emp_devo contacted the developer team today, wanting to pay for an ad for Empires. After giving him some art assets, he created the following banner, which you are all also free to host. I also made this one: If you would like to create or host your own or have any questions, ask here.
Those look really really good... I cant decide what it is about them, especially the top one that is so appealing. Makes it look like combined arms happens a lot when in reality its more tanks just tanks or more just infantry.
Anyway, what Tama is hinting at is that if anyone wants to "donate" to Empires, you should instead host an ad to bring in new players. Because while we inevitably get a bunch of retards saying "how 2 become turrent", some of them stay on. Like you all reading this.
I've actually just been hanging around trying to complete the achievements and unlock hats. Now I realise there are no hats I may just give up. Pretty good banner though. Could do with some new tutorial videos. A 3 min quick Starr tube would be much better than the tutorial map I reckon.
The ads will run for just tomorrow. I'm very, very interested to see what sort of player count bump we see.
Steam cards, Emojis, Profile Wallpapers. They would all advertise Empires. I would surely use an Empires Wallpaper. Cards would attract thousands of hunters.
Steam cards are a great idea. Just like achievements actually bumped up the playercount from achievement hunters. Only negative side effect was getting the Ponies to play, which both helped and seriously hurt the amount of players. Maybe a mix of steam cards and new achievements should be done? I, uh, may have thought that because some random's thread on 8chan did so well at attracting players, then we should advertise on 4chan... Incidentally, if we can see how many clickthroughs it gets after 80.000 views, maybe it'll be worth asking people to place banners of their own. I'm sure 4-5 people on these forums could be willing to donate $20 to the cause of keeping Empires populated for another 10 years. There's a reason the ones in the OP are the exact size 4chan requires.
Anybody knows why the first 8 achievements stopped working? It was some sort of update, I don't know what happened exactly. Fixing them would be a start.
Just looked it up on Valve's website and it serms like trading cards are at least a remote possibility... Reading through articles which say the introduction of trading cards has doubled $10 game purchases makes me think a free game would have far, far more of a traffic bump. Plus free advertising to gamers who already have steam. Only downside is the potential for a server to become an "idle server" but if trading cards are possible, and we have 2 or 3 populated servers at any one time, it sounds like a worthy tradeoff. One of the devs should look further into this though. Seems like there would be a LOT of art requirements.
Yes totally. Removing spec would probably be necessary too. Idling can be solved by autokick, a simple server plug-in.
These are dark times indeed, removing the best part of empires. A thread where people talk about it and some banner ad that's either being blocked or simply ignored most of the time are two different things. I mean sure it's cool and it could help, always worth a try, but I wonder if the ad is getting to the right people.
Spec is never a problem. When server is full we just kick spec. When server is not full, it doesn't matter at all, if people want to play they'd play, if they don't want to play they might as well quit, sitting in spec doesn't hurt. The actual problem is how easy it is to switch between teams. Some day in future we'll have to deal with this.
He brought up the issue of idling. Very common in Team Fortress 2. In the occasion servers are full, spec would be of little use and if someone wanted to actually spec a game, say to educate himself, there could be other means to do that. AMIRIT CRIPERT!?!?!?
Views don't count if there's an adblock enabled. The ad has almost reached it's goal of 80,000 views. We have a clickthrough rate of 0.13%, meaning we're going to get about 100 clicks by the time it's over. I think the main problem with the ad has been that they begin ads at 00:00, meaning we're advertising to people to play Empires when all the servers are dead anyway. Sunday is Empires' busiest night so we'll see how things are, but I doubt we'll get any more than a few extra players. Still, an interesting experiment. Judging by how new the people currently populating EPIC are (with less than an hours playtime), I'd say a good amount of them came from 4chan. I'll wait until we have the download information to see how many people actually installed Empires this morning, but I think this basically fit in with expectations. My estimate is that we got about 20 downloads of Empires from this ad. While that's perhaps not as ideal as we all would have hoped, at least it's a route to take for anyone else who has $20 too much in their wallet and wants to be rid of it. We'll keep looking into more alternatives to get Empires out there.
Empires should start logging peoples playtime and report it back to the devs like big brother, so we actually get some data on new players
Hey blizzerd I need something from you. Remember when we made all those little Empires sprites and had a thread with them? Do you still have them? I need them for reasons and can't find any.
