So thinking a little bit, would there be any interest in doing a "show of force" at a fantasy event or convention with some fliers and trying to put out the CF word of mouth?

Who here would be interested?

Disclaimer: I haven't gotten the 'Ok' from my wife yet...

I'm horrified at the idea of a public gathering of CFers, but I like this idea.

Like we'd have to think about who is going, prep some materials, get on the same page about the CF brand and how we're going to communicate it, book lodging, so on and so forth.

It would not be without cost, we'd be paying our own way and maybe chipping in for the Kinkos work.

But you know what, if we could get some interest in the game, might be really good.

Glasses being smashed, chub rolls smothering people, inhalers blazing... It will make Eastern Road look like a good day care center.

I think we're all probably more likeable in real life than over the internet.

Kill two birds with one stone.

Plus we could do a LAN party with an event in game around it, would be slick.

I think honestly a few pizzas and beers and bull ####ting for a few hours tends to squash a lot of drama.

Edited to add : When I first posted this I put bull-shatting as one word, which resulted it in it looking a lot like "####ing for a few hours"...which...is not the intention of this event :-P.

I have a notoriously fickle constitution

ROFL, '####ing for hours' could be interpreted many different ways I guess!

Strategically the barrier to entry of playing a MUD as a non MUDder and specially playing CF as a noob to MUDing is massive and will mean a very low percent of people sticking around. Its just too hard to convince someone to invest 400 hours learning to be self sufficient.

If our real goal is to boost numbers then our target market of new players should be people who play other MUDs. They would have the best rate of return on investment I suspect because they already have a foundation to build upon in terms of the game platform/terminology/etc.

I don't really view it as an "either or" proposition.

In terms of marketing, we should be hitting other forums and letting people know we're still alive. We should be trying to catch the traffic coming out of dying muds.

We're already up on top mud sites, we're probably running banners ads, that's all well and fine.

We should be telling people in other MMO's we play, particularly roleplaying guilds, about CF.

That's stuff we should be doing all the time and we should also create a 'newbie events' that we can warm people up with.

Going to a convention I wouldn't view as "cost effective converting" because there's really no market left for MUDs. Nothing you do will be "cost effective", you're not going to get 1000 dedicated people over here. It's unrealistic. I'd hope though in person meetups would :

1) Be fun.
2) If I can't convert someone face to face with a group of dedicated brand enthusiasts...I can't convert anyone.
3) If I got 10-15 people I'd chalk it up as a success. I think that's realistic. I also realize monetarily it's expensive, reflective of total cost of having people attend a convention, but it is what it is.