What would make people play LS again?

[Katherine]

***SPOILER***

And ffs delete SS. We can't support 3 races.
Make them a ls clan, let them keep their rank, just stop watering down the game.

Just a observation here, but one way to "tighten" up the map and concentrate the fun is to fast forward the timeline to Tarmon Gaidon, or the many actions that occur leading up to it. At this time in the books most of the story shifted to Andor and all points north. Fighting shifted from blight and the Gap to the borderlands with a diversionary battle/divisive action occurring at Caemlyn.

Southern maps could be preserved for global and master quests as needed, but not the primary "open world" area.

The trick is how to do it and still maintain relevancy for all the investment people have put into the south clans. In the books, the southern armies came north with their commanders and sovereigns and maintained a camp shared with SS and led jointly by an SS commander and Bryne with Matt being the overarching theater commander. Maybe set up a new "encampment" zone for the LS army in Shienar with various factions claiming a part of the zone as their "home territory"

People do like change. So perhaps going between a full map and Tarmon Gaidon map every 6-8 months with epic events in between that bridges the continuity between the two. Maybe make is so that tps are used to establish the "starting conditions" of the Tarmon Gaidon map so that one side could have advantages based on their relative level of tps. It finally gives tps a reason to exist besides a ranking ladder. All this sounds really hard. But, again, brainstorming.

[Neveyan]

Focus should be on getting and hooking in new players. Anything to enhance the fun of oldies and keep them around isn't sustainable. Everyone who's read wot should know we exist.

All effort should be concentrated on attracting new players and their experience in first 1, 5 and 30 minutes such that they get the concept, understand some basic commands and can start to explore on their own. It should be a challenging environment.

Energy focused on keeping masters is wasted in the long term.

That being said I open to increasing concentration of players so maybe cutting the zones until we have enough is a good idea.

[Katherine]

Agree that trying to sustain older players isnt really the best approach. If we had a larger overall population with lots of new blood, many older players would return simply out of interest. But to get new players who read the WOT books to play (and thus fatten out the LS ranks), they have to find us first. We focus alot of time on voting for the mud on MUD tracking sites, but that's how "older mud players" will find us--basically people like the average wotmud player now. 99% of everyone else who wants to play a wheel of time game will go to google or bing and type (surprisingly) "wheel of time game". A quick search about a minute ago on Google shows the mud at the bottom of page 2. I don't have my usage statistics in front of me, but the vast majority of people never make it past page 1. Moving up to page 1 could help things a bit.

[Enok]

Honestly, coding would bring people back and thats about it. New, fresh skills and features. Balancing of channi...I'm sorry, classes. Counters to every skill. True balance. Thieves who are master poisoners, non-channeling support classes/specs, traps, snares, limb targetting for mvs loss or defense malus (a crippled leg, a sprained wrist, etc), coded, permanent, individual bonuses from outstanding contributions to clans, aiel, ogier, working ways, real blademasters, playable grey men, weapon classes with more diversity and traits such as shield specialists or sword breaker setups, bows. The list goes on.

The best change in many years was zerk attack on warriors. The class was brought back and abs became awesome over night. It made people think and adapt. It encouraged risk taking. It was, and is, a great change.

Today, there is nothing to be tried and tested outside of min/maxing pracs, stats and gear. I used to think this was charming but it's not. There is little to no diversity in terms of setups. Even if you try to think of new things they are either considered lame or they're ineffective. Status weaves is one example. Chill me in solo pk and I'll go in because there is no point and you cant stop me.

Zone changes are somtimes great, but big changes will be met with anger akin to the reactions Nass got after he changed blight (ok, it wasnt good, but you get the picture).

I know this is never going to happen but it is what I believe would change our numbers.

[Petra]

Agree that trying to sustain older players isnt really the best approach. If we had a larger overall population with lots of new blood, many older players would return simply out of interest. But to get new players who read the WOT books to play (and thus fatten out the LS ranks), they have to find us first. We focus alot of time on voting for the mud on MUD tracking sites, but that's how "older mud players" will find us--basically people like the average wotmud player now. 99% of everyone else who wants to play a wheel of time game will go to google or bing and type (surprisingly) "wheel of time game". A quick search about a minute ago on Google shows the mud at the bottom of page 2. I don't have my usage statistics in front of me, but the vast majority of people never make it past page 1. Moving up to page 1 could help things a bit.

This is a very good point and one we don't always look at. Our site is truly awful for SEO. Crawling is forbidden by robots.txt, and the website itself is a monster. If you're outside the top 4 search results you're basically dead. 90% of people never make it past the first page of searches. On top of that the site isn't even responsive, so anyone idly Googling stuff on their phone will laugh and keep on searching. If we want to up visibility these days, our website should be a priority.

[Elysia]

There are too many points in this thread to respond to, although when I'm done with my immediate to-do list I might at least try to list the coding items so you know those are mighty unlikely. Also, re: the website, none of us except FLash have access although some have asked in the past, so that's an access issue none of us Watchers can really "fix".

RP has pretty much totally died on the side. I think more rewards or interactive mobs that que rewards for them would be great. I think RPers might play more. Granted wont help pk but still players is players.

I did want to touch on this. I can't remember the exact year Eileen was back, but extra rp awards have been in since then. If you see a random qp popping up, that will probably be due to this. It's not automated to prevent abuse through spamming, but it's there. I'm sure the more roleplay inclined Tower folk have seen regular rewards, since I see a lot of rp there. But DS and SS plus every LS who speaks in character with any regularity can benefit from this.

[Dartes]

I know the problems with website control here, but 100% what Petra/Katherine said. I might have said this before, but this is exactly how I found the mud. I searched "wheel of time game" and this was the very first thing that popped up. Now it doesn't show up until page 3 (on my phone). I had never heard of a mud before. On a related note, does the telnet thing even work any more? Maybe it's because I'm on my phone, but nothing happens when i click on the "play the game!" thing (you can tell I'm super tech savvy!). Would be cool if there was something there that worked on mobile too, since I bet most people would be searching via their phone vs a desktop anyway. Even if it was pretty basic like LensDroid, which i use sometimes to hop on and see what's happening, would be good for grabbing some interest.

[Elodin]

The website/advertising/new blood point is the single-most important one, imo, and is where I focused a lot of my energies before I "quit". Bottom line, though, is that it just isn't going to happen.

So, with a lack of any meaningful control over an influx of new players, we can focus on 1) hooking what few new players we do get and 2) retaining old players better. I think the Staff and pbase have both done a good job on both of these points, considering the tools we all have. I do think the zones (and clans...) could use a massive overhaul/purge and that'd be a very positive change, but mostly what little can be done needs to start with players. Little things like creating and maintaining "good" pk sessions, doing regular smob trips, doing player-run events, etc. Come up with "smobbing sundays" or something and let everyone know. Good, fun gameplay that is led by prominent players is what gets us short boosts in activity. Prolonged activity increases won't really happen unless we somehow magically get coding/access and might not even then.

[Firimei Lang]

True, things like Festivals in Cairhien or Andor. Goes, PvP for goodies etc.
We do all need to do something, just need a brain storming session.

Fixed to say more regular ones, like all those who RP romance [er] can have a mawwrige with a proper all day festival and so forth?

Make our own quest ideas or such forth. I know its easy to think of these, harder to implement them.

[Thuvia]

I still cannot understand why no one is allowed any access to the website. Even just getting rid of the robots.txt alone would help.

I'm more than willing to help pay for the services of a professional to spruce the site up, if money/skill/trust are holding things up.