Who is this Stunna guy, and why should we listen to him? Stunna has a real name, Dan. Dan has a bachelors degree in Marketing and runs two successful companies. Dan has spent over $80,000 in marketing coaching programs, courses, seminars, books, cds, dvds and consulting over and above his college education. Dan knows Marketing.

So I have struggled with getting involved and sharing my knowledge with CF for a long while now. First of all, for me to post some of the things I think can help CF takes up a lot of my time, and my time (like yours) is very valuable. However I have been slowly watching the playerbase dwindle, and seen some valiant but not terribly great marketing attempts fail to bring replacements. I love CF, and have loved it for 10 years. I don’t want to see it crumble into nothing, and frankly if we don’t recruit some newbies soon we’ll lose the ability to do that. So I’m going to put up a series of posts, as I have time, that deals with the subject of marketing as it pertains to CF.

We are going to begin with the biggest, most awesome, most crucial and most overlooked rule of marketing first. Message, Market, Media.

Market: Who plays CF? More to the point, who do we want to play CF?

Message: What message do you want to deliver to our market? Why is CF fun? Why is it better to spend your time playing CF than doing needlepoint? What do our prospective newbies need to understand in order to see the value?

Media: With the first two elements, Market and Message, firmly in place, we can focus on finding the correct media with which to reach them.

CF and most businesses totally mess this up. Everyone is sitting around brainstorming about marketing, wondering what they can do to bring in the new prospects. Along comes an idea (like TMS etc.) and away we go, throwing our resources into a Media without any thought to Market and Message. There is no clearly defined person we are trying to reach, no finely crafted Message we are trying to give them. We skip the two most important steps!

In the span of a couple hours you make the mistake most marketers make. This explains why so many people get discouraged and say, “There is no good way to market CF.”

This very simple formula must be followed exactly as I’m laying it out. Misfire on one of these cylinders, and your marketing is going to be a total waste.

Now in the three subsequent posts lets try to define what our message, market and media is.

I think you make a good point. The first thing I've wanted to see done for a long time is a much better home page for CF, along with a few other intro pages that might help explain the game. E.g., hey, you come from playing commerical MMORPGs, here's a page that gives you the gist of what's different about CF. To a point, I think it only does so much good to get people to come by if we're not really prepared to help them decide if this is the game for them and get started.

Beyond that, I agree with most of what you've said. Advertising is of great importance. Problem is, who does this stuff? Personally I lack the gift for this stuff and most of the staff hasn't historically been interested.

If I ever was to heroimm, I'd much rather work in marketing than writing areas. That being said, I suck at aesthetical stuff.. But I'm sure you could find somebody who doesn't.

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

I told you when I heroimmed in no uncertain terms that I wanted to work on marketing. You personally told me that EVERYONE has to do an area, and that there are no exceptions to that. You also said that marketing for me was something we -may- get to down the road.

This had a lot to do with why I deleted my heroimm.

(I have no idea who your heroimm was.)

Everyone will still do area work at some point-- there's way too many things you won't do well within the game until you understand that facet of things. We've revamped the system since to allow considerably more flexibility.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Much akin to the "design a logo contest", lets have "design marketing material contest". You'd be surprised what you can get people to do for free PBFs.

Its like a klondike bar.

Anyway, not that most CF'ers will be any good at it, but you can at least try to skim some cream off all the fat.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was hedging towards with the thread below. Maybe it's time to just formalize it into a contest or series of contests or something.

Take some time to establish who you want to be reaching before you start planning what to say. Laser specific is the way to go here.

>Take some time to establish who you want to be reaching
>before you start planning what to say.

Out of curiousity, who do you think is the right answer, there?

Let me predicate my post by saying that Market/Message/Media is a living thing, and over time you get more clear in the definition of your Market, better and more clear in delivering Message, and by process of elimination find the best Media. That being said, there isn't a "right" answer persay.

