You realize what you just said makes absolutely no sense. A forum thread about this game advertising it would by it's very nature require a player of the game (and thus be player-led) to start it. While I cannot know that the bay12 forums would have led to long-term growth, I wouldn't have been surprised if it did had a certain event not have happened that I will not discuss further here.
Because taken out of context. My previous messages refer to spurts of recruitment efforts that happened a few times where many players would coordinate to "upvote" (and other such term) BM on a large number of game ranking/listing sites. They were about players going out of their way, in an organized manner, to spread word of BM in new places.
This is in contrast to players who were already active in other communities, and independantly brought people from their other community to join this one as well. This is a more organic type of growth, while the previous is a more artificial one.
Yes, both forms of recruitment involve at least one player from BM, and talking of BM in a non-BM context. I think the dynamics of both differ enough to be considered seperatly, however.
And by tangible results, I meant long-term impacts only.
If you want to look at all possible forms of recruitment, and you consider any recruitment as being a tangible increase, then yes player-led initiatives have had tangible results. Go ahead and tire yourself out spending hours per day recruiting people. But that was not the premise of my original comment.
The very conclusion that "What we need is young blood" is weak, however. Set aside the fact that this has been brought up a few times in the past and attempts were made regarding it, as far as I am aware, the game's statistics show that the main problem is not recruiting new players (because there are already large numbers of them), but rather keeping them. These might have changed, but last I heard on the subject, the vast majority of players don't log back in after their first few days (heck, after their first). Decreasing drop-out rates by 10% would have greater impact than increasing recruitment by 100%. Or somewhere along those lines (I don't have the actual numbers on hand).
BM is a product in end-life. The decline started long ago, and now it threatens its very existence. Multiple attempts to reboot growth have been attempted, but failed. Multiple attempts to offset the consequences of this decay have been attempted, and also failed. This should not be interpreted as a critic upon the devs: when new problems arise, one cannot predict the consequences of the remedies to be taken. At the core of the problem is probably something that is exterior to BM itself: market changes. Text-based RPGs don't appeal to as wide a market as they used to, back when BM was launched. And as long as BM wishes to stay true to itself, it cannot really hope to survive the extinction of its target player base.
