty different from that in that, it's basically always on like the latter, allowing for surprise attacks and unequal teams and the like, but because of things like PK ranges, sort of like the former you always have a reasonable chance to win or survive a fight.

I don't know exactly how I'd explain that in a marketing blurb, but I think I would try to put it in terms that someone coming from other kinds of non-MUD multiplayer games could sort of understand.

To me, this is one of the lynchpin concepts / selling points of CF -- and conveying it is key to selling most of the rest of your points. For example, the idea of risk and losing something when I die may be a turn off if I'm expecting the sort of "anything goes, and hordes of teenagers will probably gang-rape you" stereotypical Asian MMO kind of model.

2) Re: The Risk bullet point, I think I would also in some way explain limited gear as part of it -- because I think that's a relatively easy to understand selling point that explains part of why risk is cool. Unlike many games where top-end characters will all have identical or very similar gear, only one character in CF is running around with the strange bracers -- and being that one guy who's temporarily king of the mountain in some way has a power and prestige to it that you don't find in other games.

3) Re: The aging bullet point, I think I would explain and sell that a little more too. Explain, in the sense that if I haven't played some MUDs without one and some MUDs with one, I may not have a good idea of what that would entail or how it would impact play. Sell, in the sense that I would try to say why having an aging system is cool. It's cool because one guy doesn't squat on leadership or a cabal/religion/etc. forever. It's cool because you always have the chance to come up the levels with top players who have been around for years, to learn from them or try your luck against them. It's cool because you actually sort of have generations of characters. It's cool because it creates a climate in which people don't expect to pretty much play one character seriously in the whole time they play the game -- if you pick paladin and don't love it, you can give warrior a try and it's not like you're giving up thousands of thousands of hours of work like you would be in a game like WoW, and moreover, you'll be competing with players doing the same thing, not the guy who's had the same character for 100,000 hours. And so on. Not that all of that fits into or can be conveyed in a blurb, but I think the idea needs to be not just let's list the features, but let's convince you that this feature is better than the way the game(s) you're playing now do things, or is interesting enough to give a try.

4) Re: the bit about specialization of characters, I think I would just try to convey in there that there are lots of GOOD choices. It's not like, you can build a warrior a million different ways but only three are competitive, which I think is the case for a lot of games' specialization systems.

5) RP: Here I waffle a little more on the sell, but maybe it's worth pointing out some of the perks of a RP-enforced game. Convince me, even if I'm not someone who insists on a RP-heavy game, why I might like what this brings. Maybe you give an example of parts of RP that might appeal to someone like that, like the scheming that can go on around overthrowing or electing an Emperor.

Comments, questions, self-doubts?