MArcomage

After many years our player base remains roughly the same. I wonder if it's caused by the game itself (i.e. it's way too specific to appeal to most people) or it's something that has to do with the site implementation (i.e. bad features or lack features on the site). If it is the latter, things can probably be improved. The question is - how? Please suggest any improvements that you can think of. Some suggestions from players were:

- use facebook to create a user group (I don't use facebook very much, so I don't know if this can help)

- create an introductory video on youtube and add link to welcome message for newly registered player (I don't have equipment to create a high quality video, though)

We should discuss and pick the best ideas. If these ideas can be implemented by me, I'll add them to my todo list, if not, I'll post them to as a contest which will be awarded with gold ;-)

1)The game is complex for a newcomer, takes time and many frustrating losses to learn by experience. Probably a lot of the newbies who appear and then abandon the game give up in boredom and frustration. How about a newbie level with simplified card selection and perhaps fewer keywords. Newcomer would have to play x number of games to become eligible to enter main arena. Or it could be an optional training room, friendly games, some of the master players would volunteer to teach the newbies.
2) When the site is ready to handle a surge in volume, get reviewed by as many of the gamer sites and zines as possible, with luck get a feature article somewhere. That would drive a lot of curious players to the site for a look; a small percentage of them would stay on to become serious players.
3) Or you could go commercial and spin gold into cash by creating a marketplace where marco-gold can be bought for cash, gold can enhance cards (e.g., permanently add Far Sight to one common card of your choice, unique to your decks, for 20,000 gold), and the master players can become professionals by building specialized cards and selling them for cash. (Then sell the game to Google for a gigantic sum before it devolves into chaos.)

Well, I would disagree with suggestion number 3. When the players who are willing to pay money become the good players and all the rest who want to play for fun can't compete, then the game is destroyed.

I would go with bringing the site to the attention of forums like Gamespot, IGN, Machinima (in Youtube). That could influence a lot of people.

About advertisement I think Facebook is a good suggestion. It's an effective and cheap (free) way for advertising. Personally, I've quit fb about 5 months ago, but most of the people use it, and after all it doesn't cost anything to create a basic group.

About appealing, I think the most important thing is that the site needs some revamping in order to become more "modernised". Especially the mainpage should be more simple with a big PLAY button somewhere that would lead to a game instantly.

Some time ago, someone had suggested to implement a demo version of the game with a simplified AI that could be used as an introductory for the game. I know that this isn't easy to be done and I don't know how effective would be in this game since AIs, in general, require animations, interactive interfaces, sounds etc. But instead of AI, there could be some simplified version of the game for unregistered users without EXP, gold, levels, deck building. Only a limited set of simple decks (basic destruction, basic construction, basic resources) would be available for unregistered users to play.

Speaking about registration, I think it should become more professional. Widespread technologies and techniques like HTTPS, external email verification, CAPTCHAs etc. should be used. The more professional a site looks the more appealing it is. :-)

In general, I think the game is specific and somewhat complicated and it will be difficult to make it popular. Speaking about myself, it took me some weeks to get the grasp about keywords, tokens and the like (I didn't read the manual :PPP). And now with achievements is even more complicated.
But the most important "problem" is that the game depends on other players availability. Lots of players play slow, really slooow. 1-2 turns a day. There are people that doesn't have the patience or the will to wait for this long time in order to finish a game. Especially newbies are more likely to overall abandon the game for this reason.

That's all :P Sorry for the lengthy post.

This is a common problem with browser-based games like MArcomage. There's a game I've been playing for like nine years ; it only has a handful of players despite its age, because it's not very beginner-friendly - lots of waiting time, just like dimitris is talking about. The game in question, despite being a wargame and not a card game, shares a big common point with MArcomage : both games don't emphasize seniority. There's no levels (or they don't impact gameplay), no rare cards/equipments/items or the like that give an advantage to older players. Personally, I find it awesome that there's no crushing disparity between players (well, except for experience, but that's something you can't change), but we need to be aware that most people just aren't motivated by the fact that there's nothing to win. Maybe the achievement system will change that.

I'm also aware that what I just said is useless since this will (hopefully) never change, so I'm gonna move on to actual suggestions :p

Maybe making the game a bit more beginner-friendly could help. The game I was talking about has a "How to start" section that covered the basics for people who didn't want to immediately read the comprehensive rules. I don't know... you could add some starter decks which work well while using simple cards (e.g. not too much keywords). Even people who read the rules before playing could benefit from that. Another neat feature would be the possibility to play against an A.I. for practice, but I doubt it's easy to do...

