Spring Needs to be Advertised!

[123vtemp]

Advertising isn't cheap.

Youtube vids and Magazine write in's are the way to go, or maybe we could make a Spring membership that if you pay for you get the privileges of losing all your money. Then use that money for billboards and bus advertisements.

That is good. It is one of the things we can do with out the backing of $$. If we go the extra step to make sure we have sufficient Info and links with our YouTube Videos it will make a good difference toward making the spring community more findable.

what about google adwords and adsense?

http://www.google.com/services/

it works pretty good

That would be nice if we had a source of funds to make use of it. As spring is free, it is not a no brainier tho. Many and likely most/all of us are initially here because it is Free. If we were to get a "trust" created for a spring advertising effort it would take care of our unorganized, and impossible economic stability. The main problem would be getting a base sum for it to sit on. That requires commitment :/ . I think what spring does is Great, and for that I would want to add to an advertising fund. I would worry tho, as BA players, who make up a huge amount of our playing community, do not generally seem to e warm and fuzzy people who would have any appreciation of value, in commitment, or helping a good cause. Not to mention a certain closed behavior. [minded and all other variations of closed (BA DSD for life!)]

If you did not understand; the "base" would generate the money to pay for the advertising, and would hopefully, increase it self as the value of $ changes.

It is nice that you guys are contributing to moving forward and not bickering and creating commentary that does not really help. That being said I must now post my response to our arguments about what we should be doing[yeah I contradicted my self and am doing both "productive" and "unproductive commentary"]. =)

[AF]

I do nto see why money would be needed.

I also think the problem is not awareness, it is retainment of new users.

http://www.darkstars.co.uk/2007/leaky-bucket-syndrome/

Your entire enterprise of advertising is totally pointless. The userbase will not grow much more than by a tiny margin which will dissapear quickly.

[123vtemp]

AF,
Whether or not those were effective ideas, Spring is not well know(fact), and that is a problem for us. If we could change that it would do wonders.

AF, is right: http://www.darkstars.co.uk/2007/leaky-bucket-syndrome/
if you do not want to read it all you can start at "The Fix" and get what is important.

Right now it is hard to get new people up and running. Our main site is a bit patchy, and once they get on and join say; a popular BA game, the wonderful newcomers get kicked! If they made it that far. One would hope that such a community as ours was more helpful :/ Thanks to that BA community

I would not mind spending time to fix up the Spring site which is a bit of a mess. (I am a web developer)

[AF]

http://newspring.clan-sy.com

Theres a document regarding proposed site wiki structure with a few posts by tobi to get people started, and the site itself is stored in the svn if you wish to setup a test environment.

When there's a suitable amount of data transferred from the current wiki to the new site, the new site will be deployed.

Also regardless of wether retention is an issue, if you advertise now you will be doing more harm than good. Users will come, not have a clue, get annoyed, leave, spread the word and we'll be seen badly and have lost potential users forever. And remember, the statistics show that the number of visitors visiting this site is far far higher than the number of players who have stuck by spring.

[123vtemp]

thx

about the site visitors... it is natural for more to come and look at a site but not pursue it

And, yes, I see the sense in your points.

[AF]

But if they're repulsed by what they find theyre not going to come back for a second look eh?

[Hoi]

first of all, we need to change the installer, if im a noob and download the game and i have to pick ba ca kp and alot more i think like wtf?? Then youll end up with noobs downloading only the kernal panic mod becaus the size is small, at least ba and xta should be auto downloaded (im not sure about ca bacaus its like 50 mb) , auto map/mod downloader should be integrated in the lobby, and when installation is complete you should see something like 'do you want to play the tutotial mission, to learn the game? (recommended) this mission should explain the game. This is really needed becaus when i play xta i see the noobs porcs metal makers and morpfing there comms, nano-stalling becaus they have no energy . We want to prevent 80% of those ppl leave just becaus they cant play the game

[123vtemp]

The best answers is for them to spec a game or two. They learn what works for people, and they get to see stuff blow up. Of course every one just wants to kill stuff right off the bat, but that s not how you learn. half of the players you were referring to are probably BA players that only know how to play DSD /:

-auto map DL is risky as sights may change, but the CA dler does auto dl most of your maps.

[BrainDamage]

auto map/mod downloader should be integrated in the lobby

right click -> open image to enlarge

EDIT: http://springlobby.info

[Hoi]

auto map/mod downloader should be integrated in the lobby

right click -> open image to enlarge

EDIT: http://springlobby.info

that lobby should be auto used?

[LordMatt]

It will be when it is ready.

[Jazcash]

I guess you could also say Spring isn't a ' Noob Friendly ' game. You'll find most new players are shouted at or kicked because they have no idea how to play. Usually because they end up dropping in the deep end with experienced players. Maybe you should implicate a popup message for new players which links them to the Wiki or the help feature.
A lot of the Spring community are regular PC users so they'd know where to go for help with such issues, but I found a lot of my friends who tried this game were, yes I pity them too, console players. So when they made the jump to Spring they had no idea what to do or where to go for help. Maybe rename the ' Help ' button to ' How to get started ' or something as Help is usually related with bugs and errors etc.
But I guess Spring is made for PC users in general :)

[Tobi]

Spring is called Spring, not Spring Engine, it's like an umbrella over numerous free/open source projects, like the Spring engine, SpringLobby, TASClient, TASServer, uberserver, AFLobby, XTA, BA, CA, Evo, FunTa, Starwars, NOTA, LLTA, Gundam, KP, chicken, etc.

