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Community Feedback
We're listening. For players who wish to have a voice in the future of Evernight, this is the place to talk to management. This is the newsgroup we'll be actively monitoring on a daily basis.
EverNight's future
Submitted by Cortex 7/7/2012 12:42:00 PM {time} ago in Community Feedback
I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck. 1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players? On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking. The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard. Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave. Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed. Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games. I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex. Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party. In summary you would have 3 types of games ; - the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games. The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change. 2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution? They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs. More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful. Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby. 3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically. Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on. The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well. To end a positive note, cake for evrybody! Cortex
mmm cake
wyrm
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
Thanks Cortex, excellent post. I like questions almost as much as I like ideas. Maybe even moreso.
Although I would have preferred seeing you segment your topics into several different threads so that each could spawn more (reasonably organized) discussion.
[Playerbase]
Can the playerbase rise to 100+? Currently, unique visitors is floating between 50-60 per day. Well, that's over halfway to 100 already. That's right now, as-is, nothing done, nothing changed.
Do we believe we can grow the playerbase to well over 100+? Yes, unquestionably, we do. Actually we believe we will be able to grow them much bigger than that. Big enough to require at least one more decimal point, and we're not ruling out needing two more.
At this point we don't really know ultimately it what form it would be implemented in, but variants that offer something to appeal to players who only wish to sporadically pop-in and play for 20 minutes to an hour kind of thing, is in EN's future.
[Diplomacy]
You bring up a lot of excellent issues and ideas regarding diplomacy. For that though, we already have a pretty thread going on the topic of diplomacy. And many of these very issues are at the top of that discussion.
[Codex]
Do. You. Want. To. Date. My. Avatar....?
Oops. Sorry. Couldn't help it.
Got a little bit of a Felicia Day crush thing going on here...
Ahem. Moving on...
[Recoding the UI]
Our objectives and reasons for recoding the UI are several.
1) Managing & updating a website like Evernight written in classic asp is such an absolute nightmare we're not even going to try.
2) Getting getting the codebase migrated to a modern infrastructure that we're very comfortable and experienced working in will greatly expand our ability to make modifications (fixes, upgrades, additions, etc) when and where they're needed, much faster and easier than would be possible (at least for us) with the existing code.
3) We want to open the vast majority of the game to be publicly/anonymously browsable without needing to be logged in. We feel this will be much easier to accomplish with a user authentication system we're familar and confortable with, rather than wrestle with the existing code to make it our bidding.
3a) At some point, options for third party sign-in authentication will be added in (facebook, google+ twitter etc). Again many time easier (for us) to implement and manage.
[Dranden and Maximus Prime]
We can't speculate on what Max or Dran's reasons were (or weren't) for the things they did (or didn't) do.
All we comment on is what we plan to do.
[Going Forward]
There are options and avanues available today that weren't even concieved of even just 2-3 years ago, let alone 5-8 years ago.
We both have substantial background and experience developing and running several web properties for profit under several different business models. Not that any of them are going to make us into mega-millionaires, but they're well enough that neither us has to get up in the morning saying yes sir/no sir to anyone, (other than a client or customer) .
The point being, web development is waht we do. Full time. Full time for the last 5-6 years. Part time, another 5-6 before that.
Plus, we don't view Evernight as purely a "business" project. We both have a passion and enjoyment to work on this project. For us, this is one of those great opportunities in life where your work and your play come together at the same time in the same project.
[Community]
Yep. Absolutely. The community is huge major factor. It's a significan piece of what makes Evernight Evernight.
At some point we're going to be looking for substantial community involvement and participation. Moderators, administrators, writers, artists, coaches, etc.
Athough at this point in time, it's a bit early to speculate as to just how all that will come together.
Right now our main focus is solving the the biggest early in-your-face technical hurdles that need to be overcome.
Once the dust has mostly started to settle on those issues, we'll be able to turn more attention to the other issues.
[Overhead]
There is, and isn't overhead. Our staffing right now is two. Mike & Ken. We are both management and the development team. When we transition the hosting, we're just moving the site onto our existing hardware. We have more than enough idle server capacity just sitting around waiting for something to do.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
what no milk?
*happy to see something happening and someone speaking for Evernight agian.
wyrm
-------Original Message-------
Management wrote:
Thanks Cortex, excellent post. I like questions almost as much as I like ideas. Maybe even moreso.
