Closing Islands ?

[Geronus]

Um...one more thing on density... Let everyone have an infiltrator as a new non noble class... :-)  wishful thinking?

And spend every other day recovering from my latest stab wound? Please no.

[Indirik]

Rotating freeze.

That would be the most frustrating, maddening, anger-inducing system ever invented.

[Blue Star]

Instead of dropping regions off the map... why not allow the culture of one island to occupy those same regions?

In other words if we are going to take regions from the realms on a island anyway...why not to it in a way that allows for another islands population to occupy those regions with their culture and history?  It could be done with a dropping of a veil in a cataclysmic event reducing both islands in size but forcing them together.

*shrug* I have no idea how much work that would be.  Could be it is almost the same as opening a new island completely.  That work load is something that needs to be considered... If it is going to take 1000 hours of coding to do it...then just sink and island and reward those families with something for the burden.

Um...one more thing on density... Let everyone have an infiltrator as a new non noble class... :-)  wishful thinking?

Agreed cataclysmic land slide/ earth quake slams to continents together creating, and DW looking thing,  wait im not done, and it let 3 active noble limit on island!!

I prefer for one of the bigger island AT or BT to crash into EI or FEI. It would change things up a bit maybe change the region names that were once on both the islands that crashed into each other. Though another big island, mm would take some time to get used to some of the same realms exist but not all regions disappear and well just imagine. Doable? not sure.

[Indirik]

Freezing I don't like. As Jaron said, it may end up being the same as closing an island if player count does not increase. If freezing takes place, it's probably going to be years until any unfreezing is considered, and by that time the freeze would be pointless because a lot of players would have moved on and no-one will be able to remember what was happening anyway. If we go with the freezing option, you may as well combine it with a reset for the island involved.

You are in a sense correct. If an island is frozen, then if it is ever unfrozen there will be a hug disruption of the island. It could very well result in what would in effect be a reset. But that would be something for us to decide in the future, if the opportunity ever came around to "unfreeze" the island. Even so, freezing it is a much better option that just closing it and kicking off/deleting all the characters and realms. At least when it came back, there would be some people left who would remember what was there, and carry on with it.

[Tom]

In other words if we are going to take regions from the realms on a island anyway...why not to it in a way that allows for another islands population to occupy those regions with their culture and history?

Because that does exactly zero for what the purpose of this whole thing is.

[Tom]

At least when it came back, there would be some people left who would remember what was there, and carry on with it.

Also, there is the wiki where everything could be recorded for future reference.

[Geronus]

Also, there is the wiki where everything could be recorded for future reference.

Besides, we know that people play this game for years. There are bound to be people who remember what was going on. I agree that the disruption will be significant and not all the players involved will still be active, but I doubt it would be a total loss. More like the post-invasion periods on BT where everyone has to spend a month or two taking stock and getting reorganized.

[Tom]

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.

[Penchant]

Rotating freezing seems bad because it will keep the game constantly being disrupted and basically instead of disrupting an island or two, you are screwing everyone, everywhere over.

Freezing indefinitely until a threshold is gotten to seems best.

[pcw27]

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.

[de Aquitane]

Much of the dissapointment of closing an island comes from the loss of status and power currently held by a charecter. Not only that, but to keep playing you now have to move to an other island where others already hold dominance. A more attractive option, at least to me, would be seeing a continent wiped out, but a fresh one start at the same time. It might not guarantee your previous influence, but at least nobody starts above you.

I did not read the whole thread, so I don't know if this was already suggested or disapproved of (in such a case, my apologies), but why not close two islands, for example Atamara and Beluterra, and then create a new world using the old map. You could even go so far as to make the starter realms correspond to some of the stuff from the both islands, so people can try keep their culture alive, though I think that might just be raping the histories of both continents.

I also like the idea of holding multiple titles, but I doubt it would ever happen in practice, especially if there is penalties to productivity. A monarch would probably not want dukes with several duchies, and a duke would not want his lords to be inefficient. And since they are the ones calling the shots, the power would stay distributed if possible.

Freezing an island, much like blightning regions, will serve as an eternal reminder of things lost, but I would not have anything against either. I'll keep playing anyway.

[Tom]

Why don't we start a collection to advertise BM on facebook.

Because FB advertisement works best if you can target your ad very well, and BM is very hard to target. The options FB offers (and yes, I've checked it out) don't help much. About the only thing of any use is limiting it to people who speak english.

[Foxglove]

Even so, the idea of some informal crowd funding among the players to pay for a bit of advertising somewhere (it doesn't have to be FB) seems like a solid idea. I remember seeing a website that offered discount advertising spots for indie developers and I wrote something about it on the M&F forum when we were exploring ways to get the word out about the new project.

[pcw27]

Tom did you check out the "precise interest" feature? Under precise interests they have "Video Games", "Role-Playing Games", "Strategy Games", "MMORPG", "History", "European History", "Game of Thrones", "Lord of the Rings", heck there's even 488,000 people that like feudalism on there. Basically anything a person can like on facebook can be the basis of an ad target. You just have to enter them into the search bar and if there's a significant following it will pop up along with the total number of likes that topic has.

You can do this for a facebook likes campaign and for battlemaster itself.

[Meneldur]

I know this is going against the general trend, but I actually think freezing an island would be worse than sinking it. Looking at the example of the War Islands, players migrated elsewhere in a bid to continue their realms and religions, resulting in things like Everguard and Torenism on Dwilight. Closing another island may have that same effect on the players there, not merely increasing player density but also adding another interesting element into game play as players from the closed island try and rebuild elsewhere. Furthermore this kind of migration may allow cultures and groups from the closed island to continue, albeit in a different form.

Now perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I don't see a frozen continent ever being re-opened barring a sudden miracle. However by giving players the vague hope of re-opening we will ensure that nowhere near enough will be willing to migrate to allow the continuation and spread of cultures that would occur from a closed island. This essentially means that the end result will be the same as closing an island while banning immigration- not only are game cultures and histories destroyed (an inevitability regardless of which option we choose) but there is no chance of said cultures surviving elsewhere in the game.