Off the cuff I'd say your looking for a male, age 16-22, primary occupation is student, lives in a rental, plays or reads fantasy books and games like Magic/D&D/Yugi-Oh, and has conveniant internet access. It might be a good idea to put some geographic criteria in here as well, that makes things a lot simpler. You might try to figure out what type of area are you pulling the most good players out of now? Like, are people in metropolitan cities playing CF because they can stay at home and do something sophisticated, or are people from BFE more likely to play because there is nothing else to do? This is is where market research comes in. The more laser focused you can get your market, the better. (I know you guys have done some polls about these kinds of things, if you want to post the results of polls I can analyze the data real quick and tell you what other polls you need to run in order to fill in the gaps.)

Almost as important as knowing who your Market is, is knowing who your Market is not. There are some Messages, and lots and lots of Media that just aren't going to touch this Market. For instance, this guy is not reading his local newspaper, so don't bother with putting things in places where he's not going to see them.

Find out what it'd cost to get these mailing lists and such.

I mean, if we have to put an ad up at a local college to get a guy sitting around trolling the internet for resources at $12/hour, I'll toss in some money towards it. I don't think we need a guy like Valg (and by that, I mean an intelligent and skilled admin) spamming around Google for 20 hours a week. People will donate if there's a goal in mind (like, hey, lets raise $200). I was talking about revamping the item search and I've had like 10 people reach out to help out.

I think most people are willing to help if you narrow it down to specifics of what they can do and what their contribution will work to achieve, in dollars & cents.

Here's an example.

If you posted on Contest Board "Hey, can someone get me a list of 15 of their local college newspapers and contact information", you'd have a dozen responses in a week's time. CF'ers though, being primarily young or very busy, tend to have short attention spans. You can't ask them for "continued dilligence", long term types of tasks. But many will at least give a gung ho effort if you segment it.

How many people are used to catch bad descriptions, write areas or do other (somewhat) menial mud tasks? Is there really anything they could be doing of greater import than feeding the MUD with new people?

You just have to up marketing on the priority list. It is VERY important! You just have to believe that it is more important than anything else (because it is) and you'll find a way.

I'm just saying that, in the past, we've asked people to get on this, and you see how that's gone. Not mentioning any names, but some ex-staff have volunteered for this job and not done great with it, and some swore they would do awesome things and then just sat on the job for years at a time.

It's an important task, but finding people who want to do it, are able to do a good job, and then actually do it has been less trivial than you might think.

I personally think Valg writes great copy for that kind of stuff, but hardly anyone else has had both the talent and the motivation (at least, for very long.)

>I'm just saying that, in the past, we've asked people to get
>on this, and you see how that's gone. Not mentioning any
>names, but some ex-staff have volunteered for this job and not
>done great with it, and some swore they would do awesome
>things and then just sat on the job for years at a time.
>
>It's an important task, but finding people who want to do it,
>are able to do a good job, and then actually do it has been
>less trivial than you might think.

Muahahaha! Welcome to my world!! I have to have the pre-fired chat with an employee today, so I can appreciate the difficulty in finding the right man for the job. I volunteer to give feedback, as I have in the past, but I can't roll out a full fledged marketing campaign for CF - I just don't have the time. I don't even have time for my paying clients right now. My plan right now is to keep going with the posts, and hope that inspires someone to take up the charge - or at least it's a resource for a future marketing immortal in the future.

>
>I personally think Valg writes great copy for that kind of
>stuff, but hardly anyone else has had both the talent and the
>motivation (at least, for very long.)

The trick is the consistancy. Someone has to be managing press releases and marketing efforts with consistancy. Notice I'm not saying with "intensity" which I think has been the trend in the past. You get a YEAAAARGHH MARKETING CHAAAARGE!!! that fizzles out too soon to have an effectiveness. I would say that if one person could (for instance) every Sunday night resolve to send out the same press release to a list of 10 newspapers (the same ones every week) and take a glance out how PPC was performing, that would do wonders. The key to marketing is just drumming out that same Message again and again over time until people start buying.

(and CF doesn't even have to make them buy! that's the crazy thing! just come take something for FREE! it's a no brainer)

It's an important task, but finding people who want to do it, are able to do a good job, and then actually do it has been less trivial than you might think.

I personally think Valg writes great copy for that kind of stuff, but hardly anyone else has had both the talent and the motivation (at least, for very long.)

Danke!

