Tactics For Gaining New Players.

[Neo Eternity]

I am part of a small RP that has been going on for two years called Dark Age Legends. I would be happy to plug RoH and see what they think of it.

As for the MySpace bit, it's a good idea. After all, there are musicians and the like that have gained popularity and got help starting their career via MySpace. RoH wouldn't be much different.

As for the whore train... Well, I don't think we'll have to worry about them too much. Considering the kind of people they are, they most likely won't play. I'll be glad to advertise this website and the MySpace page. My own profile gets a decent amount of views (though I hate how many "friends" I have. Too much) and I have a couple of friends who RP. It wouldn't be like throwing a link to RoH up on 50 cent's profile (And I'm positive we don't want that), but it would get at least one or two people involved.

[Kheldar]

I think there's a potential group that as of yet I haven't really seen brought up. I know that the basic idea is that the matrix game is just an enhancement to the Role playing, but the logical games themselves are still very strong.

There are RoShamBo (rock paper scissor) groups and tournaments. There is an event at the World Series of Poker of RPS. I think that there is some potential to pull some participation over in this direction with the more complex matricies.

http://www.answers.com/topic/rock-paper-scissors
http://www.emf.net/~estephen/roshambo/

While I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would be turned off or uninterested by the role playing aspect, I'm sure there is some percentage of the group with the game theory interest that might be persuaded to give us a shot.

[Panther]

From the beginning of Dragon's Mark, I've wanted to rebuild and continue to grow the ties between the RDI and Duels.

Tera is our "Duels Ambassador", she has my permission to help the Duels promote things over at the RDI side as much as we can.

when it comes to other places, you may want to think about who you are targeting not just in age/etc, but as I mentioned in the other thread what type of patron?

the RoShamBo groups may be good to bring in folks whose primary interest is the Matrix Based Dueling versus any actual RP.

Targeting MUSH/MUD etc could get you the opposite.

Which group would you rather have here? Is one group preferable over the other or does it not really matter?

If the "quality" of the patron is of concern (like mentioned regarding using MySpace to promo), is RoH better served to go after the RP crowd and try to turn them on to the dueling aspect versus going after a crowd where the RP comes second to the dueling?

I won't pretend to be able to answer any of this for "you" (the collective duels group), but I will continue to offer whatever help I can via Dragon's Mark, and of course offer my opinions and ideas as they come to me :>

[Deluthan]

If the "quality" of the patron is of concern (like mentioned regarding using MySpace to promo), is RoH better served to go after the RP crowd and try to turn them on to the dueling aspect versus going after a crowd where the RP comes second to the dueling?

I find this question interesting. My feeling is that our primary "type" of newbie we want to attract is one who is new to dueling AND new to roleplaying. We would teach them dueling, and through dueling they would learn how to roleplay. I speak from personal experience: When I was first introduced to DoS, I knew nothing about roleplaying, and through DoS I learned how to roleplay.

Why attract players who know nothing about roleplaying? Call it building a loyal fan base. If we advertise in other active roleplay venues, those players are already roleplaying elsewhere and are probably not going to shift their efforts to RoH even if they stop by to see what the whole matrix thing is about. First (and no offense intended to anyone) I don't think we're going to wow any veteran roleplayers with our superior roleplay skillz--it's hard to compete roleplay-wise with venues where all they do is roleplay. And second, at risk of sounding profane, RoH won't be where they lost their roleplay virginity--in other words, it won't be the first place that captured their roleplay imaginations, and I think there's something to be said about what was your first and where your roleplay loyalty lies.

The duels have always had a broad range of developed roleplay and storytelling, from your beginner to your awe-inspring. While advertising in roleplay venues certainly has its place in finding new players, I think RoH may do best to consider itself a place for beginning roleplayers to get their start, and stretch it's major advertising focus outside the roleplay sphere.

[Karen Wilder]

From the beginning of Dragon's Mark, I've wanted to rebuild and continue to grow the ties between the RDI and Duels.

Tera is our "Duels Ambassador", she has my permission to help the Duels promote things over at the RDI side as much as we can.

In a slight divergance from the main topic...

Is the "Red Dragon Inn" setting over at Dragon's Mark the same setting that the Rings of Honor forum resides? Are you using the same map, with the same places of interest and same psudo-political structure derived from the DoS (i.e. the Barons nominally in charge of the various districts)?

The more I get my thoughts out in these threads, and the more I read over there on those boards, the more interested I am in crossing over some of my storylines to (hopefully) get more interest and interactivity.

But I'd hate to wander over into those rooms/boards with the title of "Baroness of Seaside" and create some sort of conflict with the setting you have.

