Growing the Community

[LPhillips]

Realistically, I think we'd need a small player dev team to make that happen. I'd be willing to work on that; it's not something you have to be ever-present for.

[piranha]

We want to let the community contribute with as much as possible, We just have to create the tools that are somewhat friendly to use. At least it doesn't work if you can break things by accident.

We have a translation tool that is working ok that allows you to update the warpedia. If anyone would like to use it you are welcome: http://www.warbarons.com/admin_language_pub.php

Just create a translation for warpedia and then start editiing it.

[ptGamer]

This is great! I am going to start working on this

[ptGamer]

To continue pitching in my 2 cents/ideas...maybe this fits better under the "wish list" forum, but the central theme is about growing the community.

...
5) Some restriction on what games Newbies can enter. I have no idea if this exists or not, but I imagine being drubbed by an experienced player working the ladder is a sure way to lose interest in the game. I'm not looking to inflict that on anyone anyway, nor to collect free points from droppers. It's also a nasty thing when your open FFA is interrupted by a dropper who never even completes his first turn.

A system to help players finding opponents with similar skill level should help encourage players to stay active. My experience after playing a few games with human players was mixed: on the one hand, being wiped out quickly (e.g. a game with TheVic or SatanicLan) was discouraging; on the other, I found some cool ninjas that welcomed me to join their team. Even now, when I create a game, I can't help but wonder if I'll run into a player "farming" points on the same map over and over (not that this is wrong).

If there's an option to set a win/loss ratio threshold when I create a game, and the system ensures I won't run into someone I have absolutely no chance against, I would be more encouraged to create new games. The following is a simple implementation that comes to my mind, the math / algorithm genius in this community can probably come up with something more elegant:

Win/loss ratio is a number calculated as [ (1+ # of Wins) divided by (1 + # of Losses) ], rounded to 2 decimal places, top cap 100.00, bottom cap 0.10. Some sample cases are:
* If I won 999 games and lost 0 games, my ratio is 100.00
* If I won 99 games and lost 0 games, my ratio is 100.00
* If I won 10 games and lost 0 games, my ratio is 11.00
* If I won 5 games and lost 3 games, ratio = 1.50
* If I won 4 games and lost 4 games, ratio = 1.00
* If I won 1 games and lost 5 games, ratio = 0.33
* If I won 0 games and lost 9 games, ratio = 0.10
* If I won 0 games and lost 999 games, ratio = 0.10

When a 1v1 game is created, the creator can set choose a threshold from, say, 20%, 50%, 100%, 200%, and no threshold. If the creator's has a ratio of 1.00 and sets a 20% threshold, players with a ratio within that threshold (0.80 to 1.20) will receive the real time feed, and only these players may join the game.

The win/loss ratio matching a particular game type should be used. If a player creates a 1v1 game, the 1v1 win/loss ratio is used. If a player creates an FFA game, the FFA win/loss ratio is used. Etc.

A matching feature is to set a default threshold in the account profile so games created by players within that threshold are shown first / grouped together would also be nice.

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We have a translation tool that is working ok that allows you to update the warpedia. If anyone would like to use it you are welcome: http://www.warbarons.com/admin_language_pub.php

May be a wiki page can be created with the title "contributing / volunteer opportunities" and describe the ways that members can contribute, and include the links to tools like the translation tool? Maybe this already exist but I did not find it?

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Another idea: email players who have been inactive for over a certain period of time (e.g. 1 month) and include:
1) updates to the game system since they left (e.g. links to news article and a 1-line summary)
2) invite player to login again, did they simply forgot password / username and didn't bother to check back in?
3) asks them to participate in an exit interview on why they stopped playing. Did they find other games more interesting? Are they discouraged by certain things about the game? Are they discouraged by other players? Etc.

No sure if the current privacy policy needs to be updated in order to do this, but my guess would be no.