Although I would have preferred seeing you segment your topics into several different threads so that each could spawn more (reasonably organized) discussion.
[Playerbase]
Can the playerbase rise to 100+? Currently, unique visitors is floating between 50-60 per day. Well, that's over halfway to 100 already. That's right now, as-is, nothing done, nothing changed.
Do we believe we can grow the playerbase to well over 100+? Yes, unquestionably, we do. Actually we believe we will be able to grow them much bigger than that. Big enough to require at least one more decimal point, and we're not ruling out needing two more.
At this point we don't really know ultimately it what form it would be implemented in, but variants that offer something to appeal to players who only wish to sporadically pop-in and play for 20 minutes to an hour kind of thing, is in EN's future.
[Diplomacy]
You bring up a lot of excellent issues and ideas regarding diplomacy. For that though, we already have a pretty thread going on the topic of diplomacy. And many of these very issues are at the top of that discussion.
[Codex]
Do. You. Want. To. Date. My. Avatar....?
Oops. Sorry. Couldn't help it.
Got a little bit of a Felicia Day crush thing going on here...
Ahem. Moving on...
[Recoding the UI]
Our objectives and reasons for recoding the UI are several.
1) Managing & updating a website like Evernight written in classic asp is such an absolute nightmare we're not even going to try.
2) Getting getting the codebase migrated to a modern infrastructure that we're very comfortable and experienced working in will greatly expand our ability to make modifications (fixes, upgrades, additions, etc) when and where they're needed, much faster and easier than would be possible (at least for us) with the existing code.
3) We want to open the vast majority of the game to be publicly/anonymously browsable without needing to be logged in. We feel this will be much easier to accomplish with a user authentication system we're familar and confortable with, rather than wrestle with the existing code to make it our bidding.
3a) At some point, options for third party sign-in authentication will be added in (facebook, google+ twitter etc). Again many time easier (for us) to implement and manage.
[Dranden and Maximus Prime]
We can't speculate on what Max or Dran's reasons were (or weren't) for the things they did (or didn't) do.
All we comment on is what we plan to do.
[Going Forward]
There are options and avanues available today that weren't even concieved of even just 2-3 years ago, let alone 5-8 years ago.
We both have substantial background and experience developing and running several web properties for profit under several different business models. Not that any of them are going to make us into mega-millionaires, but they're well enough that neither us has to get up in the morning saying yes sir/no sir to anyone, (other than a client or customer) .
The point being, web development is waht we do. Full time. Full time for the last 5-6 years. Part time, another 5-6 before that.
Plus, we don't view Evernight as purely a "business" project. We both have a passion and enjoyment to work on this project. For us, this is one of those great opportunities in life where your work and your play come together at the same time in the same project.
[Community]
Yep. Absolutely. The community is huge major factor. It's a significan piece of what makes Evernight Evernight.
At some point we're going to be looking for substantial community involvement and participation. Moderators, administrators, writers, artists, coaches, etc.
Athough at this point in time, it's a bit early to speculate as to just how all that will come together.
Right now our main focus is solving the the biggest early in-your-face technical hurdles that need to be overcome.
Once the dust has mostly started to settle on those issues, we'll be able to turn more attention to the other issues.
[Overhead]
There is, and isn't overhead. Our staffing right now is two. Mike & Ken. We are both management and the development team. When we transition the hosting, we're just moving the site onto our existing hardware. We have more than enough idle server capacity just sitting around waiting for something to do.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
Good points. It's early the glow is still on..
Reality is for later. Let's see the rise in player base first.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
Well, yeah, that too...
-------Original Message-------
BlueSky wrote:
Good points. It's early the glow is still on..
Reality is for later. Let's see the rise in player base first.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
I'm gonna throw my hat into the mix and state that I am available to volunteer as a moderator or player coach when the time comes.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
Management wrote:
Well, yeah, that too...
-------Original Message-------
BlueSky wrote:
Good points. It's early the glow is still on..
Reality is for later. Let's see the rise in player base first.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
I'm also planning on promoting this game on Reddit and some gaming events that I have coming up throughout the year. I'm not sure if I would do it until the revamp of the website though. I've shown this game to one of my best friends and my brother recently and they were both turned off by the "ugly look" as my brother so graciously put it.
