I agree with you, Foobooy. FB people aren't really in for the long haul, at least, in my opinion. I think most of the people that would be interested in Earth are already past the point of no return. Text based games just aren't really conducive to the internet like they used to be when everyone had dial up.
Its a hell of a lot better game then Mafia Wars. I think there will be a LOT of nostalgic gen-x'ers like myself that will remember what it is and come back for a peek.
I wish Pan could figure out a way to get the rights to the name 'Earth 2025' in the marketing plan. At one time or another there have probably been several hundred thousand people who have played the game. This thing COULD have a lot of inertia if the chips fell right.
Cheating Mod Hall of Shame: Dark Morbid, Turtle Crawler, Sov
That being said, with all the new game around and the currently low membership earth's not nearly attractive enough for new players compared to other games offered.
It still illustrates the point that there were a LOT more than several thousand.
There were many standard games, and a lot of players who played either Standard, Tourney or FFA exclusively. I think the total number of earth players would be well over 100k, possibly much greater.
Earth was an AMAZING game when the player base was that big, the political side of the game was incredibly interesting.
Is anyone actually referencing their opinion against FB analytics and usage stats, or are we just venturing guesses at how successful this thing will be based on personal opinions about what games people play on FB?
Personal opinion. Earth isn't an appealing game anymore dude. As much as some people may still enjoy it, a purely text based game which has remained more or less the same since 1998 will not be able to attract players over a new game with graphics and geared towards a new generation of gamers.
NOW3P, I performed an OLS regression using usage statistics from my vast database of Facebook analytics with new users as the dependent variable and number of graphics as my independent variable and came up with a coefficient of .8592. My conclusion is that it will be a failure. Look for the paper in Computer Games Quarterly.
the main idea is exposure; if even 100k people hear of it, and 1% of them try it, that's 1k people who've tried it... and who knows, maybe only 1% of them will stay, that's 10 people sure; but if the 1k people who've tried it each expose 10 more people to it...
etc
exposure is key, it is a nostalgic game sure, but lots of us like that sort of thing ;) heck i installed Baldurs Gate II : SOA half a year ago to replay it heh.....
Klown, i played before ArMxTF disbanded. I think that was in 98?
and like others have said, multis were abundant, i'd say at most there has been 25,000 unique players ever and maybe 10,000 that played it seriously.
but then again, we don't and won't ever have those numbers.
exposure is key, said it before.
I play diablo 1 regularly right now, do you know how hard it is when you don't cheat?
Man, I remember when Diablo 1 was like, ZOMGWTFBBQ in the gaming world.
our idea isn't that we will flood alliance with new blood, it's that we'll have several servers for that solo facebook style experience, but some of those players will migrate to alliance for sure.
as far as graphics and stuff, I've thought of a few solutions to use some javascript and such to add in some animations and visual representations...
I think the main thing to remember is that EE is an old-school game which currently caters to old-school users. We are looking at bringing that style of game to a new generation of users, focusing more on taking advantage of the mediums available to us today than anything else.
I'm very confident in what we have coming down the pipe, so we'll see how it goes :)
-=Dave=-
Earth Empires Staff
pangaea [at] earthempires [dot] com
I think along with all the stuff the admin and developers are doing, we as the community needs to do more things as well to ensure that the new blood can survive.
Could we get an agreement between our experienced players to not farm the hell out of people in other servers, especially on servers designed for new players? One of the biggest turn off for a new player is logging in and seeing your "hard work" gone. Farmville's bug where the interface isn't updating correctly and thus, no actual farming was done for many users, pissed a lot of people off.
Gamers these days live off achievements.
World of Warcraft, leveling, shiny new armor, titles, achievements, it is THE most successful game out there right now, and maybe in the history of gaming. It's actually a very simple game, but with stats that people can compare.
Imagine we had achievements in Earth, account based, and some achievements country based.
1,000,000 acres grabbed!
1,000,000,000 civilians killed!
