voting

[Hepheus]

It really doesn't seem to me like the player base has dropped THAT much since I remember us always making the top ten. If you don't vote, please do. I believe you can vote twice every day. For those that do not know, the links to the different voting sites are right at the top right of the forum. "Top mud sites". Is very easy just two clicks and you are done.

Thanks

[Twinblades713]

But I'm lazy. D: That's not a choice, it's a lifestyle.

[Hepheus]

Lol, thus the focus on the two click site. This will help to attract people looking for a new mud. People tend to try out the more popular muds first. That's how I found my first mud, wasn't number one, but was in the top ten.

[Akoz]

Thats how me and a number of past and present users found the mud as well! and Look at me, perfect pk fodder y0!

[Hepheus]

There ya go people, an example of why we need to vote!

[Imoutgoodbye]

Please vote so people will stop using me for PK fodder!

[jibber]

Voted 6 times today on my way around AL.

[electricsheep]

You know what... I am going to prove a point here once and for all. All data is pulled from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/topmudsites.com

1 - People, on average, spend less than a minute and a half on TMS. That means they go, vote, and that is it. TMS could not possibly bring enough people to qualify for this kind of attention.

2 - A user on TMS who stays longer than a minute views two pages. They aren't look for a mud, they are checking their stats.

3 - Globally on the website, each page gets 0.000014 views a month. That is probably where FL is atm.

4 - The global traffic rank of 261,335 and the US traffic rank of 80,356 indicates that there are less than 50ish people who actually hit this website by search engines every month.

In other words, out of the few people who actually go there even less spent more than one minute. Out of that tiny number, even fewer click any page other than the vote page and their own page. The only people who could possibly come to this game from TMS come from Google first. Wouldn't it make sense to cut TMS out and have people come from Google to this game?

Reality : Relying on players coming from TMS is one of the unhealthiest things this game could do.

Solution : Accept Reality.

What is a mud, who the heck knows? Anyone who plays one already has one they play. As seen on Alexa, the average user is fairly old and set in their gaming ways.

If you want to bring players without paying for real advertisement, you need to have :

1) Good keywords

2) A good website

3) Good site links

There, I did all of the heavy lifting for you. I run games and use this method. If you do exactly what I have told you to do, you should rank in the first 3 links (probably the 1st) on Google when people type in the top keyword "adult rpg". From that, you will get about 800-2000 clicks per month on your site coming from Google (yahoo and bing will also drive traffic separately). It is an applicable keyword, and from those clicks you should earn a pretty good stream of players. Once you rank that keyword, you can rank another and then another. If that keyword fails, you can try another. It takes about a month to start seeing any results.

The problem you have right now is that the majority of the popular muds already have their player base and they recruit virally. You have no such option since your base is so low. You have a great game, but don't promote it. The easiest break from this is organic (google) traffic.

If players want to help, then they should add a link to your website from forums, social media (twitter, fb, linkedin), yahoo answers, or anywhere else with the anchor text being your keyword... for example : Check out this awesome adult rpg if you want to have some fun. This gives you good site links, as mentioned as #3 above.

Anyways, I know the fallout I will get from this post -

"Three years ago, you were going to help but took off." : Yes I did. I had personal problems and did take off. Not a single staff member picked up where I left off. I am a player, not staff.

"We don't have any staff with enough time to do this." : Fair enough. Hire some. If the staff doesn't have the time to actually revive this game, then you new more/new staff. This is not brain surgery. Anyone willing to learn can do it effectively.

"We don't trust any current players, and only hire from players." : Fail. This is the exact same thing Irumeru said a few years back. That went really well. Post on forums, or hire from players. It makes no difference. You need what you need... and the need definitely calls for a bit of humility at this point. Openly asking for help and discussing the situation publicly isn't shameful, it is a very positive thing.

"How dare you tell us what to do?" : Someone who cares enough to do it, despite not being a very active player.

[f0xx]

Careful there sheepy, you are entering dangerous waters.

[P_body]

What is dangerous about sheep's post, other than a potentially apathetic tone?..

[electricsheep]

These matters are very much cut and dry, and everyone here realizes it except the people who matter. There is an Eastern proverb that says "a new man may start many fires, but will eventually burn with them if not careful." You mention apathy. For a visual on what apathy looks like, just navigate to the current website. If none of the current staff are capable enough to, have the time to, or posses the motivation to improving a simple website, it might be time to turn over the keys or bring new blood in IMO.

