2012 Year in Review and Eye on the future

[Ronan]

Website redesign. The landing page needs to be a sales pitch, not a cluttered blob of functionality. Look at most OSS projects and despite not being for-profit organizations they much cleaner, more focused site designs.

No I am not volunteering as I have mooks to do my CSS for me these days. Nor am I volunteering Hialmar or even know if Drupal supports custom templates. Its just a suggestion.

[oldgrayrogue]

Eliminate Game B. ALFA saw a real resurgeance on that graph I think right around the time we started "moderating" the forums.

Simplify or do away with all rules that contribute to the ALFA Beaurocracy. Streamline all procedures and decision making so that the people who actually volunteer their time and effort make the decisions and make them quickly. In a volunteer community, many times the "decision" can be "Thanks but we will not be doing that" which is fine as long as it is communicated and communicated politely and quickly.

If you want more DMs then let the DMs control the game. It takes way more time and effort to DM than to play a PC. Admin provides strong support for DMs. Our players need to do the same, and trust them to run the game as they see fit without second guessing, understand when they make mistakes (only human), and modify your expectations understanding that this is a volunteer community.

Every active player in ALFA set a goal this year of bringing one new or former player into ALFA. If we all do just that 99% of the problems are solved.

[oldgrayrogue]

Oh and in terms of PR, I recommend looking into this:

http://www.nwnpodcast.com/

[maxcell]

Website redesign. The landing page needs to be a sales pitch, not a cluttered blob of functionality. Look at most OSS projects and despite not being for-profit organizations they much cleaner, more focused site designs.

No I am not volunteering as I have mooks to do my CSS for me these days. Nor am I volunteering Hialmar or even know if Drupal supports custom templates. Its just a suggestion.

[Dorn]

Ok.

I will get in game more now holidays are over. Sadly my RL means i can do no more.

Now to ideas.

First, some i posted in a different thread

2 PCs - outcome: player hours up as people may log in when otherwise they'd be 'bored' of their char that day
While against this for a long time, i now see that often in my game times there is 1 or 2 others on...always on a different server than me. Having a player on 2 out of the 4 servers would allow. The temp retirement does not help me here.

Increase penalties for cheating - outcome: enable a range of more flexible policies to be introduced without more DMs spending time on los instead of ingame
Lose half your levels, get kicked out etc. Let the punishment be the deterrent.

Make WHL or MS campaign servers - outcome: concentration and therefore more parties, more tailored medium and high level stuff on campaignh servers
ALFA-normal takes place on BG and TSM with spawns and statics removed (or amended to make unfarmable). MS and WHL are destinations for DMed groups on certain campaigns. Outcome - hopefully concentrate players/DMs/builders on BG and TSM. Reduce administrative efforts of HDMs on servers with lower levels of use while still retaining the variety and beauty of these servers. Maybe if we think consolidation shoudl go further even have a TSM centric '6 months' before re-opening BG? (or vis-versa). Could also maybe have 'set and leave' quests on campaign servers for highbies (dragons etc)

Increase guideline DM awards for groups in parties of 3+ by 25% - outcome: people will actively seek groups
Or something like that. Yea i know it's inequitable. And noone would suffer from the inequity more than me. But...*shrugs*

Award a regular DM a RP bonus of his/her choice scaled by their efforts - outcome: encourage regular DMing, not casual DMing
A house with PS for a weekly DM over 6 months.
A steady girlfriend in town for an irregular one.
A promotion in the thieves guild/army etc
Even a string of posts in the IC thread over time about their char that would make their 'lives' more interesting.

Reverse the status quo for a 2 years campaign - outcome: interest new people to come to alfa, reduce the 'good always wins' drudgery of many campaigns
"The horde has swept aside the silver marches, the armies of man fight the horde up and down 'The Long Road' and brave souls, opportunists, and trouble makers both venture behind the lines into the marches to loot or retake the lands. Similarly, the sword coast (BG) is chaotic as it tries to support the war effort and is stripped of its martial resources as they march north. Opportunists take advantage of this, the lands become lawless once more...but good folk try to make safe this final redoubt of free people in western faerun.

Adjust the lighting in TSM and add burned houses/carts everywhere and have it a place for guerilla warfare etc

I know, this one's hard.

Give more variety - outcome: some people like belss and whistles.....((actually, i'm only soso on this..but we're brainstorming))
ENcourage the tech guys to transfer as much of Kaedrins stuff in as possible..........that's not ridiculous.