If the project was called Spring engine we'd need to have SpringEngineLobby instead of SpringLobby and springengine.clan-sy.com instead of spring.clan-sy.com.



Because Spring is an free/open source project it is fundamentally different from commercial games and as such advertising for it shouldn't be compared with commercial game advertising.

Advertising "when it's finished" is the wrong approach; Spring will never "be finished". If it's finished, it's dead, if it's dead, it's finished, and there's no point advertizing for a dead project.

I may agree if you say "I won't advertise now because feature XXX and feature YYY arent implemented; I will advertise when they are implemented.", but "when it's finished" WILL mean in practice "I won't advertise ever."

[Gota]

Make installer downlaod more content by DEFAULT.
More mods more maps by default.
New usersdo not know what they want thus it must be decided for them.
The people that will be chaning things are the ones already playing and liking spring.

When the default lobby will outodownload content when there wont be
chaos about the tons of widgets and gadgets that must all be installed idividualy when there is a basic way to get noobs be familier with the engines default shortkeys like cntrl+z cntrl+b cntrl+w Shift the queue shortkeys than it will be noob friendly.
Evrything must be set up so that by doing nothing noobs will have all they need not the other way around that by doing nothing the have nothing.
Such policies are even used when structuring civil laws and regularities.
The system must be built for the lazy.
It is only fair cause you cant blame a player that hasnt heard of spring to try for a few hours and even days and weeks to understand all that surounds spring.
It is not fair and saying that we only want people that are bored enough to spend tons of time understanding what the hell is going on is a bad attitude that is circling around ....

[123vtemp]

Tobi,
Amen

Gota,
I would say amen, cuz your right on, but I think I will cry instead.

It is not fair and saying that we only want people that are bored enough to spend tons of time understanding what the hell is going on is a bad attitude that is circling around ....

let me edit that so it is understandable:

It is not fair to say that we only want people that are bored enough to spend tons of time learning to understand what the hell is going on. On top of that there is a bad attitude which is circling around ....

One thing that new people will care about is the download size.
Not all of us have high speed connections so asking them to DL every thing should not be a default setting.
A few good maps, and hopefully small maps should be included but not 4 Gigs worth of maps as I have.
OTA content should be mandatory as many mods need it and that would cause a noob trouble. XTA, BA, NOTA, and probably pure should be default. What about CA? ... it is huge and will be out of date unless it is the first mod they play. I do not remember if XTA is huge or not, but it is one of the significant mods and should probably be encouraged. NOTA is Small[9 MB] and often for a brief period every day is the 2nd most played mod in spring [around 10%](the first 5 or so hours of each new day GMT).
A link to the mod descriptions on the wiki may help them chose what mods they would want. As well as a link to a page where different widgets and such were described.
I my self do not know of all the different useful tools, and neither do I know that I may want them.

[Gota]

Of course not all the maps.
Most maps are unplayable anyway due to horendeous metal maps or terrible textures o heightmaps.
Im talking about a hlf gig install...I think it is within reason.
That should be the default andf recommanded installer size but the few that do not have fast conections can remove stuff like maps and soon..
Id say there are probably about 50 maps which are worthy to be played from the entire collection not counting the metal maps.
Most of them can go into the installer imo as default installer settings and maybe allow for 2 ptionsone fulll and one lite but the full should be the reccomanded one...there are tons of free online games that take from 1-2 gigs easy and people download them by the thousands.
Id we go by the weakest link than there shouldnt be new models nor effect cause some still use pentium 4 1.8 gig and a gefroce 2...
come on...

[smoth]

OMFG USE SPELL CHECK YAN, I have seen you type coherent english in TASClient. Cut the bullshit you can write english properly.

[Pxtl]

The sad, simple fact: BA is the dominant mod. People go into the lobby, they see BA.

BA is horrible to n00bs. Terribly abusive. But it's the only game in the lobby. So, here's the really sad fact, if we want to popularize Spring:

We need a single-player/tutorial mode for BA, so that we can get new players to play it.

I feel dirty just typing that.

[malric]

Related to the topic. I found a link to spring here:

http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080 ... Games.html

in, I would say, good company (glest, civ, wesnoth).

I found this following a link from slashdot, so I guess others might as well. It is good to advertise when possible (postings, banners, etc), but a big effort in this direction is not what we need. Improving site, noob friendliness, tutorials, single player campaigns - there are a lot of things to do.

[Argh]

Because Spring is an free/open source project it is fundamentally different from commercial games and as such advertising for it shouldn't be compared with commercial game advertising.

Advertising "when it's finished" is the wrong approach; Spring will never "be finished". If it's finished, it's dead, if it's dead, it's finished, and there's no point advertizing for a dead project.

I may agree if you say "I won't advertise now because feature XXX and feature YYY arent implemented; I will advertise when they are implemented.", but "when it's finished" WILL mean in practice "I won't advertise ever."

Quoted for mega-truth. +bazillion.

Seriously... the advertisement campaign, guerrilla-marketing, etc., etc., should be going on NOW, and should not wait for some improbable event to occur, such as delivery of completely perfect commercial-quality games. Even though P.U.R.E. (and probably Gundam, S'44 and IW, among others) will be polished games on release, it is just not practical to wait forever on this, and in fact, it just prevents us from reaching the breakthrough phase.

More popularity = more players = more developers looking at the engine = more code added to Spring = more game development = more players. Advertising in whatever way can be managed with a budget of $0 is still effective and should be a part of how things go.