[Anume]

Uh, I think we told you to go ahead and try this out at least two times now...?

I don't get why you decide not to do it and then make posts like this.

Pm me if you want to discuss this further.

[Imoutgoodbye]

Well, someone certainly has plenty of opinions. Then again, take it from a postmodern theorist: There is more than one reality and it's not cut and dry.

But he's so cute with all his widdle points!!!!

[electricsheep]

doublepost

[electricsheep]

I got this as a reply to the same suggestions some months ago :

Thank you for your suggestions, we appreciate that you've taken the time and mental effort to help improve our game.

We've had similar suggestions before, it the main deterrent for setting something like this up is primarily time. Though I'm not certain, it looks like a serious learning curse and hours. How long would you say it takes to learn all this and get it up and running? If we decided to take a shot, would you be willing to lend a hand where we need it?

I answered yes, and received no info back.

[P_body]

maybe apathetic was the wrong word. I just meant to say you had a candor to your words. You were forthright and didn't sugar coat. You seemed somewhat apathetic or detached. Objective. Direct. I didn't mean it to sound rude at all. If someone wants to make a project for writing some SEO content etc. I'm all down for helping and playing with social media etc.

[Anume]

As you brought it here, I will do the same. You've had a huge campaign before with a lot of players and Imms investing time into it. Nothing ever came of it unfortunately. I think - not certain here - that you tried to do so another time later but again nothing came of it.

You also basically told me before that you would not be motivated to work much on any of this unless you became an Imm if I'm not remembering wrongly...

[electricsheep]

Welp, I called that response. See, the thing here is that I provided you tools. Tools I could use, or tools that anyone one of your staff could use. You're welcome, by the way. Whether you like what I wrapped around the tools, in terms of what I wrote, it is sad you cannot recognize someone giving you something and have the courtesy to even give a tip of the hat.

1) I tried... can you say the same about yourself or any other member of your staff in the past.... 3 years. If the staff had invested even a modicum of time in it, they could have picked up where I left off. I had to leave for personal reasons, and not a single staff member made any attempt to pick it up. Not a single staff member was hired to pick it up. What is the purpose of staff if they cannot handle administrative duties as mundane as promotion? Mine do. Why can't yours?

2) No, there wasn't a second time. I posted the same information as above in the prayer forum which got one reply from staff... and nothing was done. This was in Feb. I did try to bring some of my staff over here, but they left because there weren't enough people to play with.

3) Essentially, if anyone is going to do a job for you because you cannot, that to me means they are staff. You shot me down for a spot, so I went and built my own sandbox rather than play in yours. I came back to share what I've learned over the last few years, rather than withhold the information. I even went as far as to provide keyword research and a deep scan of your website for you.

This is the sort of response I expected. That is fine. Let me know if you don't plan on using my research, because I will use it.

[electricsheep]

[Bimpni]

And what if I had said your advice had already been put to use several months ago? Yep, I've personally contacted google, facebook, along with about five other businesses. The advertising angle is being discussed, and the keywords can be expensive, from the lady I talked too.

For three keywords, it will cost us "60-80" cents per click. The flip side is it is a -guareenteed- visit to our website. We get to set a limit of how much money we're willing to spend, I thought a dollar a day was not bad, at first. The lady I spoke with, and that gave me those quotes, suggested a budget of five dollars, and for a new account, they'll give a 50 dollar voucher. So we put up 100 dollars for the first 'campaign' and we'll recieve an extra 50 dollars worth of credit. Thats about 5 dollars a day to spend. If we don't recieve a click that day, we're not billed, thats how google campaigns work, from my understanding.

Here is another thing, the game went down to nonpayment recently, and the pbase came together and donated enough to get us up and going again for a year, with a -tiny- bit of surplus. We can do a crap shoot and go with google keywords (facebook is a bit similiar in cost, for adwords, except I believe you 'bid' on how much you're willing to spend. i.e. if we decide to spend 25 cents per click, well, we show up when everyone else willing to pay more, has ran outta money)

Either way, we don't have enough money to sustain a large campaign on either place, we have enough to do it for maybe 3 weeks to a month.

Which is also about halfway to paying for another years servor fees.

