Ideas to bring new players to Ascent

Having good videos with good tutorials could entice a lot of players to join this game, tutorials are a good advertisement for the game, every time I find a game that I think I would like, the first thing I do is to check for tutorials in youtube. That is a great way to advertise the game. Maybe the players with better experience or more knowledge could create tutorials based on 3 top elements of this game, Trade, exploration and mining/crafting/research/base station building etc etc. Those starting elements can be a big help.

My observation is that our discussion forum in Steam looks like crap. Every time someone posts against a thread with a negative subject line that boosts it to the top of the forum. Prospective gamers then come to the discussion forum, see all the whiny subject lines, and stay away from the game. We need to put some positive posts up (I have) and keep bumping them, while letting the negative troll ones die. When you post against a troll, you bump up his thread, doing his job for him.

This can't be Jam's job, it's got to be ours! Post your positive experiences in the steam discussions!

Indeed, I post there under another name and I keep trying to help new people and rebutting the negative posters. We just have couple of people there who really hate this game, one of them just got permaban from Steam.

It just hit me...

Massively expensive game production of the century. Wait. Not this century. XX century. Yes I am talking about Privateer!

Cosmos is vast and unfriendly, as the modern games about it.

Get any rights on any movie, any game is out there... and implement it in our game. It could be just few screens and great music (Homeworld), more personal UI and story telling (Privateer), a peace of something from somewhere which will be unknown for XXI generation and LOL/WOW factor for (I have to say us) oldish players.

Make every player dream come through! Make THE GAME which finally has all we always wanted and dream of!

This is not indy game in my view. This is THE GAME in the making...

Do not compere your selves to present mass productions. YAM you have said they can not achieve universe like experience and you were right.

Cosmos can be only vast and unfriendly, because anything else is a lie. Cosmos can be humanize if we only can meet and see a human being in the cosmos.

Last but not least. Show players a human face and you will win it all.

_____________________________

What is a point in creating reality if you can just record it and replay it ?

The simplest 0 outlay way of boosting numbers of players that i can think of is to offer a whole bunch of premium game keys to official Sci-Fi fan sites.

The ones that i can think of that might be most productive are :

-Firefly

-Isaac Asimov (literature)

-Harry Harrison (literature)

-Star Trek

-Star Wars

-Sci-Fi Gamer sites

These should be offered free, and in mass quantity. No thinking small.

There is no real cost, but the give away could also be recorded as a promotional cost and possibly be deductable for JAM at tax time too. If you gave away 10,000 keys and got 100+ new players that stayed from the give away, the game mass would likely increase to the point of sustainability and WOM growth. If more than 1% stayed it would just be a bonus.

I don't think "advertising is a waste of money" necessarily means "I don't want new players". It's just that advertising costs a lot to reach a reasonable amount of people, and conversion rates (i.e., the proportion of ad views that actually become sales) are generally pretty low for a niche game like this one.

Word-of-mouth is the most effective although a difficult form of advertising.

A game that doesn't require everyone to have the same skills to play successfully is more attractive to a large population of potentially new players than a game that requires the same play ability for everyone - Facebook grows by Word-of-mouth because it is easy to use.

I don't see any reason to suggest Ascent to anyone I know because it has too many drawbacks and there is a lot of inertia by most people to online games which draw only a tiny part of the population.

Frankly, because of the enormous commitment required, I can't imagine any game developer not desiring a lot of $$$ as payment for labors.

The simplest 0 outlay way of boosting numbers of players that i can think of is to offer a whole bunch of premium game keys to official Sci-Fi fan sites.

The ones that i can think of that might be most productive are :

-Firefly

-Isaac Asimov (literature)

-Harry Harrison (literature)

-Star Trek

-Star Wars

-Sci-Fi Gamer sites

These should be offered free, and in mass quantity. No thinking small.