That said, those ads took me a damn long time to write. If they're good, it's from brute force and not anything I'd consider a personal strength. I'm also more or less completely unable to sit down at my desk and say "OK. Write 5 different ads." -- I'll just end up staring at a screen. Sometimes, I get a random idea and can run with it, but even then I toss the result in a virtual trash bin about half the time.

That's compounded by the fact that I haven't had a lot of luck finding places that will let us advertise for free. Some gaming sites have forums, etc. for that purpose, but they're usually low-traffic. (I've still hit them, on the ground that pasting is easy, but it's of questionable utility at best.) Universities have mailing lists and clubs who would take interest, some trade publications or online sites are probably out there, etc. Takes a lot to find all of that and get rolling, however.

Given a couple people who proved they could reliably turn out good material and/or find places to stuff it, I'd probably be able to chip in there as well. I appreciate that it's important,

Obviously, some people have more of a knack for this-- advertising firms employ a lot of full-timers to do exactly this sort of thing. The key is finding a couple volunteers who can cover the full skillset and get us rolling.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

I'm still upset the staff never asked me about the legal work you've needed. And who drafted that confidentiality agreement you have heroimms sign? Ugh! (yes, obviously, someone breached it and showed it to me. Don't ask me who. It's a long time ago.)

I'm hurt. I'm very, very hurt.

If I think about it, the reason why I started playing MUDs was an article in a local hobby magazine and (a few years later) a banner ad on one of those online comic pages. I think it was for Retro Mud and they also had a catchy slogan, something like "Its not a game, its an attitude".

I stopped playing there soon after I got res killed by my own guild guards and yelled at by fellow guildmates for a simple mistake but thats a different story. :p

One of our largest clients is a marketing firm and I view marketing a lot like I view design work.

Everybody knows its critically important, yet most people try the "amateur hand" attempt until they realize its not working.

You could go another route (which would be true) and say far too many people overestimate their own abilities in those departments. Its like, if you got in trouble with the law, you'd hire a lawyer. I'm wondering if we can all pitch in and hire a marketing person.

I just feel like we'd get better results out of someone in that career line (like Stunna is), than randomly spamming TMS with reviews hoping after 4 years or whatever it'll suddenly work. Its always been a temporary fix and I think CF needs a bigger injection.

I think the biggest issue is budget. But at this point, I'd say the single biggest problem CF has is lack of players. My last char I feel guilty for even playing. I feel like I'm in a permagroup because I've ranked like 40 ranks with the same 2-3 people. Why? Because *there is no one else*. Short of solo ranking, I had no choice.

Its getting pretty bad and I think we need to start branching out in our tactics. I think if we had something we wanted to do and an estimate on what it would cost the playerbase would come together and pitch in the money. Obviously we're not going to run commercials on Fox, but at the very least maybe try to fully explore the free options that aren't TMS.

I nominate Valg to go out and get and estimate for what this sort of thing would cost from a professional marketing company. Stunna might be able to provide some estimates on what he thinks something like that would cost. I also have a friend who works in marketing, and I know that the designers design their websites (the look etc.) and then the code people translate that into the code to actually make it look that way. That might be a good first place to start especially since Nep was talking about redoing the website. Why not hire a professional to take a look at what we have, and help us design it to be more eye-catching etc. We (shouldn't) need to hire a web programmer, but having a concrete design (especially one specifically crafted to appeal to our "target audience") would certainly be a big first step, and something for our web talented people to work toward. Hell, if you shared the design, you could probably get code snippets for the web site from our web talented players.

See I'm good at volunteering other people (I'm not skilled in any of these areas) to do stuff. Sorry Valg.

My time at the Marketing Firm that I'm with is set at $115/hour. So figure that what y'all are talking about is going to take at least (way low end here) $1000 of creative, then throw in some design work. Don't forget Art Direction and proofreading. Then comes media placement. Ah ah, don't forget markup!

A "Done Right" campaign that was geared towards online only would earn a bid of roughly $10,000 for setup and, say, the first 6 months worth of paid online advertising.

And I didn't even include copywriting.

My firm isn't the cheapest but we are by far not the most expensive.