100,000,000 networth achieved in one reset!
Achievement points based off these, more for harder ones, achievement points rankings.
These things will create addictiveness as well.
Facebook news
Forgotten has gained the achievement "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" by having more then $10,000,000,000 on hand in Earth Empires!
Forgotten would like to share this achievement with you by giving you a bonus. Click Here to accept it!
And it's all scale-able.
"I can has networth!" Secret Achievement, details viewable once you achieve it.
By having the lowest possible networth in the game, you have unlocked this secret achievement!!
Forgotten
"Heck, the FB version of EE doesn't have to be anything that resembles EE, it just has to have our theme, and be very addictive. Recruit from there."
Yeah, I'll buy that.
"Forgotten has gained the achievement "SHOW ME THE MONEY!" by having more then $10,000,000,000 on hand in Earth Empires! "
*knows who to LG today*
====
Pang:
"as far as graphics and stuff, I've thought of a few solutions to use some javascript and such to add in some animations and visual representations..."
I remember complaining about how slow Earth was on my 28.8k OH MY!
I have no doubt we'll see a great success in terms of solo playing in the other servers.
Seriously... if Farmville has so many addicts, this game can as well. Farmville is the most tedious and unrewarding game ever and it has so many people playing that crap for hours on end.
the achievement thing could be set to only alliance members only, much like "Neighbours" on Farmville. and maybe a enforced, can't hit your friends type of thing.
remember, we're dealing with facebook, that population is filled with people that can tell how a square is also a diamond
well, I spent a few minutes today working on EE and the FB api, and I played my turns through facebook today, and got the EE site to post a nice picture of a lolcat to my wall, so we're definitely going in the right direction there :p
now to make it so you can send ally requests through facebook! :p
-=Dave=-
Earth Empires Staff
pangaea [at] earthempires [dot] com
I had a little think about this and i honestly think this has the potential to be huge.
I think we all agree that the thing that makes this/earth 2025 special was the group based game play, at some stage or another most of you have probably said something like 'this game sucks, im only playing because of the people'. This team play is what you should promote and develop to new fb users. In other words dont highlight the primary server with the hope some eventually join the alliance server. Instead you should be heavily promote the TEAM server. IMO this is the best server for 'hooking' them into the game.
1-It provides a sense of individual/group game play.
2-Encourages them to play as a team with people they know. Imagine a team of people in one school warring each other. No one likes to be on the losing end and it will keep interest in the game high among ppl in the school or organisation.
3-Its the best 'server' for fb spammage with news and achievements. Make it so teams/alliances can offically declare war on each other and make it appear in the news (and fb newsfeed).
4-New players wont get stomped on in the team server as much as stepping straight into the alliance server.
The game should have a consolidated ingame help menu that should prominently answer questions like 'What is the difference between the different servers' and 'How to improve my country?' Join an alliance of course!
1-Going to need alot of new graphics.
2-Problem of revealing country ownership and the problems associated with it. i.e. you can find out who someone is or could be allied to without spy ops and suiciders type grudges between people.
I think it should work even if it doesn't break all records and take the world by storm. It has to be kept in perspective and it won't hurt to gain the exposure. To me, gamers on facebook seem to be mainly focused on the convenience of playing games from an interface they're already involved in. A game that has some depth and is free will have a great chance and I think going to them with a single player experience they are used is the right idea (to begin with).
It'll probably bring a few into the social side of the game but its more likely to do so if we (the players/alliances) set up more of a presence on FB to draw them in....
I get the feeling FB tends to think having games will keep people using the site and making more connections. In reality it probably does keep people logging in but they don't really make many more friendships as most games are geared to only sending in game updates and bonuses for having more 'friends' play as they can then use paid for perks to make money from the game.
Though I think its right to start off in the whole FB way of gaming for the exposure and a single player experience as its what Facebook gamers are used to... I like the idea by torment of trying to get people eventually to play in team servers where real friendships and organisation with actual friends and family will pay off and rather than the general bonuses through vague connections (only really made for the games sake in Facebook to gain new players from the developers point of view).
