Buffalkill: And how do propose to increase retention?
The most straight forward thing to me is make war happen more often. What's the two things that most often stand in people's way for starting a war? The huge potential damage and that currently if you are smaller it's much harder to fill the military gap with tactics and strategy. For the huge potential damage, look into changing how looting affects a region would go a long ways. Then for overcoming the gap because you are smaller, would be introducing more things to differentiate armies. Both of those issues are being addressed already.
As well you want to know what helps retention, making sure that new players can always be involved in war at the beginning. How? War Islands, an island in constant warfare. The War Islands is great for the game in many other ways as well, but that is the one relevant to the topic at hand.
There many possible strategies worth debating to improve retention. Here a few possibility off the top of my head:
- Gives newbies more to do; i.e. choose a class, choose a unit type; give them the ability to try all islands without the usual hassle
- Relax the char limits; one of the first rules of marketing (I'm sure) would tell you that the more time people spend playing your game, the more "brand loyalty" you acquire. A lot of people have said they have capacity for another player but they can't. What if Facebook told people in 2007 they could only log on for 15 minutes a day? Then they never would've made that movie about it, and the Winklevoss twins would be ruling the world with an iron fist