Before you ask about why I don't do some of this myself, I'm the IT guy at the company. I handle client accounts and servers. I'm capable at a bit of creative copywriting every once in a while, but I have zero (actually more like a negative number) talent at anything design related, and very little talent in the way of creative. And I avoid media buying like the plague. CPM? ROI? No thanks.

Oh and before you ask why I don't enlist the help of the creative types at my firm - exactly *one* of them has read a fantasy series that I recommended to her (Wheel of Time). All others start to get that "deer in the headlights" or "glazed-eye syndrome" look whenever I bring up anything remotely sci-fi/fantasy. These aren't the folks you want trying to help us "for free."

I *do* have a couple of friends among my coworkers who would probably do a webpage design for us for free, but both are ludicrous busy (almost always) and since I'm sorta their supervisor I hesitate to ask.

"Ok so what's your point, Twist?"

My point is that we aren't going to have the moolah to hire a professional marketing firm anytime soon, so we should probably forget about that. Stunna does make some excellent points, however. Also the idea of playerbase help does appeal to me as well.

How do you know you can't raise the money unless you ask? I don't know how many players there are, or how much any single player could/would donate, but if you set a concrete goal (like 10,000$) you *might* be surprised. I buy PBF's, which I know isn't a lot of money, and I have always *meant* to donate before, but without a solid goal or idea where my money is going, it is less... urgent. That's why I said we should get someone to get an estimate on what the work would actually cost and let us know. I know I'd be more likely to donate larger amounts if I knew they were going directly to generating a larger player base. Also, I'd have concrete signs of my investment, namely ads, that would alleviate some of the throwing money away feeling. Also, how much is it worth to me to have more noobs with newbie breadz for me to pwn? Priceless.

Create a campaign, let people know what they are paying for, and I think you'll see a lot of donations. (plus I'm really good at persuading people to do this!)

I imagine a lot of CFers are like me... I started playing this game when I was a teenager over ten years ago. I was broke, full of confused emotions and hormones, and bored most of the time. But CF was there for me, and gave me something to do that I truly appreciate. Fast forward 11 years, and now that college freshman is a guy with a wife, kid (in the oven,) career, business and decent bank account. I wouldn't bat an eye at giving CF a sizeable donation if I knew that the money was going to go for something positive.

.

nt

"New payment options w/ Iron Realms"

At the very least, is there someone we can reach out for to do some of the grunt work of finding these mailing lists and such that Valg's talking about?

Can we figure out a way to outsource the resource gathering parts of it?

If we could focus on content and not "Where do I send this #### to?" aspect of things at least it'd help.

Well, you have two types of marketing consultants. You have the big major firms that are stuck in the rut of what worked 10 years ago, and what works if you are Coke or K-mart or something, but that type of marketing is useless for CF.

A lot of marketing firms make the mistake of trying to do what's called "brand building" for smaller busineses who do not have (and maybe don't even want to have) the resources for true branding. The idea here is you make everyone aware of something, and when they need it they will come and find you because your product is the one they have been made aware of. Sam Adams is great at this... they have given themselves a niche (beer drinkers beer!) and educate the consumer as to why Sam Adams is the ####. The don't ask you to go to their website, take advantage of a sale, or place an order. They count on the fact that the next time you go to the pub you'll remember that Sam Adams is the beer drinkers beer, and buy one. Firms that do this cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.

The other kind of marketing is called direct response, and this is what I specialize in. It's a lot simpler... I have a product, I want to show you an advertisement and get you to have a direct response - call me up and buy my crap. This is the type of marketing CF needs to do, because it won't be able to build a brand. (And if it did, it wouldn't be CF anymore.) If you were to hire me on a consulting job, I'd charge you $5,000 for a long day. Sun up to sun down, pouring over your marketing. You would pay my aifare, hotel and meals, but we would hash out a lot of stuff and set you up on the road to success. This is really cheap, because frankly I'm not the best there out there (yet.) In fact I'm often paying people who are more expert than me way more money than this to come pour over my stuff.

I digress.

The cheapest way to do this (and really the best) is to teach someone to fish. Dump a couple grand into educational resources (you can buy these from me, and I'll give you a discount) and give a staff member the know-how to do it themselves.