So, I believe that main holdup for us is deciding, -is- it worth it to run a short ad campaign, for a month or so, and see how we do, or do we stick with paying servor fees. The donations -were- for servor fees, not for advertising. Since this topic has come up again, a bit sooner then we planned, I'll make a poll shortly since its your guys money we'd be spending.

[electricsheep]

If you ran a paid ad campaign, you NEED to update your website for something more visually appealing. Even though you will get views, you won't get people to stick around. I would strongly urge you to get at least 1000 natural views from search engines per month, and a bounce rate of below 50%, before you pay for advertising. This ensures the quality of your website. You should install google analytics to the site in order to see these factors.

Build your website for humans, optimize it for robots (google). Right now, it doesn't look good to people or robots.

You seem motivated, Bimpni. Please use the fire in your tummy to update the site. Find a free template, use one from scriptmafia if you need to, or have one designed for you by a player. I know how to do this, but Anume and I are not seeing eye to eye at the moment. I am sure others do as well. Use Wordpress! Everyone does because it provides a backbone to your site for ease of updates. You can hide the fact that it is Web 2.0 by a well designed theme. In fact, the Thesis free theme is simple and extremely flexible.

If you insist on PPC, there are a million ways to get free $100 adwords vouchers to start out with. Keep signing up and using vouchers. You can find them all over the net. If you need help with that, I can probably dig up a guide. Don't user Facebook ads. Facebook users are not downloaders and are only up for the instant click-gratification flash game model. If you do decide to use Facebook, use Cubics. Cubics is the advertising platform Facebook game developers like myself use. The ads appear on FB for a fraction of the price. Think 6 cents per click instead of 60.

You are paying to much for hosting, btw. You are using a reseller of Volumedrive services. He pays much less, and charges you more for the same service. Read : You are burning money.

If you want to make the most of your surplus, pocket it for now. That money will come in handy later, once you have a viable site up. You can do a ton with it, from buying huge tweets and Facebook page updates to PPC.

[jibber]

I've said I'd build you all a website several times before, and yes, I optimize it, make it look pretty, and do as much as I can do make it visually appealing. In any case, I'm still up to doing it, or if you'd like, you could just as easily point your domains to the nameservers, and I can change/do whatever else you guys want done to the website.

Certainly, the main website you guys have now, while it seems some work was done to it, isn't very appealing.

As for the Wiki, I haven't done any ... 'browser' optimization for this reason alone. Why should I spend any time trying to update my CSS to make my website look pretty in IE when I can tell people who already play this game to just use Chrome/Firefox? Most 'wiki RPG forsaken lands' keywords already bring up my website at 1/2/3 spots, but they have to know what they're looking for first.

[Twinblades713]

I'm willing to be a soldier. Have been, still am. Waiting. Lol

[electricsheep]

You need to optimize it for keywords people are looking for, not keywords players here would look for. That being said, you seem to have a knack for design. I still suggest wordpress, as it is the easiest for hands-free SEO and updating. The wiki itself could be a page that is incorporated.

I've said I'd build you all a website several times before, and yes, I optimize it, make it look pretty, and do as much as I can do make it visually appealing. In any case, I'm still up to doing it, or if you'd like, you could just as easily point your domains to the nameservers, and I can change/do whatever else you guys want done to the website.

Certainly, the main website you guys have now, while it seems some work was done to it, isn't very appealing.

As for the Wiki, I haven't done any ... 'browser' optimization for this reason alone. Why should I spend any time trying to update my CSS to make my website look pretty in IE when I can tell people who already play this game to just use Chrome/Firefox? Most 'wiki RPG forsaken lands' keywords already bring up my website at 1/2/3 spots, but they have to know what they're looking for first.

[Hepheus]

You said in your first post that tms doesn't bring enough visitors to warrant this kind of atention. One post with a few words informing people who may not know, just how easy it is to vote is hardly a lot of attention. If we were to get ONE person to visit our mud per month and just give us a try I would say that is more than enough to warrant our current playerbase spending 3 seconds a day to vote. Yes, I agree, we are not going to get mass numbers of people coming to FL by being in the top ten, but it certainly will not hurt. Thre ARE people who use that site to find and try new muds, so it is always good to get to and remain on the top ten so that we have a better chance at being one of the muds those people try.