Some perspective

[Doug R.]

There are currently 758 polish players and 3417 polish characters (4.5 characters per player)

There are 38.8 million people in Poland

That means one in every 50923 people in Poland plays Cantr. If every polish player maxed their account, there would be one character for every 3394 people in Poland.

If these numbers were idealisticly extended to English speakers, which has (US 300million, UK 60.27 million, Canada 32.7 million)

There would be 7717 English players (currently only 615) with a potential then for 115775 English characters. If you use a realistic scale, with English speakers having 5.5 characters per player, that would be 43089 characters (currently only 3434)

So, using Cantr's success in Poland as a base-line, that means Cantr is under-achieving in the English speaking world by an astonishing 92%, and this is not even accounting for English speakers in non-English countries. Can someone please figure out what's happening in Poland so we can tap the magic here?

[psymann]

Erm... *gets out calculator*

38'800'000 in Poland.
758 Polish players.

38'800'000 / 758 = 51187 Poles per Cantr player



60'270'000 in UK.
615 English players.

To maintain ratio of 51187 English per Cantr player:

60'270'000 / 51187 = 1177 English players required

(not the 7717 that you mention)

This means we are down by 48%, not by 92%.



But yes, we have a higher proportion of Poland playing Cantr than we do in England (just not as high as you said). But I think I know why this is...

... the rest are all playing War of Empires instead! We have only English and French translations over there, so the Poles can't play that one yet!

psymann

[Doug R.]

Psyman, if you had looked at what I did, you would see that my calculations were based on English speaking countries, not England. So my numbers are correct.

[Chris Johnson]

Psyman, if you had looked at what I did, you would see that my calculations were based on English speaking countries, not England. So my numbers are correct.

Well if you want to ignore Australia, New Zealand & South Africa to name a few, along with all those people who speak English as a 2nd language who's main language isn't catered for such as the estimated 30 Million English speakers in India, , then yes your figures are more or less correct - but I'd say the discrepancy was greater

[Jos Elkink]

One thing you did not put in the equation, though, is the relative number of available online roleplaying games in each language. There are probably very few Polish online game, even relatively speaking, and there are many of them in English. We thus have an entirely different competition in the two languages. Although I would not deny that we are by far not reaching our potential number of players, in this particular case I think this is the main explanation.

What really surprises me is, for example, the lack of French players in our game, and the enormous number of French players in Renaissance Kingdoms - a game that is slightly more boring than Cantr in my opinion, but that at least is really targeting the same type of player. Or, well, maybe this point is really unrelated ...

So, any suggestions how we reach those people that should be playing but aren't?

[Doug R.]

Well if you want to ignore Australia, New Zealand & South Africa to name a few,

Well, it's not my fault that they put those countries so far south that no one notices them

I think Jos is right, possibly combined with fewer spawning points to encourage density.

As for the french, well, I've heard that the french area is pretty much a death sentence due to out of control animals (just what I've heard) so the word in France could be "don't bother."

[Jos Elkink]

I think Jos is right, possibly combined with fewer spawning points to encourage density.

Of course I'm right - no point in saying that

Nah, just kidding ... but about spawning points: I'm not sure that's true. They had fewer spawning points, perhaps, but they also had the density spawning much earlier in their development than the English.

It would be interesting to see the distribution of town sizes for each language area, actually ... would require some thinking about what the best statistics is. A simple graph of the number of towns with each size of town would do the trick, but some nicer statistics could be useful - maybe yet another idea for the next stats article?

As for the french, well, I've heard that the french area is pretty much a death sentence due to out of control animals (just what I've heard) so the word in France could be "don't bother."

Hmm, maybe ... problem is population density, though - more people would mean less of a problem with animals. But it is true that the French are on an island with relatively long expanded animals (one of the few islands with animals, I mean), while being weakly populated.

[Elros]

Speaking of animal density, the Spanish continent is terrible. I spawned a character on there and he travelled from town town for about a year and only saw 2 other people. However, he kept getting attacked animals and despite the healing food he gathered he was killed within a year by animals. There was areas that had around 80-100 animals of one species!

[Jos Elkink]

Yeah, that island is similar to the French. I just started a discussion on the issue in ProgD.

[notsure]

Merci, merci, Jos! Many thanks from the French island!

notsure

[sem]

If you don't want to make things change too suddenly maybe you could give the animals a vicious dose of the sneezes (preferably a strain that didn't spread to characters too easily)?

[Marian]

Make them attack each other. Why are people the only targets for a bear when there's a bunch of juicy deer running around?

And why do deer and horses and things like that attack people anyway?

[sem]

Make them attack each other. Why are people the only targets for a bear when there's a bunch of juicy deer running around?

Maybe the deer run faster?

Edit:

Seriously though, there should certainly be a chance of the carnivores attacking the herbivores.

[SekoETC]

In that case there should be a much larger population of small herbivores than what newspawns can punch to death. Naturally, carnivores should start dying off if they don't have anything (people or animels) to eat. Also they should only attack animals if the population of herbivores is low. So people would have a reason for letting small animals live, since it's better that bears eat them than bears eating people.

[Jos Elkink]

I like the idea of animals dying off if they don't attack enough, but it is actually rather problematic. I tried to run some simple simulations - a small area with two types of animal, one eating plants, and one eating the other animal. They survived for a while, but always one of the two would eventually die out.

The balance that exist in the real world ecological system is actually quite impressive and 'invented' by a very long process of evolution - to try to create one in Cantr with many types of animals, that doesn't die out in a year of playing or something, is actually hopelessly difficult - however simple the concept seems.

Animals attacking each other - just like they do now with characters - seems like a reasonable idea, though, and is currently being considered, among others.

Keep the suggestions going - I am particularly interested in ideas I wouldn't think of already - like the sneezing one is pretty good.