Posts made by Tuoni

I was wondering, how much there is RNG involved in this engagement drawing? Does everyone win who have selected from that specific week or..?

@Althalus said in (Answered) Toggle Nudity For player Characters? [ AKA unequipable Undergarments with censor option) ,( NOT OTHER EXPLICT FEATURE REQUEST)]:

@Tuoni pecker slider was discussed before

Well of course..

Hmmm.. nudity you say?

What next? Butt, boob and pecker sliders?

Marketing as important part of early development

Introduction
Marketing is a really important part of the game development like it is actually in business as usual. Marketing is also something where you can go really wrong or absolutely nail it. Marketing can be costly, but with some smart strategy you can find the right places where to invest money and still avoid massive costs.

I am not a marketing person myself and I have worked mostly in purchasing or financial in general. However, I have watched from aside when my colloques from marketing and sales do their job. Sometimes when I have paid those imo overpriced marketing bills, I have almost cried, because those prices can sometimes be quite insane. I have experience from startup companies as well and I am working in one right now, so I understand how for small indie-game studio it can be hard to make marketing right when funds are quite limited. So maybe we could focus on low expense marketing possibilities.

Good start?
DynaMight Studios has done many things right already. They have nice website from where you can find good amount of needed information. Foundation program is absolutely great and promotes community members to spread the word. DS has been active in social media too and now the latest thing was opening an Instagram account. So I would say, that the starting point is on solid base.

Kickstarter was a little bit disappointment and I am sure devs were hoping much better result. Still it gave something to start build on. Some people had high hopes when NDA was lifted and they wished something great would happen. I was sceptical about the impact and unfortunately I was right. The Funding meter on website has barely moved. Removing NDA is of course a good bonus, but it won't sell by its own. There is not enough content creators and not enough content from where to create. Later the situation gets better and I do not have any doubt about that.

Ideas from community
Now if our community members have good marketing ideas, maybe we could talk about those and in best case we hopefully give DS some useable ideas. My suggestion relates to media and especially for videos.

Videos, videos, videos
Videos are nowadays what sells the games. People loves to watch gaming videos especially from youtube (and why not from Twitch too). And I am not talking about long Q&A or streaming videos. Those are nice add, but not something what captures the interest of totally outsider who first time crosses with Fractured or does not give much for those who already follows your development. People wants to see official trailers, teasers and content updates.

• Trailer
  Quality of videos does not need to be same as big studios with all fancy cinematic cutscenes. It might be actually better to focus on gameplay and give audience honest feel of the game itself. Videos does not need to be long especially when we are talking about teasers or trailers. These can be just couple of minutes long and introduce the most important headers and key features, show some gameplay footage and maybe short peak for something not revealed before. This kind of trailer is what Fractured needs imho. It may be too early to ask this for A1/P2, but maybe for start for Alpha 2 or at least for Beta 1. This would be really good marketing boost for sure.

• Teaser
  Throwing small teasers live now and then is a good way to keep players interested. Maybe start of upcoming testing phases you could publish a teaser, which introduces shortly the upcoming content and features. It is enough to have a hook, that captures people attention and get more people to join the next testphase.

• Content updates
  Content updates are different and can be longer if the introduced content includes a lot of information. It is not a bad idea to make short ones either if the addressed matter is a smaller feature for example. People loves content update videos or at least I do.

Final words
There can not be too much videos.. Because people are always waiting for new vids to get more information and something new to discuss with. I know DS has limited resources atm so I do not expect anything radical happen straight away, but I hope you consider add some videos during upcoming test phases, because after or too close for launch, it might be too late already.

SBI did generally a good job with the official Albion Online videos during development, but they really nailed it with few of those. I remember how much this one video affected positively to so many people and got them really excited of the game. This Everybody Matters video has so many things made right; Music, story, gameplay footage, core features, storyteller, introducing playstyles.. It was fantastic and not made with mega budget.

Albion Online Youtube Channel

Here is also few articles what I have been reading lately and which are related to this topic if someone is interested.

Indie game marketing tips

Marketing your indie game

How to make indie game trailer

@Roccandil said in Characters Per Account:

@Tuoni said in Characters Per Account:

@Roccandil said in Characters Per Account:

@Tuoni

Market checking seems fine to me in Albion. It's easy to find out when a disparity exists, sure, but you still have to do the work to exploit it, sometimes across PvP zones

It does not matter even in some cases you needs to travel through dangerous zones, because some people will do it anyway. It is just stupidily easy and hurts economy.

Hurts economy? Exploiting variances in local markets -is- economy. And if that exploitation were so easy, the variances would cease to exist. Perhaps I haven't been playing long enough, but I haven't seen that yet.

Because in Albion it was kind of meant to create local economies by selling local resources (and items based on those) and that way make every market unique. Now those who did merchanting used alts and/or fast traveling to check out the other markets before they decided where they are going to travel with the goods. And because people had this easy access to other marketplaces, more goods were transported and the uniqueness or different markets were hurt. All markets had almost same stuff for sale with almost same prices (excluding Caerleon because it was central hub). This was of course just one reason and relatively easy access to all resources everywhere was another. I do not know about others, but at least to me that felt so stupid that you can spy other markets without any effort. I benefit from the system myself, but from game point of view it does not sound reasonable way of acting. To stop this they would need to restrict number of alts (which they would not do because their business model) or remove some fast traveling options (which is partly important if you want to group up fast). It is kind of win to lose situation.

