Since I was mentioned here, I thought that I would say that my dual activity is coming to an end. I haven't joined any new games on WF for over a month and am just letting my games/tournaments finish out of good player habits. The entire sense I get from WG is far more positive and fun (how WF was when I join in the pre-beta days). Thanks for all the good work you guys have put into crafting this site and maybe someday my cheap self will pay for a membership (I do have some board ideas in mind). I have been recuiting fodder for WG and who knows, someday one of them may be a great player.

Wallace Wishmaster wrote: Well, I stopped doing the wargear thing when my initial premium membership expired. It's just hard to start over. Maybe Tom will grant me a year free membership if I port my boards, which will be no small task :P
Regarding WF, I've been keeping an eye out for any suspicious new iPhone apps.

http://forums.warfish.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=785

How does this not piss you off? You know that game's over now and it's not coming back. 90% of the posts in that forum are requests for help with stuck games that will go ignored unless Theep decides to call them resolved for no reason and close the thread. More people have found the WF forums through sheer desperation than ever did due to our efforts at promoting it when we started out. How bad does it have to get?

i don't know if this will fly or not but it would be a good idea (for WarGear) to have a player survey that way WarGear will know where the players are coming from and where the advertising dollars should go. i know for advertising on facebook you can have your adds focus on a specific gender/age/time of day/type of app.you are using etc...so any info (with in reason) about existing players on WarGear would help getting new players. it would be a good idea to have a small incentive for completing the survey, choice of one month of board designer or one month of the stats viewer.

KrocK wrote: i don't know if this will fly or not but it would be a good idea (for WarGear) to have a player survey that way WarGear will know where the players are coming from

This is a very good idea.

I have a pretty good idea where new signups are coming from as you're asked this question when you join and people seem to be pretty good about filling it out. What questions are you thinking of?

The problem at the moment is not getting new signups but getting people to stay once they've joined - I don't think the site is user friendly enough to start with so Yertle and I are working on that.

Wouldn't be just fine to create a group on FB or something like "Become fan of WarGear"?

(=




ps: also remember to add that the game is addictive!

tom wrote: I have a pretty good idea where new signups are coming from as you're asked this question when you join and people seem to be pretty good about filling it out. What questions are you thinking of?

The problem at the moment is not getting new signups but getting people to stay once they've joined - I don't think the site is user friendly enough to start with so Yertle and I are working on that.

Are you talking about the interface when you say "user friendly"?

Tesctassa II wrote:

tom wrote: I have a pretty good idea where new signups are coming from as you're asked this question when you join and people seem to be pretty good about filling it out. What questions are you thinking of?

The problem at the moment is not getting new signups but getting people to stay once they've joined - I don't think the site is user friendly enough to start with so Yertle and I are working on that.

Are you talking about the interface when you say "user friendly"?

More along the lines of what do I do and how do I play.  I think the Flash is fairly intuitive (isn't it?), would take a couple of turns to get use to, but seems user friendly IMO.  So it's getting people to understand when to take their turns, and how WarGear works (maybe some related to the Flash here).

There are Help pages, but players have to go there and it may be a bit spread out to get a quick summary all on one page.

Tesctassa II wrote:

Are you talking about the interface when you say "user friendly"?

Yertle wrote: More along the lines of what do I do and how do I play.  I think the Flash is fairly intuitive (isn't it?), would take a couple of turns to get use to, but seems user friendly IMO.  So it's getting people to understand when to take their turns, and how WarGear works (maybe some related to the Flash here).

There are Help pages, but players have to go there and it may be a bit spread out to get a quick summary all on one page.

For that maybe a "How-to" page would do the work. I can think of a page with a sample of the flash application where you can find explanation on what a button does and how the game works.

If it isn't too difficult to implement, also a simple "play a turn" tutorial.

(=

Tesctassa II wrote:

For that maybe a "How-to" page would do the work. I can think of a page with a sample of the flash application where you can find explanation on what a button does and how the game works.

If it isn't too difficult to implement, also a simple "play a turn" tutorial.

See, I think this page does the Flash explanation http://www.wargear.net/help/display/Playing%20a%20game.

I thought about a Flash tutorial, or popups during your first turn, but that has to wait until you actually play and still may miss the solution to the problem (helping people understand what they are to be doing and to return to do it). I've been playing with video capturing things today, perhaps that may work.

Please continue to give ideas though, as like tom said, it's kind of tough since I know what to do and how to play :P

i'll ask my brother, since i just got him to join and he was never at TOS

Yertle wrote:

Tesctassa II wrote:

For that maybe a "How-to" page would do the work. I can think of a page with a sample of the flash application where you can find explanation on what a button does and how the game works.