The presentation of Evernight needs to be greatly improved if we're gonna attract today's generation.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
The Knockout Kid wrote: I'm gonna throw my hat into the mix and state that I am available to volunteer as a moderator or player coach when the time comes.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
Management wrote:
Well, yeah, that too...
-------Original Message-------
BlueSky wrote:
Good points. It's early the glow is still on..
Reality is for later. Let's see the rise in player base first.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
Thanks Knockout, those are the kinds of things we like to hear.
When the time comes, if you were to want to lead an effort to promote Evernight on Reddit or elsewhere, we'll do what we can to support that.
We agree though, major efforts before we're ready aren't necessarily the best idea.
Our current timeline is to make the first major transition by the end of August. Which will consist of physically moving the hosting to our servers and switching over to running our new interface.
By new interface we mean everything that's not "in-game" i.e. the lobby, games lists, player profiles, reviews, top players, chat, settings, help, etc. All that kind of stuff.
The in-game pages will be mostly the same, pretty much what you're used to, but rewritten without frames.
For this initial "re-launch" will everything be perfect?
Well, we're pretty sure it probably won't be. But we're reasonably confident we'll have a good case to make the claim that it's "better"
That's why we want to get as much feedback and ideas as we can right now, so we can try to incorporate as much as possible under the constraints of time window we're working with.
And then of course once players are actually using the new interface, we're pretty sure we're going to get a mountain of feedback then. Likes, dislikes, good, bad, what's right, what's wrong, bugs, problems, suggestions, ideas, etc.
This kicks off round two of more modifications. Only now we'll be working on a technical platform we're comfortable and experienced with, players will be able to be more specific on their feedback based on what they actually see, and we won't be under the pressure of a time constraint.
It's at that point, after implementation of the best round 2 ideas, we expect have the game in a state where we'll feel ready to turn our focus to bringing new players in.
Of course, we welcome all new players who want to come by and check us out before then. They're welcome to play and the feedback from the first impression of new players is extremely important.
-------Original Message-------
The Knockout Kid wrote: I'm also planning on promoting this game on Reddit and some gaming events that I have coming up throughout the year. I'm not sure if I would do it until the revamp of the website though. I've shown this game to one of my best friends and my brother recently and they were both turned off by the "ugly look" as my brother so graciously put it.
The presentation of Evernight needs to be greatly improved if we're gonna attract today's generation.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
The Knockout Kid wrote: I'm gonna throw my hat into the mix and state that I am available to volunteer as a moderator or player coach when the time comes.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
Management wrote:
Well, yeah, that too...
-------Original Message-------
BlueSky wrote:
Good points. It's early the glow is still on..
Reality is for later. Let's see the rise in player base first.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
Cool.
I do agree that bringing in the new people won't really be doable until at least after the revamp. But more importantly, until we stop being such a niche style game.
Lunar Savage
-------Original Message-------
Management wrote:
Thanks Knockout, those are the kinds of things we like to hear.
When the time comes, if you were to want to lead an effort to promote Evernight on Reddit or elsewhere, we'll do what we can to support that.
We agree though, major efforts before we're ready aren't necessarily the best idea.
Our current timeline is to make the first major transition by the end of August. Which will consist of physically moving the hosting to our servers and switching over to running our new interface.
By new interface we mean everything that's not "in-game" i.e. the lobby, games lists, player profiles, reviews, top players, chat, settings, help, etc. All that kind of stuff.
The in-game pages will be mostly the same, pretty much what you're used to, but rewritten without frames.
For this initial "re-launch" will everything be perfect?
Well, we're pretty sure it probably won't be. But we're reasonably confident we'll have a good case to make the claim that it's "better"
That's why we want to get as much feedback and ideas as we can right now, so we can try to incorporate as much as possible under the constraints of time window we're working with.
And then of course once players are actually using the new interface, we're pretty sure we're going to get a mountain of feedback then. Likes, dislikes, good, bad, what's right, what's wrong, bugs, problems, suggestions, ideas, etc.
This kicks off round two of more modifications. Only now we'll be working on a technical platform we're comfortable and experienced with, players will be able to be more specific on their feedback based on what they actually see, and we won't be under the pressure of a time constraint.