[Amaltea]

It is the same setting as the RDI we all know, same map, same landmarks. But with some exceptions. There are no Baronial Districts, because that is an RoH feature.

[Xenograg]

Is the "Red Dragon Inn" setting over at Dragon's Mark the same setting that the Rings of Honor forum resides? Are you using the same map, with the same places of interest and same psudo-political structure derived from the DoS (i.e. the Barons nominally in charge of the various districts)?

The more I get my thoughts out in these threads, and the more I read over there on those boards, the more interested I am in crossing over some of my storylines to (hopefully) get more interest and interactivity.

But I'd hate to wander over into those rooms/boards with the title of "Baroness of Seaside" and create some sort of conflict with the setting you have.

I (speaking as a DM admin) want it to be. This schism has existed for too long. It will likely never heal completely, but much can be achieved.

[Panther]

Is the "Red Dragon Inn" setting over at Dragon's Mark the same setting that the Rings of Honor forum resides? Are you using the same map, with the same places of interest and same psudo-political structure derived from the DoS (i.e. the Barons nominally in charge of the various districts)?

We do have pretty much the same map posted, but like many things RDI, it is "unofficial".

Personally.... the map is rather different from what I grew up with in the FFGF, different from the RhyDin I first started playing in. I'm not sure just when/how the changes took place, but looking back at my own and other things written back in say 1993, the RDI was on the edge of town... or even pretty much just outside of town at the edge of the forests surround the city. It was the first building you would come across when approaching RhyDin the city.

There were always minor deviations here and there, it was the nature of the beast... but somewhere along the lines some pretty major changes took place... the Inn moved to the "center" of town, a whole nother floor to hold The Keep, and more. There was even a whole generation of RDI Players that never realized there was an entrance to the Arena from the RDI itself.

So, that's a long-winded way of saying...


They are very very similar, similar enought that given the "nature of the nexus" that I don't believe anyone in RoH would have difficulty bringing a SL to the RDI or vice versa.

[Karen Wilder]

They are very very similar, similar enought that given the "nature of the nexus" that I don't believe anyone in RoH would have difficulty bringing a SL to the RDI or vice versa.

Okay... to get down to specifics then...

Would a potentially very controversial SL like Inquisition, with the soon-to-be-made post involving the KW & the Knights Templar charging in, fit in with the setting?

How about SLs that include the Templars making patrols in the city and dealing with criminals, like in Pieces of Quiet?[/url]

[DUEL Psly FTA]

Y'know, I still have some of those old Rhy'Din maps. . .including the "big" ones showing the whole continent, such as it was.

Y'all lemme know if that's something you wanted to see.

[Topaz]

The Oracle is doing a fine job to make the "two Rhydins" look like one and the same town. A link to it on the RoH Forum may be something to consider.

[Panther]

They are very very similar, similar enought that given the "nature of the nexus" that I don't believe anyone in RoH would have difficulty bringing a SL to the RDI or vice versa.

Okay... to get down to specifics then...

Would a potentially very controversial SL like Inquisition, with the soon-to-be-made post involving the KW & the Knights Templar charging in, fit in with the setting?

How about SLs that include the Templars making patrols in the city and dealing with criminals, like in Pieces of Quiet?[/url]

I don't see why not.

There is the view the RhyDin has never had a true police force, etc... while I've seen other characters play cops/lawmen/etc.

RhyDin, by very it's nature, will never be quite the same to any two people. This can be good or bad, or even both, depending on your point of view.

[Amaltea]

The Oracle is doing a fine job to make the "two Rhydins" look like one and the same town. A link to it on the RoH Forum may be something to consider.

RoH already has a newspaper: DZN.

[Jake]

The Oracle is doing a fine job to make the "two Rhydins" look like one and the same town. A link to it on the RoH Forum may be something to consider.

RoH already has a newspaper: DZN.

Speaking of which...

I'm hoping that I might be able to re-publish some of the Oracle articles in DZN. Much like you'll see articles in the regular papers that are sourced to the AP (and other news feeds).

Amal has expressed interest in doing something "Oracle"-like on the RoH forums with the content being drawn from DZN. (There is already a mini-feed on the RoH front page that will list the headlines of articles posted within the last 30 days.)

And, since that leads nicely into a solicitation...

I'd love to get more contributors for DZN. I'm only one orc and it's hard to write all or most* of the content while working other dueling projects.


*Clarification, in case it's necessary, all or most of the non-TDL content. With much thanks to all of the people that have contributed to DZN's content in the past and hopefully the future!

[Random McChanse]

While I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would be turned off or uninterested by the role playing aspect, I'm sure there is some percentage of the group with the game theory interest that might be persuaded to give us a shot.

