Marketing/promotion

[Shri]

Sorry If I'm doing something wrong, again..
Just wanna comment a bit the fact... that even when I was investigating games on this world.. its was like 17k games (browser ones included), I needed to do before starting on my own game..
I kinda, don't remember I did see this one...
It was a pure, slight, chance, I did stumble in some forum.. some guy saying about this game, before I did found out about it and join.

I mean.. wtf? MMO RPG survival game like this should be known. Especially due to complexity in crafting and mining (really rare, to not just see stupid nods who respawn in same place and you farming em over and over).

'Don't starve' and many other survival games are rubbish compared to this game. Children's play. And still... if you google it.. its fraking hard to finde this game in any list of games.

Low promotion on such sites or what? I am wondering.

ps: On my first week of game play I just needed to go on reedit and put some comments + tags about this game, for future players/seekers. Im still ftp, but not for long tho.

[dageir]

Yeah everyone asks about this when new.
We still do not know the answer, but I guess the devs do not have the man-hours or finances to launch this game commercially.
I have asked about the possibility to put the game on multiple servers with one continent per server (similar to EVE) to allow for more players after an advertisement push, but the devs are silent on that matter. I guess there is also a concern about player retention being bad and on how to finance the game.

[Halbertz]

Short answer: devs are weird guys.
Long answer: angel investor copypasta with this music on background https://youtu.be/QJJYpsA5tv8

[Matexo]

I joined pretty recently and had the same thoughts! If you have any questions or need help with anything the wiki https://ringofbrodgar.com/ has a lot of great info for getting started! Feel free to pm me with questions too, would be happy to help with anything!

[VDZ]

There have been previous threads on the matter, e.g. recently 'Market the game'. The devs don't think the game is ready yet:

We could obv do more with our soycial media platforms, as our digital footprint there is laughably small compared to the no. of people who have tried the game over the years. Paid ads are nothing I'm interested in, because ads are cringe and the world would be a better place without them. Anyone who even sees ads on the internet is already doing something wrong.

(Big yikes whenever I try youtube without adblock. Could not be me.)

Realease on digital distribution platforms is on my radar, but I take a long view of that. The game isn't there yet.

I'm otherwise pretty ride or die with the "build it and they will come" mindset.

They also cannot feasibly do this at the moment because player capacity is limited by technical factors:

There are mainly two things I worry about, though; partly, as mentioned, the risk of getting our mail-servers and/or domain blacklisted; but I'm also a bit worried about having a too successful world launch. The last two resets were teetering right on the edge of server overload, and so if we can't handle more players than that for now, it may be actively harmful to bring in even more until that has been fixed.

[PresqueVu]

[redacted]

[Shri]

There have been previous threads on the matter, e.g. recently 'Market the game'. The devs don't think the game is ready yet:

We could obv do more with our soycial media platforms, as our digital footprint there is laughably small compared to the no. of people who have tried the game over the years. Paid ads are nothing I'm interested in, because ads are cringe and the world would be a better place without them. Anyone who even sees ads on the internet is already doing something wrong.

(Big yikes whenever I try youtube without adblock. Could not be me.)

Realease on digital distribution platforms is on my radar, but I take a long view of that. The game isn't there yet.

I'm otherwise pretty ride or die with the "build it and they will come" mindset.

They also cannot feasibly do this at the moment because player capacity is limited by technical factors:

There are mainly two things I worry about, though; partly, as mentioned, the risk of getting our mail-servers and/or domain blacklisted; but I'm also a bit worried about having a too successful world launch. The last two resets were teetering right on the edge of server overload, and so if we can't handle more players than that for now, it may be actively harmful to bring in even more until that has been fixed.

Thx.

[vatas]

You can only have one first impression.

It makes no sense to spend money or effort to give people bad first impression.

Granted that with w14 launch, game is getting to the point where it's at least theoretically possible for average new player to figure the game out without any external resources. Main contributor to this are the "beginning of" -quests.

We still have the problem where, despite buffing defense to the point that people are complaining legitimate siege will never happen*, new players have zero direction to build a base that is actually safe, and even if they do so they're susceptible to being tricked into coming out of their base; not saying the "about" page should list every known griefing tactic, but even a single sentence like "some players choose to play as bandits/barbarians, and we consider having to avoid them part of the game."

*People like SnuggleSnail argue that as long as there are people defending who A) know what they're doing and B) put in more effort than building three archery towers and complaining at Discord/forums that sieging someone is too easy, the defenders will certainly win.

My somewhat doompilled explanation how you can seriously damage a naive player without investing anything into siege equipment.

[The_Blode]

If the next 2 or 3 worlds add as much "tutorial" content as this world did, we're golden when it comes to the new player experience.
The server being able to handle more than a few thousand people is a big must, too.

At that point I'll see no major hurdles keeping the mass market away.

[vatas]

The server being able to handle more than a few thousand people is a big must, too.

(This is based on what I remember, but I'm rather certain I remember correctly. I do end up speculating a fair bit.)

I'd like to clarify that according to Loftar, the issue with scaling server capacity is software, not hardware. Assuming server wasn't rewritten alongside the client when "hafen" launched in 2015, it doesn't have the best multithreading support.

This means that no matter how much processing power you give to the server, the software has bottlenecks that make server increasingly lag out once X number on players are connected and are interacting with the game world.