My apologies in advance on butting in, but i would like to point out why i think that BB has fallen:
1) The core original members of the US community have left due to being bored with the game, or having grown out of gaming all together, or random other reasons that associate with real life issues rather than in game issues.
2) Lack of advertising is the key reason why BB is slowly dropping viewers. Those who have seen the game and left are probably somewhere around a 15-20% chance to come back, those who haven't seen it and have no contacts and are in the age in which they would like to game probably have around a .01% chance of hitting on the few remaining areas in which advertisements occasionally pop up.
3) Lack of understanding of the functionality of the game. If they don't get a mentor they're basically going to run their team into the ground for 3-5 season before emulating a successful team, and that's the equivalent of 1 real life year minimum, sometimes 2. asking someone new who is losing many games in a given year in either a micro-nation or a full sized national is a large ask if it's literally that long a wait time.
Of the three options above, this is my viewpoint on how it can be affected with limited initial risk to BB and it's funding.
1) I don't think core members are going to be any more likely to come back with random changes. I think they'll just be gone because thats life. I played multiple text games which there was an old guard that got brought in due to advertising and contacts, and when they left their contacts either recruited some more, or all their friends already knew, thus reducing the player base at a steady decline.
2) A couple of routes here. Traditional advertisement streams are probably a little rich to your upfront costs, and i don't know exactly how much cash we have to play with here. I think there is a viable alternative to this however, and it's similar to a few other games, whether we talk as big as league of legends or perhaps another relevant text based game which i wont mentioned because they are in your market and don't need any more free press. What they do is incentive current members and/or local people to actively recruit members as basically sales representatives for the game. I would think of it as a commission, where you can either outright provide someone a cash incentive to go out and recruit for you....or you could simply provide X amount of months of supporter for them for every Y amount of knew members they bring in and keep playing for more than a season or two. Can be counted by one person, can provide people with links that actively tell you who is recruiting whom when they click it. Extend current supporters who do it.
3) I find this to be a particularly lazy issue from the BB end. I think that the speed of the game makes it easy for people like me on a busy schedule to continue playing this game. However, i think that instead of fixing it so that new players know what is going on, we've instead provided some perimeters for when they can buy transfers, and perhaps the extent to which they can add salary over their break-even number. I am calling it a lazy issue because i think we're trying to fix the effects, and not the cause, of the problems that we see. I would much rather you get a few new pages up and running, have them appear for the first week or two, and explain basic mechanics that are of significant importance to a successful management stint in a shorter amount of time. Teach new players about the importance of understanding their economics, understanding game-shape, and understanding enthusiasm. If you can reduce the knowledge gap between veteran players and new players, you'll increase retainment within the game.
Maybe some of my ideas are not so good, but I'm more interested in bringing up new users, and I think that might help some other issues veteran players have.
Last edited by FuriousSK at 1/24/2014 5:42:24 PM