If it isn't too difficult to implement, also a simple "play a turn" tutorial.

See, I think this page does the Flash explanation http://www.wargear.net/help/display/Playing%20a%20game.

I thought about a Flash tutorial, or popups during your first turn, but that has to wait until you actually play and still may miss the solution to the problem (helping people understand what they are to be doing and to return to do it). I've been playing with video capturing things today, perhaps that may work.

Please continue to give ideas though, as like tom said, it's kind of tough since I know what to do and how to play :P

lol! I've never seen that page! But the game look so obvious to me (except for few things) right from the beginning I didn't need it!

Anyway, when I gave the suggestion I thought of my father who didn't know what to do. I convinced him to sign in, but then he stop playing. You mentioned that lot of people join WG but then leave. Well that might be because they're not really intentioned to keep on playing. I actually signed in to play with some friends of mine who told me about this site, but, as far as I know, they've stop playing (I didn't... eheheh).

To address your point about the "what to do now I've signed in" I can propose (again ) a tutorial page to explain how the site works. Something like a "quick start" page with few explanation of where to go if you wanna join a game, create one, (maybe also pointing out the difference between a lightning game and a normal game) and a link to the FAQ question as well for more detailed info.

One of the things I'd like to suggest is to revise the default settings about the notifications. Telling the experience of one of those friends of mine who didn't like the huuuge amount of mail he received after we played a game. You could say: you just have to disable them, but most people probably don't want to deal with configuration and things like that (also a too long tutorial is annoying) in the beginning. Even more if they've joined to play and have some fun (and simple) time

If anything usefull will ever pop in my head I'll post it.

Hope it helps!

Tesctassa II wrote:

 

To address your point about the "what to do now I've signed in" I can propose (again ) a tutorial page to explain how the site works. Something like a "quick start" page with few explanation of where to go if you wanna join a game, create one, (maybe also pointing out the difference between a lightning game and a normal game) and a link to the FAQ question as well for more detailed info.

Does this page do that though? http://www.wargear.net/help/display/How%20to%20play

(Oh ya, I need to create the Creating a New Game Help page so that link works, I'll do that.)

I guess an FAQ could be good as a summary, although I'm kind of still unsure as to what would be present that's not already present (without going into too long of a detail :P).

As for the Email, I think they should be Enabled (like they currently are), like friendly reminders (a lot of them :P) until the player manually figures some things out and changes them.

Anyhow, this is where I keep ending up, it seems like the information is there in the Help and even relatively short, just need to help players return to make their moves.

(Kind of stole this thread, probably should have put this on the other Suggestion thread, sorry.)

I'd say the flash player is pretty user friendly. The only problem I have is that hotkeys don't always work right away, especially during unit placement. I often have to click on the drop down unit count bar to select a number of units before I can actually use the hotkeys to do so... which kind of defeats the purpose. I doubt a new player would be looking to use hotkeys at first though, and for all I know it's just a problem I have and not something site wide (although it does occur on all 3 of my computers, all using latest version of Firefox).

Tesctassa II wrote: Wouldn't be just fine to create a group on FB or something like "Become fan of WarGear"?

(=




ps: also remember to add that the game is addictive!

There is a facebook group aleady!

Ok guys. Got the lesson. Read and search before post! Right! [taking note] Got it!

XD

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wargear.net#trafficstats

This is a useful site for viewing things. Wargear is still a bit too young/small to have much useful information, but maybe some other sites you've visited in the past have quite a bit to say.

Actually looks pretty stable within parameters to me. Hrm. Not what I was expecting.

Thanks to WF's heinous boot probation policy, I'm slowly but steadily becoming a WarGear convert. Went to the in-laws for Christmas break, discovered they didn't have Internet, and racked up 7 boots. Thanks to that, I'm in "probation" until July(!), which means the only new games I'm invited to are either personal invites or tournament games from the few tournaments that didn't boot me. This means I'm down from 30 active games to 12, and that number is going to decline as tournaments wrap up (assuming they don't just arbitrarily crash between now and then).

In the few WarGear games I was in at the time, though, I was booted and that was it - I just jumped back into a few new games and called it good. If we can get BAO or something like it over here, I'll be sold. I will point out that BAO isn't exactly an original concept; Starfleet Battles (old hex-style "board" game) had a similar concept where you could write down your moves for a turn cycle, then hand them off to a neutral arbitrator who would proceed to run them. The only difference between Starfleet Battles' version of BAO and WF's was that there were a finite number of moves you could engage in with Starfleet Battles (32).