[bLaunch ALFA3 without a new platform[/b]
All start at one and apply all of the above. And market the fark outta it.

As for other ideas posted above:
Ronan - website redesign - totally. But we need to retain them once in the door so get the internals soerted out before doing this as people wont come back for a second look.

OGR - yep - i vote for someone i trust to maintain a game i love to come back and play. People like rumple, curm, veilan etc have my vote again and again and i dont want them hindered in diong the right thing. And yes lossen up on DMs IF they're trainiend and follow standards. There were some big messes in days gone past (serious ones, not just petty fights which were more common)

Stormy - good point. Mid level is perhap more imprtant than high level as there are feweer 10+s

Castano - all good points

Ith - if adventuring areas are other PWs strong points, perhaps we should ask them if we can use there areas? We traded for much of BG, so lets do this to? cut and pastable areas would be great. Trainaing Dms a big yes, in a supportive way.

Rorax -
1 yep,
2 no way in hell i would be horrified if ADMIN of this PW allowed this. It would not be the game i've played for close to a decade.
3 yes, with respect to 2. Maybe with loot tokens for trading in with 'respected' DMs. Maybe combined with campaign servers!
4 yep, perhaps the same as 3? instead of high level 'areas', have high level set and leave encounters or campaigns. But when a campaign is offered, i'd expect the high levels to take it as i've heard concerning rumours that some pass up on opportunities as tehy may be too 'risky'.

Another point from me - someoen develop an easy way for people to load their times and compare to other payers and DMs on a web interface. some sort of 7 day/24hr gantt chart thing. ....make it graphical and put it on the front page of the website. Show the dedication to player and DM matching.

[rorax]

I think someone already suggested it...

But perhaps we can consider the option that those who died or those who willingly retire can pass some of their XP and wealth to the new toon - so they'll be able to return and play back with their group?

So if you had a toon with 100k XP and 100K wealth - you'll now have a toon with 50k wealth and 50k XP. (or any other amount we'll define)

[Castano]

I'm totally in favor of a website redesign focused on getting people to apply from the very first page. making the apply to play button larger and in the middle and possibly flashing in bright red would help. (ok the flashing part was a joke)

right now even I after 8+ years here find it a wall of text.

[Rumple C]

Hokay....

Time to do this. Our house is in order (more or less), time to tart ALFA up and then hit streets with flyers. (metaphoricly speaking)

Front page redesign is a great one. Wall of text is a very apt descriptor. What are our goals here? To excite prospective players. So... they want to know what we are about, and they want to know what they can expect in game.

Lets hope it can be done.

If nothing else i'd like to see wall of text relegated down down down (or perhaps to just clickable headlines) the page. A popup with connection info and client extension download links.

Upper page should be spiel, with some dramatic art, and i'd like to see links for each server where we can get folks excited with server specific propaganda. EG MS is like this, it is exciting because, here is what is happening right now with plot lines, you can find player group whatever here. -Insert MS art here-.

That is just my very rough idea anyhows, I am not sure what the limitations are on the system we use currently and how it could be implemented. I'd be happy to source Art (from out members) and help write propaganda with assistance of others. If there are any professional marketing or website people what do you think? Or anyone for that matter? Lets get some ideas out there. Many heads are better than one. I'll see if I can summon Hialmar for his infra-opinion on feasibility and ease of changing front page.

[Rumple C]

Followed by...

Hitting like minded RP forums
Podcasts? Any volunteers for this, my accent is funny, and i'm not the best speaker.
Gaming websites
Dnd websites
Stealth advertising on other server forums
And what have i missed?

[Rumple C]

Oh, and links to where the game can be purchased.

[Hialmar]

Oh, and links to where the game can be purchased.

You mean like this:
http://www.alandfaraway.org/node/2487 ?

As for a website redesign, I can help but I'm not a web designer so we'll need to find one.

Drupal can be themed as is presented here:
http://drupal.org/documentation/theme

[Rumple C]

Social media.

Is there a website pro (or less than pro) in the house?

[Rumple C]

I've had a poke around with Drupal, I think I can make it do what i want. I can carefuly add an edit a few blocks that should give us a little glue to trap new players. Now to gether the content to do so...

[Dorn]

i played with a free webpage thingy and it's quite fun actually:)

after an hour or so did this http://alfa111.webs.com/

may not be of any use (some bits/colours etc are a bit tacky and nothing at all to do with drupal), but it was fun.

If you want i can try and learn to use drupal unless you've got the time rumple

[puny]

dorn: perty!