In the long run if the game becomes more focused to the team side, and players encouraged to create their own alliances/groups on facebook, it'll soon spread and when they come to compete in the Alliance server they'll already be hooked and want to know how the rest of us operate. So with lots of smaller alliances, it would probably be the case many will merge into pre-existing groups/alliances. That's my hope anyway. So whether its individuals or groups, the Alliance game will probably hold the most value to play because of the social side that keeps us involved. Something FB doesn't really bring to its users with the current games on offer.
i think everyone has grasped many of the aspects we hope to accomplish with Facebook.
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about the Facebook type structure when we were dreaming up the team server. Get 4 of your friends together and take on the rest of the server. Torment hit it on the head in terms of achievements.... group achievements are awesome and if we can make it so Pang, Torment, Spawn, Syoto and NOW3P all have news events together about playing EE, we can recruit more of their friends potentially.
The biggest thing I want to do with Facebook is start the move to new mediums. Webgames are great for folks at work and stuff, people in their 20s and beyond, people who played this type of stuff back in the day. We want to move to Facebook and mobile devices so that we can target the new generation of users -- ie high school students (which is what most of us were when we started playing) who can play from their phones at lunch or on the bus, the 20something players who never got into games back in the day.... lots of new, untapped markets for EE.
We make the game so that it becomes whatever you want it to be... a quick way to spend time when you're travelling on the bus/train/car or something you can reall sink your teeth into in the way many of those on Alliance have.
Edited By: Pangaea on Apr 11th 2010, 18:24:02
-=Dave=-
Earth Empires Staff
pangaea [at] earthempires [dot] com
Perhaps also encourage primary as a place to start for them? Since I see very little chance that people will listen to forgottens good sense :P
OH and on a side note if you want to stop the potential for lots of untaggeds who AB missile etc on the alliance server(if it happens?) you could always go the way of the team server and make people have a tag past protection?
If we're going to drop the fb users onto the team server, something really needs to be done about flufftards that have multiple tags and bully the honest players.
Seriously. That's the new RD. I thought the team server was a good idea at first, and it is, but the practice is fluffed up. I'm never going to play on the team server.
--Xelah
Death Knights
-*-*- First to get banned from the new forums 04-05-2010 -*-*-
the Admins don't want to put their hands on those issues using Admin power right now.
some of them do participate in the war effort though.
Team Server was such a great concept, except it's ruined.
What if EE introduced back a 1A server?
Just satisfy these sub Council Alliances, Ragnarok, BEER, MKR, whatever, give them back a server.
Different rule sets there, maybe use it also as a long term changes testing grounds. A server doesn't cost much more, and although it does show a sign of defeat against these groups.
Both sides would achieve their goals, Team Server would remain Team based, these sub-Council alliances gets their home.
If that happens, and they still try their antics on Team Server, then the Admins can easily use their ban hammer.
We're pretty committed to NOT making a duplicate of the Alliance server, at least not until there are enough players to warrant it.
The team server is moving forward I think.... they've gotten over a hump in terms of policies migrating to a new way of thinking, and it seems that the "war" there is over.
-=Dave=-
Earth Empires Staff
pangaea [at] earthempires [dot] com
yea, I like more servers except for the player-base splitting thing....
Alliance & Council & Limited running at the same time imho contributed a bit to splitting the player base on old earth.... It'd be fine to have more if we had more players, like say >10k on a server....
I'd also be inclined to reintroduce random... like 1c-> whatever if we got back to the >10-15k in primary mark
I like multiple servers....gives you the opportunity to use different play styles in different places under different circumstances. I like warring in Team, netting in Alliance, etc...
it would be interesting if you guys could show some data about player base splitting.
How many players only play express?
How many players only play alliance?
How many players play alliance and team?
How many players play express and alliance?