Its getting pretty bad and I think we need to start branching out in our tactics. I think if we had something we wanted to do and an estimate on what it would cost the playerbase would come together and pitch in the money. Obviously we're not going to run commercials on Fox, but at the very least maybe try to fully explore the free options that aren't TMS.

When I've discussed budget with other people the thought is basically that any money we come into would go towards:

1) Pay the bills. PBFs roughly cover this, but there may be a small shortfall. I can't crunch the numbers from here.

2) Marketing.

Our hardware gets the job done. (Yay, text format.) We're not interested in trying to provide salaries for staff or other means of pocketing the money-- it would take a ridiculous amount of cash to offer a remotely fair wage to our 20+ staff, and it's against our license anyway. If people buy more PBFs (and books through our Amazon link, and Cafepress stuff, etc.) and Ye Olde CF Accounte accumulates money, I can't think of a damn thing to do with it besides marketing, and even a small budget would likely go a long way. (Plus, it can be viewed as an investment rather than an expenditure.)

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Stunna and Tac make an excellent point on this in the subthread above.

Hey, how come you guys haven't responded to my email btw?

I have a short timeline to work with so I'm trying to come up with the best options available...

- DC

.

Media:

Media is the easy part, because you just ask yourself what things will carry your Message to the Market that are within your budget.

Some things that come to my mind are:

Overture/Adwords that key on things like elf, dwarf, purple wyrm, dungeons and dragons, swords, axes yada yaday. Don’t believe the #### you hear about PPC advertising, it works, and if you manage your account properly you will not be screwed. I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars with PPC.

There should be some sort of opt in newsletter or the like to build a list of emails to send to. (this is also good for retention)

Advertisements in gamey type magazines. Also some magazines that cater to college aged people allow non-profits to advertise for free.

Email lists from various sources. These can be purchased (cheaply) online or given to you by comic stores etc.

PRESS RELEASES are a big one. Newspapers are LOOKING for stories like this. If someone wrote an article (every week) and blasted it out to 100 major newspapers nationwide I promise you it would get run in at least 20. (Assuming the article didn’t suck.) There are also a lot of web sites like www.freepressrelease.com that allow you to get some additional internet advertising. You could also approach local TV, or national TV as well… they are looking for stories too, and frankly CF is an awesome human interest piece. By the way, this is all FREE.

Properly done posters (refer to message post) that are downloadable as php, and can be posted in areas where geeks congregate, especially where they congegrate with wifi.

There are a million ways to do this, the sky really is the limit, but go ahead and post other ideas too. This is all for me today, more on marketing when this post dies down.

Message:

USP (Unique Sell Proposition) is stage one for most business. What do we have that is different or better than everyone else? What makes us unique? Well CF has this in spades, there is NOTHING else like it out there. On top that, the game is @#$^$#@! Free. For the love of God, this is a marketers wet dream. You have a totally untapped market, a completely unique product, and that product is free? It excites the hell out of me, and frankly I don’t see any reason why CF doesn’t have a constant 1,000 people online just by virtue of this.

A smart CF ad would look like this:

Attention grabbing headline, something like:

PLAYERS SAY FREE ONLINE GAME IS BETTER THAN SEX

TOTALLY FREE ONLINE GAME HAS PLAYERS DANGEROUSLY ADDICTED

ATTENTION: ADULTS ONLY

TEN REASONS WHY CARRION FIELDS IS THE GREATEST ONLINE GAME ON THE MARKET TODAY

I’m not feeling very creative, but you get the idea. GET ATTENTION. But this is also what we refer to as "an outrageous claim" and that's fantastic, because that is exactly what we want to do. Make a claim so outrageous about CF that it grabs the reader and makes them want to see what the ad is all about. A headline is an ad for an ad.

Now we have to backup our claim with some ad “copy.” “Copy” basically refers to the text in an advertisement. My suggestion would be to do a description of what distinguishes CF from all other gaming experiences, mentions several characteristics of CF that are unusual or unique and defines the benefit of that uniqueness. For example:

"Carrion Fields is all text based allowing your creativity to run wild. Describe your character to invoke emotion and charge the other players with imagination."

