I miss the really really really good days..

[N-Aldwitch]

What this game needs is an empire of slavers. If people are just sleeping in towns, they need someone to activate them. First we need a charismatic person with a dream that requires a lot of building and manufacturing. Situated in a good location where resources can be gathered or found nearby. It should also be easy to defend. Get some followers, convince them that sleepers are dirt and this group is bound to win. Then you go kidnap some people from nearby towns. For this you'll need vehicles which might be troublesome, but ships are still easy to build. Kill anyone with crowbars. Be prepared with a lot of healing food. Then you take the people to your headquarters but you should have enough people to have someone awake around each travelling tick to switch course if the prisoners are trying to switch it back towards their hometown. Three or four guards from different timezones should be enough. But unless you're taking prisoners one by one, this rules out even the biggest land vehicle, you would need a ship and unless you want to use a longboat, you need access to a harbor. Also you should convince prisoners that there's no way of escaping because you're going to need resource gatherers. Hitting them until they're helpless might do the trick but after that their efficiency is very low.

70% of that is a Felin Ginger regurgitation.

[Doug R.]

Lots of nonsense

LOL Seko. Yea, that's what the game needs. Someone who kills off all the established characters in their region and kidnaps the rest, 99% of whom would rather abandon their characters and let them starve rather than live a life of slavery. Not to mention all the OOC coordination that would have to go into getting characters of diffferent time-zones together (4 - come on). So you leave the surrounding towns Kirinn-like wastelands while the body count in your own town skyrockets to the point that it's just easier to build new buildings instead of trying to find 3-4 awake people to help you drag the bodies out of the old ones. Some plan.

[Sicofonte]

I used to use the word of mouth system, but after I realized that many players do quit the first days because the lag... (for many people, 2 seconds of lag for each click is just too much in any text based game)... I stoped.

[wichita]

The lag has taken it's toll over the past few months. I don't think that anyone will deny that. Hopefully that is on its way to being resolved, and Chris and ProgD will have time to focus on further optimization to keep lag minimized.

Marketing is not the reason. The game itself is not appealing for a large audience for many reasons.

Also, once you've played the game for some time, it gets too boring for most. The game mechanism is fun at first, but doesn't provide much challenges for experienced/wealthy characters.

While I see your point, and often have days with that feeling myself, I do have to disagree by and large. One comment that I see in nearly every staff application is that the most enjoyable part of Cantr is the freedom that the game provides to express oneself creatively and play in a free form manner. There are a ton of games on the web that can provide hack and slash, preformed quests. Not that there is anything wrong with that, Cantr has just been designed to be something else.

Cantr is essentially designed to be a mechanically organized Play By E-mail game. The plot is player defined. It is supposed to be "a slow-paced game...designed for players who have more on their agenda then just gaming." I quote that a lot, because that is what the game is advertised as, and why I started playing. IMO, the target audience is anybody that fits that description.


Marketing is a serious deficiency on staff right now, and is currently the top priority of GAC discussion. We want to solve the problem and find ways to get the word out about the game. To reiterate what Doug, Sicofonte and others have said here, I also believe that word-of-mouth has proven to be the best strategy in the past, but it seems that we have lost the ability to organize such a grassroots effort that the Poles so impressively threw together a couple of years ago.


It seems to me that the Polish players that helped forge that drive have moved on or fallen inactive. Attrition is normal and expected among a player community that has "more on their agenda then just gaming." What GAC is trying to do at the moment is to help organize a marketing group that will combine organization with redundancy, so that those who do know how to get the word out can direct those that have time to do the grunt work, and have enough people with overlapping communication so that when someone needs to bow out, someone will be there to take their place.

Keeping the current players happy can only go so far. No matter how entertaining a game is, it is no match for the business of real life. Good players will eventually get busy and need to leave for a while. We need to make sure that we can replace them.

We should also take care that we do not sell out the original intent of the game, either. It is a mistake to turn it into something that it is not, just so we can increase popularity. This is not the Diane Warren Gaming Company. We have a certain level of artistic integrity that should be conserved.

We will always have turnover. Cantr is not for everybody, and there is no formula for who will enjoy the game. Many people will come by for a sample, but only a few can stay. We need to pull a constant stream of players in to ensure that we have a solid player base, and we can never be satisfied with the current group we have at any given moment.

[Reindeer^]

It is supposed to be "a slow-paced game...designed for players who have more on their agenda then just gaming."

Maybe that is one reason. Some people do like the idea of this game but if there happens nothing in few hours, they will quit thinking that there is nobody playing this game. Well, if the game is more faster some players will propably quit because they don´t have time to play Cantr 24 hours in a day. I don´t know how many people like slow-paced game and how many wants to play about 12 hours in a day (I have met one of those). Of course, if nothing happens in the game, there is always forum and irc.

But I want to play normal slow-paced Cantr.

[DylPickle]

I don't even notice the lag.
Maybe that's due to my lack of a decent computer all my little life, but even now the screens only take a couple seconds to load for me.

I tried recruiting people to cantr, but I find it's nearly impossible to explain the game to people. When I manage to get the point across, they try it out for a few days then just leave. Even if they like the idea, there's something that's just holding new players back, and I'm not quite sure what that is yet. But it's there.

[the_antisocial_hermit]

The lag has been greatly reduced so far as I've noticed. It was so bad that you couldn't even access Cantr sometimes, or if you did manage to get through, it'd take 10-15 min. just to get to one character's page.

[Cdls]

Marketing is key to any type of success. If you cannot market what it is you are tying to sell, or in this case a player base, then you will not have a successful product (game). Ive had tons of experience in marketing with both private and other jobs. I may not have had any college experience in marketing but Ive boosted sales by anywhere from 50-75 percent of daily quota, so I must be doing something right

Anyways, if you need some help, PM me or send me an email.

[Doug R.]

Yes, they need help, but they don't ever ask for it. You need to apply for a marketing position.