and those flaws have been said before but nobody remembers it.

if player can get something for free or create havoc with multiple accounts (and not even breaking rules) he/she will do it.

oh, so about 10 minutes a week is all the game needs? cool, but you're dumb :p

and req: my point is as an admin. the community has a very steep learning curve to be a part of, especially the alliance server (which is where everyone wants the growth, thus, is the topic of discussions, eh?). This is one of the hurdles we wanted to overcome. We made the game with a "if we give the community a better game, that will spur players to make hosting sites, create guides and content and create the resources needed to make the game grow"

But that hasn't really happened -- we get lots of user-created content, but it's typically focused on the users who are already highly engaged with the community and it's often locked behind clan sites. On this server specifically, many alliances just polarized their stances and opinions while continuing down the same path we were on during the end of E2025, making their members follow suit. That was focus on yourself at the expense of ALL others. I remember back in the day there was plenty of public content and strats and stuff when I started playing, hosted on third-party websites (one offs, hosting sites, etc).

Considering the amount of time and effort required by the staff to do all the things that we had hoped would be done organically, the question is more about allocation of scarce time and resources by a handful of contributors who already have full plates + busy RL. I have other projects I'm also excited about and have a much more direct impact on my real life than EE (hi Detmer! :p). I'm not trying to make excuses or complain, but I'm just being candid about this issue.

But like I said, there's lots of stuff that could be community created and vetted, like new documentation, guides, strats etc. I already outlined what has to happen from a dev perspective above :p

blah blah blah, I don't care about your RL or your other project Pang. I care about EE. Make it better for me. Thanks.

just kidding of course. OK I'll try to get primary guys to step up and develop some stuff for you Pang.

Getting 600 new people to sign up wouldn't be unlike spamming an alliance invite to the 11k-person 1A, back when mastodons romed the earth. Of those 600 people, most would log in 3 times and be deleted in a week. You might see 60 new actives at best.. eg, one new alliance. Color me unimpressed.

I agree with 95% of what pang has posted here

new ppl = more land

yargh

"especially the alliance server (which is where everyone wants the growth, thus, is the topic of discussions, eh?)."

Where you disagree?

On the developer side, I recall we used to have a couple dozen folks trying to program bots at given times. We just need to repurpose those folks for good! haha.

I do think this game would expand rapidly on FB. As for worries over multies, one, still IPs showing and two make them do those stupid captchas. If they have time to do that 45x a day, power to them, I certainly do not.

I do worry that perhaps too many people would try to play at once, but then, if that increased revenues would it make it sustainable? I have no idea and have to trust Pang's judgment on it all as he's got the best vantage point and it's his choice.

Everyone in this thread seems to have forgotten that we once played Earth when there were more than 10k countries...

So the whole 'omgz i duno if we can handell some moar playerz' bit is stupid

And in my own opinion, I had ALOT more fun actually PLAYING the game when there were 10k players on the server rather than sub 1k. I'd wager a bunch of people would agree with that opinion

trumper: we tried to repurpose developers who made other things for their clans. several of them were the ones who cheated and abused their position, creating lots of drama. it's about fit not just technical skills.

and it's not my choice alone as to how we proceed, btw... qz has been keeping the lights on here for a year along with zarc + the mods while slag and I typically just post crap like this because we got frustrated developing and dealing with bullfluff drama as the reward for putting in hard work.

oh one thing i forgot is that we need an AI element added too that would play people's countries for them if their bail 2 days in so we don't have a ton of countries that never made it OOP. 10,000 players is easy, IMO. 10,000 active players who are engaged and sticking around is what's harder :p
We're looking at building engagement, not just inflating numbers.

You might want to look at how Civilization World is a flop on Facebook as a FB game, for case studies. The game was also "reset based", and the game ends when a civ researches the final tech. It was fun. Really fun.

However, the developers kept adding monetization "pay to win" mechanics that ultimately killed the game, you simply cannot win if you don't pay, 6 months later, the player base was only 10% of the original first 2 months when it was still fun.

They refused to balance the game mechanics, remove/reduce the pay to win elements, and milked it for a short few months before it died. The people that did stick around, and didn't pay, formed power guilds much like EE and each "game" was what essentially boils down to what is like EE's Team server - a reset/game is usually characterized by a single large organized guild that just killed everyone else and wins, because 1/3-1/2 of the server is that one guild.

Alliance server should never be a destination for new facebook players if it ever does reach that platform.

A) they get farmed fluffless by LaF anf Evo

or

B) they get killed by SoF or LaF

or

C) they join LaF or SoF, don't get farmed, but turn into fluffs.

If you look at gamer profiles, you see that the recent ones have a player number past 20 000. And there's what, 1000 playing now tops?
Export the raw data of those who arent playing into excel, what did they play, how did they do? Were they noobs who got whacked hard?
Were they vets who got tired?
Lets then try to find fixes for the cause as a community, how can we make it more noob friendly or less consuming for vets? Or whatever else reasons we come to from analysong that raw (anonymous) non-playing data.

Now for that 20 000 inactive base, you have an email contact. once we've thought of compelling fixes, changes, an email to all of them from ee.

Damnit, all you need is one statistics student who's looking for a thesis subject etc to do an analysis for this game.

How do you pick good staff out of a community that has spent the past 15 years lying, cheating, and backstabbing each other?

Of all the sad pathetic confessions you've ever made on these boards to get attention Req, that may be the saddest and most pathetic . . .

Aww my little troll puppet can't resist but to post.

hm missed this thread

I agree mainly with what pang said.


Incidentally, I'm learning some things that may make it easier for us to expand development &etc... specifically LXC... linux containers... so i can give root permissions out a little more flexibly, within a container :)