It's at that point, after implementation of the best round 2 ideas, we expect have the game in a state where we'll feel ready to turn our focus to bringing new players in.
Of course, we welcome all new players who want to come by and check us out before then. They're welcome to play and the feedback from the first impression of new players is extremely important.
-------Original Message-------
The Knockout Kid wrote: I'm also planning on promoting this game on Reddit and some gaming events that I have coming up throughout the year. I'm not sure if I would do it until the revamp of the website though. I've shown this game to one of my best friends and my brother recently and they were both turned off by the "ugly look" as my brother so graciously put it.
The presentation of Evernight needs to be greatly improved if we're gonna attract today's generation.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
The Knockout Kid wrote: I'm gonna throw my hat into the mix and state that I am available to volunteer as a moderator or player coach when the time comes.
The Knockout Kid
-------Original Message-------
Management wrote:
Well, yeah, that too...
-------Original Message-------
BlueSky wrote:
Good points. It's early the glow is still on..
Reality is for later. Let's see the rise in player base first.
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
Smaller, faster games are definitely a priority, as are some sandbox games of various sorts. Places to learn the system and play around and receive some basic rewards.
Any game which allows for multiple human beings to play against each other will generate ill-will over time. Drama isn't going to go away even if you could eliminate the diplomacy option. (Chess is a great example. There's no diplomacy in chess. But that doesn't mean personality conflicts don't arise.)
So the real concern is, as Cortex, notes, the time investment required. Even eliminating in-game e-mail doesn't remove the potential for players to communicate outside of the game (heck, if I get three buddies to join with me and we're playing in the same game, I can collude with them all I want). Since diplomacy offers advantages in-game, it will continue.
The best we can do, I think, is to streamline the basic elements of diplomacy so that people who don't want to be bothered can most easily do what they need to do.
Beyond that, a compelled interface which actively prevents allies or NAPs from abusing that status might remove some amount of the drama, at least from "low-diplo" games. I still suspect it won't be nearly as much of a cure as it sounds.
As for where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong? I'm not really in the best position to speak, but I'd point to three things:
1. No vision. They wanted to perpetuate EN, but I never got a clear sense of what they wanted out of it beyond being able to keep playing. Most of the new features we got came through Gack and Gnascher and from others pushing them to add stuff.
2. No management. Nobody really seemed to be in charge and guiding the decision-making process to bring about a desired vision. We had multiple brainstorming suggestion discussions like this one. Max and Dranden rarely participated and never intervened to say "OK, here's what we're actually going to do. Let's get to work."
EN had, and still has, fantastic player support from day one. But without direction, it's not that helpful. The matchmaking management involved in getting FEG coaches, for example, was considerable and a necessary precursor to that project being possible...
Generally, such things were player admin driven. Somebody like BlueSky or Wyrmmlore being behind a particular initiative was a better predictor of it being implemented that Max or Dranden being behind it.
3. No momentum. I think that's key for the relaunch, too. Subscribers came back after the bad Jaleco days; there was an excitement about the possibilities. And nothing much happened.
Part of the excitement of a beta is that you're EXPECTED to try things out, you're HAPPY when something doesn't work and you figure out why because you're contributing, and you can expect to see some new features or changes crop up fairly frequently as things get rebalanced or tweaked in response to your feedback. (Or, you know, it's a free game. Whatever floats your boat.)
But that work needs to be getting done.
Don't get me wrong, without the compelling gameplay, none of the rest matters. But if we assume what we know, that the game itself has merit, then our new management needs to be thinking about how to keep excitement high and momentum going once the relaunch occurs.
It's like Kickstarters with lots of interesting and exciting stretch goals and updates. Activity promotes activity. But it'll work better if you plan things out in advance before going "live."
I'd rather wait another few years and see a relaunch I'm willing to promote, than have a repeat of the past where I was honestly unwilling to push the game to friends because basic features in the outdated interface weren't working at all.
Narsham
-------Original Message-------
Cortex wrote: I would like to have a discussion about several topics regarding concerning EverNight and its potential. I also have a few questions for the new management. I wouldnt mind hearing the opinions from my fellow players. Good job on acquiring EN and best of luck.
1. Does EverNight in its current form really have the potential to rise to a steady 100+ playerbase? Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?
On the first question 100+ would probably be doable after some marketing efforts but higher then that might be wishful thinking.
