There's a thread discussing what this site's version of BAO (we call it SMTNPlay) is going to play like - hold on - here you go. http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/550p1/Simultaneous_Play


I think we do need to find some way to make sure the players that WF is shedding are at least aware of WG's existence, without being total dicks about it. Ideas anyone?

Thanks asm - just got done replying to the thread you quoted when I discovered you replied to this one. :-)

Devil's advocate: Why NOT be total dicks about it? What is Steven going to do about it? Ban everyone that mentions WarGear? If he applies the same level of attention to suppressing WarGear that he spends on everything else WF-related, we have absolutely nothing to fear. I'm not a huge fan of being a jerk, but the entire reason this site exists is because Steven did such a "fantastic" job with his site that there was room in the market for a replacement.

Past that, the usual social media outlets would work. Maybe throw in one of those pesky Facebook widgets in games that lets you brag about victories to all of your friends. I could finally have something to spam back against those on my Friends list that insist on telling me about their Farmville accounts! Muahahahaha!

asm wrote: (we call it SMTNPlay)

Blech.

I got it - we'll call it SMTP! Simple Multiple Turn Protocol! It's brilliant and won't be confused with anything else ever!

Huh, I always thought it was short for Synchronous Move Temporal Partitioning.

Oatworm wrote: I got it - we'll call it SMTP! Simple Multiple Turn Protocol! It's brilliant and won't be confused with anything else ever!

S&M for short.

Oatworm wrote:
Devil's advocate: Why NOT be total dicks about it? What is Steven going to do about it? Ban everyone that mentions WarGear? If he applies the same level of attention to suppressing WarGear that he spends on everything else WF-related, we have absolutely nothing to fear.

I... can't find anything wrong with this line of reasoning...

Thank you, asm. I may now have a signature.

Oatworm wrote:  Maybe throw in one of those pesky Facebook widgets in games that lets you brag about victories to all of your friends. I could finally have something to spam back against those on my Friends list that insist on telling me about their Farmville accounts! Muahahahaha!

I kinda like that idea.

The main reason we shouldn't be dicks is so that Steven doesn't hate tom, out of respect for tom. I do think it's funny though that my "wargear.net" tournament of WF stalled and won't be able to finish...

Edward Nygma wrote: The main reason we shouldn't be dicks is so that Steven doesn't hate tom, out of respect for tom. I do think it's funny though that my "wargear.net" tournament of WF stalled and won't be able to finish...

It would probably be quite easy to make a tournament with impossible rule mods that break boards and invite 256 people to them. Use it as a forum with a captive audience to sell alternatives.

I remember there was someone doing something like that a year or two ago who was then booting everyone in the tournament as they couldn't or wouldn't finish their turns, just to grief them with a boot on the account.

Crappy behavior, all-in-all. I wouldn't do it myself, but I'm more of an idea man. An instigator, if you will. I make tools. You can use them however you want.

Huh... it would appear that I could create a 768-team tournament. That could be entertaining. I wonder if there are 768 active players left in all of WF?

EDIT:  I lied.  If I go with 3 player teams and 6 teams per game, I could throw down 2,304 people into a massive tournament of stupid.  This is getting disturbingly tempting...

DOOO EEEEEEEEEEEET

Also, an 18 person game is stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.

to bring this thread back to advertising i was checking around and there are a few other options that may be interesting.

there are quite a few gaming "portal" sites that you (tom) lists WarGear (I'm pretty sure its free to list a site) and adds a link to this "portal" site and you Vote for WarGear by clicking the link. The more Votes WarGear gets the higher up the list WarGear moves and the closer to the front page and the more exposure WarGear gets.

http://www.gamesites100.net/
http://www.gtop100.com/

http://www.byspot.com/home/adspot.php
any where from $1 per day to $0.60 per minute for the two sites above

http://apexwebgaming.com
http://apexwebgaming.com/advertise.php

To go back to an old point on this thread, about retaining members, I think one possible issue is that once a player joins, they are then presented with a list of 0 - 15 games that they know nothing aobut. They sign up for something that looks cool (lets say spy vs spy, or episode 1) and then proceed to have their asses thoroughly handed to them in a confusing manner. They think, well, that sucked, and go play some stupid flash game.

One term that gets thrown around in the UI world is a "One click solution". In this case it would be fairly easy to implement. When a new player finishes signing up, there could be a nice friendly button that says "Sign me up for a game of classic risk". This would put them in an existing (4 or 5 player?) classic game with open slots, or create a new one if none exists. With a steady flow of new players (and existing players joining), these games should fill pretty quickly.

That is an outstanding idea. I say put that one into action right away.

Yes, that is a great idea. Then from there they would hopefully explore the site some more... but would there be a way to then introduce them to more unique maps down the road?

Good idea, I'll work on it.

Vataro wrote: Yes, that is a great idea. Then from there they would hopefully explore the site some more... but would there be a way to then introduce them to more unique maps down the road?

Yeah, because (as I understand it) this wouldn't supercede or remove anything that currently exists... just stick in a big flashing attention-grabber right when a new player sees the main page for the first time, to attract them to a 'classic' game. They could still access the open games and everything, this would just be a way to highlight the best way to ease into playing on WG (again, pardon me if I'm misunderstanding your idea BD).

A possible permutation between BD's idea, Vataro's fear, and the previous unwieldy (IMO) idea of rating boards on difficulty and subdividing the games list would be to designate a handful of boards as 'beginner-level" and make only games on those boards available for new players until they had completed some minimal number of games, say 10. So you'd have the three obvious ones (Global War, WarGear WarFare, and Cram's War), plus maybe France, Germany, Europe 1560, Maze, and Antastic. Something like that. The Risk boards, some other basic geography boards, plus a couple of the popular non-geo boards that still don't take any additional non-basic-Risk skill to master. Then once they've gotten their feet wet, give them complete access to any game.