Then enlist some third party verification as to the wonderfulness of CF. Use testimonials to make the outrageous claim (CF is better than sex.) It should be pointed out that a testimonial is different than a review. Testimonials speak only to how good, fun, entertaining, engaging CF is.

The smart CF ad is topped off with a call to action. "Visit our website, telnet here, or even better email infokit@carrionfields.com for a free information download."

Is a pretty good tagline I think, and grabs attention. Obviously it's been used by us before, but just wanted to specifically state that it would make a good headline for future ads (as it has in the past no doubt).

asdf

Would you like to to read, "By what name would you like your REAL LIFE to be mourned?" so that it is less outrageous but considerably more true?

To use one of your examples, if I saw an ad titled "PLAYERS SAY FREE ONLINE GAME IS BETTER THAN SEX", I'd probably walk in the other direction. I definitely wouldn't click it from work, since who knows what kind of "game" is being plugged there.

We're aiming at a highly literate and creative crowd. I don't think excessive sensationalism will speak to them. I think it would (unfortunately, really) work great for a different product, but I think the people most vulnerable to tricks like that are not the people we'll retain a month or two down the line.

Angles I do think have promise somewhere:
Nostalgia/Retro: A lot of people played MUDs (briefly or serially) a decade ago. Time gilds memories. Plug us as the heir apparent to the big commercial attempts of that era-- content-wise, we blow them away on account of longevity. Think of all the people who run emulators for 80's video games.

It's like _________! Only Better.: Find people who know another type of game well, like D&D or Magic or whatever. Explain why CF is just like that, only with the bad parts replaced by more better parts. Customize your ad to that one game, and infiltrate their fan sites, etc. with testimonials.

Elitism/Boutique: Basically, our game has layers of depth and individual attention that MMORPGs don't try to provide. You aren't mobbed by "Kewl d00d" people. You have a realistic chance of being a bigwig, or having custom content (quests, etc.) created around you. Here, you're aiming for the people who think their commercial gaming options are fluff.

No Money Down!: Not only are we free, but you can log on from any computer. No software to install, no digging for your credit card, no upgrading your video card yet again, no disclosing your private information. Simple. Just log in and go. You're playing within a minute of clicking.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

>We're aiming at a highly literate and creative crowd.

Yes we are. Not trying to be elitist, but there is a certain portion who will not understand either the wording (mourned isn't in some people's vocabulary) or the connotation (as in they won't understand it is implying death). These people are considerably less likely to become CF'ers than those who understand what that phrase means.

For instance, I think the "bookstore crowd" would be a decent demographic for us to go after, but the "I read a book once, and it was alright" crowd probably isn't. You said it's about crafting your message to your market right?

"Less graphics then Dungeon Hack but way more fun!"

Never played that game but even I know the name...
Well, I also play Moria on my palm but I think quite a few people played these Rouge like games back then.

If Blizzard manages to get the Diablo players to play WoW it could work for us too.

asdf

Market:

Who do we want to play CF? We have one fantastic advantage here, and it’s something that all businesses want to develop - a niche market. MUDs are a foreign idea to 99% of the population, and that gives you a great opportunity to paint the perfect picture in the mind of someone with no preconceived ideas about what they will find behind the skull.

Now the mistake of the amateur (no offense) is to go after the 1% of people who know what a MUD is. Number one, you are going to be competing against every other MUD out there, and no matter how great you think CF is you’re going to encounter a phenomenal amount of brand loyalty. This is why the mud site voting is such a bad idea. You are attracting people who don’t have the CF mindset, who have preconceived ideas about what they are going to find, and who are unlikely to continue to play CF over the long hall. In the lifetime of the VoteOrDie campaign how many players have we actually latched on to? It can’t be that many, look at the who list.

But wait! There is a better way! Go after the other 99%. There are millions upon millions of people playing online games in our country, hundreds of thousands still playing D&D, for God’s sake, more playing Magic the Gathering. These things are lower tech than CF, and not nearly as interactive and fun. Why not introduce CF to these people?

I like your ideas man, and I agree with what your saying. I certainly dont want CF to die like my last mud did.