The game is highly restrictive addressing a small sample of players. To be more specific, daily tics and diplomacy is what makes EverNight but reduces its potential to attract more players. As for myself I always hated daily tics or fixed tics of any kind. With such a setup EverNight does not allow me to plan my free time as I want it to. The fixed tics also drives away those players who do not have a steady and routinely based lifestyle. Obviously EN is tick based but it would be nice to enjoy EN in a different kind of way. For lack of a better term I would call it EverNight Chess. You would log into EN whenever you want, play a game which lasts between 30 to 60 minutes and collect the points immediately in a different leaderboard.
Diplomacy also restricts EN. You need to be political to succeed but more often then not it becomes a tedious chore. During my EN days Ive encountered numerous players who went into 'quick diplo' with very short emails such as '5tick NAP?' or 'Accepted' and this after a few months of playing. The question is, who is driven away by the diplomacy part of EN? Non-English speaking players would be most obvious, the silent types (Remember tomb123 or River? Although River wasnt very silent in the NG's odlly enough), the purists focusing on the mathematic side of EN and many more. EN is very time consuming and mainly because of the diplomacy part. Whenever players start to feel 'burn-out' they will leave.
Diplomacy also has a nasty side effect. Grudges and hurt feelings. This shouldnt be underestimated. A game in EverNight is a huge time investment for atleast a month. Watching your game getting trashed without getting any sort of compensation can be the nail in the coffin. You dont even have to be wronged to lose enjoyment of the game. Getting 'outplayed' (notice the quotes) in the diplomatic area by for example a sudden gangbang orchestrated by a player 150 regions from you can be enough to close EverNight and to never return. In a nutshell, the loss of players due to diplomacy shouldnt be dismissed.
Im not advocating removing diplomacy from EN. Certainly not. I suggest the possibilty of fixed diplomacy games enforced by code to allow for games in which talking is not a necessity along with normal diplomacy games.
I also put forward the construction of a Codex containing the Law of EN. Some games might require players to adhere to that Codex.
Failure in doing so should get them before a Tribunal of Elders which can and may exact a punishment such as transferral of his XP to the wronged party.
In summary you would have 3 types of games ;
- the normal diplomacy games in their current form - fixed diplomacy enforced by code - Codex enforced games.
The second question, "Will the recoding of the UI to current web standards result in a substantial increase in new players?", the answer is I believe a resounding yes. But I would like to put forward the idea to use the new UI to setup EverNight Chess (see above). Im not against adding more content to the game such as new spells, forms, regions and new rules. The game would become alot more intresting but its restrictiveness wouldnt change.
2. Do the new owners know where Dranden and Maximus Prime went wrong and if so, what is the solution?
They had evrything. I think. Money, a gifted coder (Gackmasta), a financial expert, a seasoned marketeer, numerous admins and a willing community. And yet they failed to deliver. The sudden disappearance of Gackmasta didnt help. Probably the person who so far has done the most work. In my opinion the problem was that EverNght didnt turn out to be the Goose that lay the Golden Eggs.
More money and personal effort was needed to increase the playerbase. Much more then expected. EverNight is not a money cow and it doesnt have that potential. If someone disagrees with that he should explain why. The competition is atrocious and plentiful.
Still, the game can run without any money investment and a low personal effort. If Im not mistaken the game didnt run any deficit the last 4 years. The advertizements paid for evrything. The problem is to assess how much money you are willing to invest and how many hours of personal effort you are willing to burn. If you invest too much the entire project might become an expensive hobby.
3. On a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being 'barely dependent' and 5 being 'extremely dependent', how do the owners view their dependency on
the community? If the dependency is high please elaborate what your intentions are in return for the personal effort of the volunteers. It would also be nice to know what and who you are looking for specifically.
Im guessing it is a 4 or 5. A project like this just doesnt seem doable without any help from the community. Failure seems inevitable without help. In the coding department I suggest a development server accessible to the players who are willing to code for EN. Off the top of my head I can think of the following skills, tasks and roles : NG moderators, Wiki Super Moderator, Wiki Moderators, graphics designers, writers, coaches, marketeers and so on.
The overhead of the size of this project is huge. If you, the owners, can not fully focus on the coding and marketing then I dont see how this will end well.
To end a positive note, cake for evrybody!
Cortex
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