There is no real cost, but the give away could also be recorded as a promotional cost and possibly be deductable for JAM at tax time too. If you gave away 10,000 keys and got 100+ new players that stayed from the give away, the game mass would likely increase to the point of sustainability and WOM growth. If more than 1% stayed it would just be a bonus.

Sorry, but the scale you are suggesting does have real costs.

The new players you are suggesting to target already play other online games - Robbing Peter to pay Paul.

What percent of those potential new players will stay long term with Ascent?

Ascent just lost a lot of players brought in by advertising - Why did Ascent lose the players?

First of English is not my main language and no offense to Jam, i love the game so far i just want it to survive..

My guess as to why you are losing new players is due to bad first impression and the fact it's released but does not feel polished in anyway.

First thing that made me not try the game the first time: The website looks like it's designed in 2000 and the forum uses comic sans in it's title..

The "flight school" does not look anything like the space you'll be spending most of the time in and I'm not surprised a lot of people already leave at that stage with the feeling of "oh another alpha stage game". Then again if the computer that teached me flight guided me through the introduction quest line and told me for example that i should aim for that dark green bar on a planet to get oxygen it would make it feel more complete i guess. Because the introduction quest line is not clean, does not hold the players hand and the game requires to much wiki for learning the basics. Let's face it.. most new players are stupid and way to lazy but you need their money

And the story of rebuilding civilization is great but falls apart as soon as you jump outside the first systems and end up in a autopilot menu with tons of colonies and star bases.. Seems civilization manages fine without me, maybe limit the amount of star bases and colonies in the same system or cleanup abandoned bases or hide them if players have not been online for x days? Or change the story.. Sure if you manage to get the hyperdrive fitted and jump further i bet space is lonely, but you need people to get there.

First of English is not my main language and no offense to Jam, i love the game so far i just want it to survive..

My guess as to why you are losing new players is due to bad first impression and the fact it's released but does not feel polished in anyway.

First thing that made me not try the game the first time: The website looks like it's designed in 2000 and the forum uses comic sans in it's title..

The "flight school" does not look anything like the space you'll be spending most of the time in and I'm not surprised a lot of people already leave at that stage with the feeling of "oh another alpha stage game". Then again if the computer that teached me flight guided me through the introduction quest line and told me for example that i should aim for that dark green bar on a planet to get oxygen it would make it feel more complete i guess. Because the introduction quest line is not clean, does not hold the players hand and the game requires to much wiki for learning the basics. Let's face it.. most new players are stupid and way to lazy but you need their money

And the story of rebuilding civilization is great but falls apart as soon as you jump outside the first systems and end up in a autopilot menu with tons of colonies and star bases.. Seems civilization manages fine without me, maybe limit the amount of star bases and colonies in the same system or cleanup abandoned bases or hide them if players have not been online for x days? Or change the story.. Sure if you manage to get the hyperdrive fitted and jump further i bet space is lonely, but you need people to get there.

Some really good points.

I wonder if a small reference at the beginning of the Flight Tutorial that much of the warping and jumping are handled through the autopilot, but learning the basics of piloting are a good foundation.

I wonder if the beginning could include an invitation to join the community as it rebuilds civilization. We are so community oriented. While joining us is not a requirement. There are many who play solo, but they do have access to the community resources. The gates we have built and the terraforming we have done and are doing are part of the game now. I think there is good reason to make it a call for joining the existing efforts.

As far as web page, What would you suggest to update it? While this is up to the game developer (Jam) to deal with and decide, I would be happy to put some things together for him to steal use.

Well I'm not a webdesigner so not sure how doable things are, when i did make a website i used adobe muse so almost no coding was involved.

But for example take the waybackmachine and look at the competition.
For example what eve did in 2014: http://web.archive.org/web/201402072337 ... nline.com/ or space themed templates: http://www.flashmint.com/show-template-258.html

Some fancy pictures and parallax makes for a big wow effect: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/speed/parallax/
Add some live stats from the game, amount of players/players online, bases and such (well if the numbers are something to show for that is ). Show the game is alive.

The website is a big part of your advertisement.