I can tell you that there is a great potential in game-theory-oriented players in terms of creating a larger "newbie hose" for RoH. I should know; I'm one of them.

Could explain why SLs scare the bejeezus out of me.

But on a more serious note, game-oriented individuals should be our target audience, because they will approach RoH primarily because of interest in the duels. Thus, they are much more likely to participate than, say, people who initially come for the RP. However, I can think of two significant reasons why game-oriented people who stumbled upon RoH would end up not staying:


1) Lack of a comfortable environment for those entirely new to RP - Though I must admit that RoH has made considerable strides in terms of being more open, friendlier, and accepting of new arrivals than when I first joined, there is still significant pressure on the new player to RP, at the very least during the duels themselves.

I've heard more than once from players in RoH that they don't like dueling people who don't RP during the duel; problem is, people who haven't RP'd before will likely not RP beyond asking for a match. After all, it takes a while to adjust to the style of IC and ::actions:: and (OOC), much less create a consistent and enjoyable character that others will be attracted to interacting with. And God help you if your font size is different or your font color is a bright basic color (no offense, Dmitri).

I myself had a difficult time getting accepted by the community the first time through (In DoS, since Marzan was a great help in DoM, and only recently have I started playing DoF); luckily, after a break I stuck to it, created a different, more interesting character, and here I am now. Even then, it wouldn't have been so bad if there hadn't been a noticable rift between those who have been around longer and those who haven't; many of the players I became close to and who sustained my interest in RoH were ones who started around the same time as one of my characters, because with a few notable exceptions those were the only players that would significantly interact with me.

As I said earlier, RoH has come a long way since then, but I still find it hard to deny that it takes some experience with RPing to become comfortable in an RoH chatroom, and starting out with none means an uphill battle largely without support (unless you have a patron in one of the regular players, and even then...) that quite a few won't bother taking.


2) Though I spent a good deal of space talking about the intimidation factor of RP, the real killer of game-oriented players is that there is no chance to practice against human opponents; once you start dueling, all your duels are ranked.

Game-oriented players are highly competitive more often than not, and being down 0-3 on the first night can kill a player's interest when they realize that they're going to have to win 5 duels in a row to make it to a higher rank. Everyone who's gotten to Warlord has likely struggled through such a situation or worse, but game-oriented players tend to be more impatient and set higher standards on themselves from the get-go, thus getting overly worried about stuff like WoL and becoming susceptible to succumbing to early frustration.

This becomes even worse if the new players aren't given the matrices to start out with. In particular, DoM is very difficult for the newbie without a complete matrix (though easier than when perfect defense was being abused), as the bulk of rounds are basic 8 vs. basic 8 and therefore it takes a VERY long time to figure out how to defend against the advanced spells that the higher ranks inevitably use on you.


This is one of the benefits of the Golem I helped create a while back; as a AIMbot the Golem was always available to call, was easy to set up a challenge with a new player, and most importantly, didn't count towards the standings and ranks. Incidentally, if someone knows how to use a Java client and wants to host the Golem, just PM or IM me, since I now finally have the code for it. I feel this is the best non-invasive solution for attracting game-oriented players; it gives them opportunity to practice and to meet other players in a more comfortable milieu, which also gives them a base of support towards integrating with the RP half of RoH.

However, I fear that the problem with players who quit because of despair of never achieving a higher rank lies not only in the lack of a venue to practice in those crucial first duels, but partly in the ranking system itself; but that's another discussion for another time.

Finally, to give an example of someone game-oriented who I invited into RoH but ended up not staying, I give you Bryan, the programmer for the Golem. I introduced Bryan to DoM after he had programmed the original DoS bot (yes, he programmed the thing without ever dueling or actually reading the rules, despite me giving the link to him after giving him the basics; this led to many silly bugs early on) to give him an idea of what dueling was really like, as DoM was personally my most successful newbie experience. It may have just been a bad night, but I had to go ask players to duel Bryan via IM, since no one hardly even spoke to him in the room. It didn't help that Bryan's natural font was 14 pt and dark green, and that he treated the whole thing more or less like a normal chatroom with ::actions described like this::. He ended up dueling 4 times to my delight, though he lost them all. However, despite my urging to try it again, he never went back. In his own words, this was partly due to the fact that he felt he was "too far in the hole" to make it out of negative WoL, and didn't want to wait a couple of months for the standings to reset him back to 0.

These points may seem very subjective on my part (especially since RoH has lasted so long even with these "problems"), but I think that they illustrate that while we can increase the flow of new players into RoH through external exposure, we might have problems getting them to "stick" due to internal barriers. These two points I've raised are what I feel are internal barriers to game-oriented players that should be considered before we let the floodgates open, as it were.