Why don't we start a collection to advertise BM on facebook. I've run these kind of campaigns before and you can get a lot of exposure for $100 or less. We'd basically each chip in one dollar. The last time I ran one of these the facebook page advertised got nearly 3,000 likes for that amount of money. Imagine if we got that many likes and out of all of them just ten percent started playing the game. That's 300 new players each capable of playing three new characters. That's nearly a thousand new characters for the game, more then enough to revitalize the continents without the need to delete, shrink or freeze any game worlds.
I would definitely chip in a dollar for this.
The influx alone should improve retention since player loss is largely the result of stagnation and stagnation the result of too few players. On top of that we could bring in a few new features tailored to give new players more to do. One simple thing to ad could be an indicator when selecting your realm which tells the new player "this realm is at war" and "this realm has lordless regions".
I think we all agree that no matter what we do, it will be disruptive. We are just trying to find a way that makes the disruption most acceptable.
The least disruptive would probably be to implement something on Beluterra which is story based and will either close the continent or shrink it further. The player base in BT should be accepting of something like this because it's part of the continent.
More realms will equal more war. An alternative would be to allow dukes to fight their own wars (against other dukes), but for all the years I've tried I was told it was too much coding... and I believe that.
It's true you can't have an actual war, but you can certainly have feuds. I think one problem here is people in BM are too nice. "Oh you need some gold, here you go don't worry about paying me back ever", "Oh you're changing your region from my duchy to a neighbor, well that's just fine and dandy you have a good time over there". In the real medieval world these could create major conflicts if not wars. Just because you can't start a war doesn't mean you can't have a conflict. You can organize duels for one thing. Imagine a situation in which a feud gets so bad the dukes demand all their knights and lords pair off and fight. Sort of like a Montague and Capulet situation only without the insipid love story. That'll make things interesting for the judge too. Does he ban dueling outright? Perhaps he'll make concessions of some kind, maybe the feuding powers will have the right to bar one another from travel through their lands with the judge issuing fines to known violators. Sometimes it's not a new feature that's needed but a new way of looking at existing features.