@Roccandil said in Characters Per Account:

@Tuoni

Market checking seems fine to me in Albion. It's easy to find out when a disparity exists, sure, but you still have to do the work to exploit it, sometimes across PvP zones

It does not matter even in some cases you needs to travel through dangerous zones, because some people will do it anyway. It is just stupidily easy and hurts economy.

Camping other players and PvE hotspots (bosses & resources) are also easier with huge number of alts and can be really annoying if allowed freely.

Different kind of spying and camping behaviour are just the downside of alts and hard to get rid off if wanted. I am not saying there should not be alts (it is good there is some), I just want devs to keep the total number calm, especially if they do not have any preventing actions planned.

@Roccandil said in Characters Per Account:

@Tuoni

If we can see which account characters belong to, that might prevent spying issues.

Well that would help for some spy activity, but I am not sure if they are going to do that.

Market checking is annoying possibility and affects negatively to local economies. I know because I used this in Albion, it was too easy there. On top of spying alts makes different kind of campings a thing and I am not sure what devs have planned to prevent this happen.

I do not personally use Instagram either, but in gaming industry it is really important to cover different kind of social medias. Those are really good channels for marketing and advertising.

@Kralith I like that "old iron" description, I guess I go to the same category.

@Roccandil I kind of understand that race point of view and it gives people chance to play with different playstyles.

However, marketing spying is one thing what you can do with multiple characters even not using those characters anywhere else. There can be other spy options as well. It also depends how much devs wants spys to be used at first place.

Proprietor pack for example gives 4 additional character slots and if we get 3 as default, who on earth needs total of 7 in sandbox game.. Just because of different races?

@Dev said in VIP / Shop and my random thoughts:

Looking at the currently biggest competitor (Albion) the VIP/Premium nets you quite some benefits, but its totally playable without it. It speeds things up but does not yield into any direct advantage during battles. Most people have no problem with paying that money, as a yearly subscription is below 5€/pMonth so not even 5$ a month - for a game which continues to get enhanced, maintained and free(!) content-updates. No requirements to buy the game itself, no paid AddOns. If its not worth that one time ice-cream or pack of cigarettes per month, how is it worth you invest HOURS upon HOURS into it? And you/your friends can still do exactly that. Play for absolutely free and get the premium through inGame-Currency - if you even need it.

Totally playable you say.. Everything is playable, but in Albion online the premium benefits are massive, especially because we are talking about game where progression is huge part of the game. You decided to use 1 year subs as an example to underrate the fee. Maybe you should been use 1 month instead of 1 year, which is 9,95$. And in Albion you benefit from multiple characters and it is effective to share progression between those. Premium is not account wide, so you need to buy premium separately to every character so the monthly prices can in some cases be quite high. Yeah the game has been free about month now, but before that it was b2p several years. SBI needed to go for f2p to get more players and this same can easily come ahead with DS too. And on top of this, if we think of how you can buy ingame currency with real money and with ingame currency you can buy a lot of stuff and benefits.. Sooo Albion's business model is quite horrible actually and I hope we do not see anything like that here in Fractured, and what I have understood, DS has more reasonable approach for their business model, when it is planned b2p + optional subs + cosmetic cash shop. And if the optional subs advantages are calm, then I do not see any problems there either.

ALBION ONLINE SHOP

I am not sure about that. Here is few pics more, even I am not sure what these pictures presents. But it might be like @Azraelius you mentioned before, that Babilis is both genders at the same time..

EDIT: Or not have a gender at all.

@Esher said in Guilds planets and races:

@Tuoni
They use "god" in the first spotlight, so I assumed that he was male ^^

Yeah I saw that one too. I guess some people have spoke of Babilis as goddes because of this wiki picture: Babilis Wiki

@Esher said in Guilds planets and races:

@Tuoni said in Guilds planets and races:

and doing some special divine quests for evil goddess Babilis.

Babilis is a god, not a goddess, pay attention to what you say, if you don't want to be sliced in half !!

I base my sayings what other people have spoke in these forums, so are you sure what you are saying?

@Jetah said in suggestion on attracting huge mass of new players to buy FracturedMMO:

@Tuoni
i have an image for that! but i changed it to a p2w viewpoint.

It can definitely thought that way too. It is totally about how players feels that. That is why I talk everytime about grey area what it comes to p2w or not p2w.

@Xzoviac All depends how much that VIP membership will eventually boost the progression. I have seen few forum post where is said, that this knowledge boost from VIP will be quite small. I can not editorialize at this point how I feel about that, and I think I have too see the benefit in use before making any conclusions or judgements.

However, your concern is valid imo, because some other games have not handle these optional subcription well. Usually these optional VIP / PREMIUM / PLUS packages are just camouflaged subcriptions, because the benefits are must have.

In Fractured VIP is planned to be account wide which is a good thing. And if they manage to keep the progression advantages relatively small, then I guess most of players will be satisfied with that.

@Xzoviac said in suggestion on attracting huge mass of new players to buy FracturedMMO:

@Tuoni ESO has the same optional subs as well but the infinite crafting bag is to much to pass on so it's a must to anyone playing properly

Well that is usually the case with optional subs. Those are "optional", but in practise more like mandatory because benefits are just way too good to by pass. Same thing in Albion Online. It is optional, but your progression will slow down so drastically that the already grindy experience turns to pure nightmare.

@Sindariya NPCs maybe, but I guess not another players.

I will cut your horn and craft some kind of instrument from that.