As for increasing the potential player base, have you considered translating the site into different languages ? While English is obviously the most common language, there are people everywhere that just can't read it, much less speak it. I'm sure some of them would be interested in playing MArcomage but are turned off by the fact that they have no clue what's going on.

I could volunteer to translate the game into French ! It's even my job :D

think what offsets most people is that once your opponent plays his turn, you're not instantly notified unless you refresh the page hence fast paced games are more or less impossible, the game is also a LOT more complex than when i first came to the site, if it was like it is now i don't think i would have stayed.

not saying anything is better or worse but

WAS: You are to destroy the tower or build your own, you have a couple of cards that have very obvious effects such as an attack value and a cost etc. Playing a card does not influence other cards they only affect stock, wall, tower and facilities.

NOW: everything affects everything, its not enough to learn cards you need to know every card in the game because of obvious synergies that gives you good card sets to collect and tokens to count, you also need awareness for card positioning and lots of keywords to know the effects and counters on, Frankly i still look every now and then in the help just to see the new values my token counters will take

All the increased complexity is nice for the "veterans" thou to keep it interesting

I agree that beginners may find the game inaccessible at first, and that a better introductory guide, or a tutorial of some sort can help.

I also think (and forgive me for saying this again) that the site design looks dated.

I feel like if those two issues were improved, the site might see some more growth. I don't think the game needs to be overtly advertised on Facebook or elsewhere. I think the best kind of growth is going to come from people saying to their friends, "Hey, check out this cool browser game...". I've introduced at least three people to the game this way who have stuck with it for some amount of time.

Overall, I think the site has been following an excellent trajectory when it comes to attracting new players. Many aspects of the interface and game have become much more intuitive and welcoming in the last while: being able to make open challenges, the use of ajax in the deck editor, getting rid of redundant POST requests (thus making the site more google-friendly)...

Falxo wrote:
I could volunteer to translate the game into French ! It's even my job :D

Same with Russian except it's not my job.
And MArcomage needs redesign (no, not that one). For me and, I guess, other community members, it isn't so important but I've heard complaints about it from my friends.

I came here for my interest in the original Arcomage game, ultimately finding the link on the Arcomage wikipedia.
If it is not already done, I suggest advertising on relevant forums for fans of the M&M-series.

When googling Arcomage I did not find this site in the first 3 pages. Is it possible to make it happen?

+1 for Vauceene's thought. I came here by M&M backrground also. Too bad M&M series are discontinued :(

Vauceene wrote:
When googling Arcomage I did not find this site in the first 3 pages. Is it possible to make it happen?

Strange... if I google Arcomage, I have our site on second or third place. Well I did request partner links from several M&M websites, but only received on positive answer - from the Arcomage tribute project.

I found it for the first time when googling Arcomage, for me its always been in the 2nd position right under wikipedias description of Arcomage.

edit: beaten to it

Mojko wrote:

Vauceene wrote:
When googling Arcomage I did not find this site in the first 3 pages. Is it possible to make it happen?

Strange... if I google Arcomage, I have our site on second or third place.

Ah, that is true. Proves how slacky I am!

dimitris wrote:
+1 for Vauceene's thought. I came here by M&M backrground also. Too bad M&M series are discontinued :(

Same here. I was pretty good at the game when I played it @ M&M, but this game took me quite a long time before actually understanding how it worked with all the tokens and stuff. I tried to read the Help page, but was demotivated. I want to learn while playing, so perhaps a short tutorial for new beginners so they can play and learn everything about tokens and keywords at the same time! ^^

I guess the easiest keyword to get along with is Alliance. At least that's the first that I understood :P And it's a good one.

I found this site via some old thread on gaming forum discussing might and magic series. Maybe we could spam a little :) on those kind of forums we come across?

We can create a Marcomage banner and place it in the signatures we use on other forums.

We already have two banners created by X-Factor:

small banner

large banner

Nice.
In the second banner I see Mage, Ice dragon and militia, but I can't figure out the last 3 cards

The two at the bottom are Luna the sorceress and Governor. I don't know which one is the middle one, but there shouldn't be too many options (it's a bricks cost common card). Maybe we should ask X-Factor?