New players. (in General)

Seems like the number of new player threads is in decline. What should we do about this?

For reference:

5 posts so far in August, 2009
24 in July, 2009
36 in June, 2009

And a year ago:

65 in August, 2008
77 in July, 2008
67 in June, 2008

And to answer your question... any marketing is better than none.

i would promote to the current playerson how best to make the grow is by player base. something as simple as adding your referral link tag when chatting on another forum. someone is bound to click and play it once, and another time someone might come back and some dont and others dont leave :D

speaking of more exposure, is there not a facebook group for us?

Fix the tutorial. Entice people to stick around. Maybe some more incentives?

If they like the game they'll tell their friends. And yes, marketing is a good idea.

Promote the site etc
aka Advertise - Tell friends etc

promote the site/advertise <-- its been done. Not many new players joined because of this.

Tell a friend <-- CB is not everyones cup of tea.

CB is becoming an exclusive club where only a few new members are allowed in each year.

And the number of posts that whine about CB could scare off potential new players.

I say a whole month of 0 whine threads, including that drop thread, let see if that makes any difference. Admins can always delete and/or lock threads.

free beer

Better stuff in rentals and more helpful help early on.

hmm, did cb advertise in websites that has listing of Top 100 various online games, web based, etc... ? I think it would actually work well.

I know that at least I tried few games that have most vote in it. Like or dislike is another matter.

I've seen CB on a few of those but there's never many votes on it.

The issue with trying to keep ourselves ontop of one of those TOp 100 lists is that most of the sites that hold the top spot offer a reward for voting for them on the site. This is in the form of either ingame "energy" or ingame money.

We'd offer neither.

We used to!

I've been on a few sites lately, what we do have that's different to them is a very obvious forum. It and chat are central to the game layout. So if we have a particularly bad day of whinefest, that's the first thing you see. I'd be off and out the door, after reading some of the things about the drop system for instance.

Other games bury their forums, probably because they're filled with idiots, but still you can play the game without ever needing to go near the forums.

I know it sounds weird for me, one of the big forum junkies to suggest this, but maybe we should hide the forum and go back to your active character being the main page?

I really like the "sandbox" suggestion. Think it should be an integral aspect to the tutorial