Loops Guide to Good advertisements,

Library of Gnidrah The East Pacific Archive
1

Ok I know how most of the UCR members think, they think that they should Spam the carp out of a Feeder RMB, but what they dont realize is this doesn’t work, sure you may get a person ever month or three to actually look into your region, but they rarely stay, usually they just time out or move to a better place, Spamming the Pacifics is, not Like but IS the same thing these asses do when they send out a brazillion emails advertising longer internet penii, Canadian medications, or hot sluts in your town who want sex now, and what do you do with those when you got them, you delete them or if you have MSN ar G Mail, they are usually deleted automatically. The Mass Spamvertisements Don’t Work.
Well I kinda take that back, they do one thing, they draw the attention of Raiders, you smart invaders will watch the RMB’s looking for targets, places where they will actually welcome the influx of new seemingly active folk, and worse you will attract the attention of the Forum Killers like Lady Blue Moon who used to go to a forum weasel her way into an admin then Delete the whole damn thing and report back to her home forum on the Great Success.

Now you are probably saying Loop I just read that whole poorly typed block of text you made are you gonna make a point or not?
Well Sherlock I am, you ever watched College or Pro Sports, I dont but I understand how it works, Coaches don’t go out to highschools or Colleges and put up signs all over the place saying

— Begin quote from ____

Looking for a team with whom to play
yarp yarp yarp , My Team, Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp
Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp
Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp
Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp
goto the world type in my team  Yarp Yarp
Yarp Yarp Yarp
Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp
Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp Yarp
WALL OF YARP
Yarp Yarp Yarp

— End quote

Imagine teh team you would have if they did, damn, , ,
no they go out and scout out folks, they go look around for good players and
they watch them and they talk to them personally, one on one, that is how you gotta be if you want to get members for your region, you got to woo them talk to them one on one, get to know them. it is unfair to go into a region and think that you are so special that you dont have to show respect for the very people you want to join you, too many founders think that all new region members are for is to make their region better, for them. You have to work to make a region good, one of the Best regions Ever was The Heartland, they don’t spam pacifics and as of this writing they have 71 nations most active folks, and this is a region that has been around since I started playing, and they do it by getting folks who they se as being good potential members and personally inviting them.
So for the majority of the founders who are taking the time to read this, THe Heartland has been here before you ,and will be here long after your nation ceases to be from inactivity, because they do it right.

so to make it simple, look at the Pacifics, look at the NS forum, and spot the folks you think will be good members of your region, ones who will enjoy and contribute to the place you created, and invite them to join your region, try not to pester, look for folks who are active daily but not tied to the pacific they are in, invite them, and you will find your own region growing.

2

There are four problems with targeted recruitment of this sort:

  1. If you focus only on people who are already on the Jolt forums, you will be writing off 90% +, easily, of potential new members. No userite region can afford to do that. The Jolt forums are communities with their own identities; the sort of person who feels at home on Jolt will feel no need to change forums after they’ve gotten settled, and the sort of person who dislikes the Jolt culture(s) will probably not get involved there in the first place. I know I would not still be playing today if someone had waited for me to post on Jolt before asking me to join Equilism. Political/diplomatic gameplay is also an entirely different world from the one represented by Jolt; there is no point of similarity by which we could judge how well a new player would like the political gameplay from watching what they did on Jolt. (Plus, trying to recruit people from Jolt would mean I’d actually have to slog through all those threads. No, thanks - I’d rather spend 4 hours hitting copy-paste than even 40 minutes sifting through the madness in General, even if I thought it would improve my odds… and I don’t.)

  2. New nations do not usually speak on the Pacifics thanks to all the adspam, so you cannot find them on the RMB. And I do not understand how you are supposed to tell who would make a good player from looking at their nation. Have you tried?

  3. If you mean only send telegrams, and send them to nations that don’t have names like “The Republic of Ggggggh59683,” who have been active more than once in the last 3-4 days, and whose population shows they are clearly new ( < 12 million or so), then I agree, and that is what the majority of successful userite regions end up doing.

  4. Initiating personal contact is hard; most people will not TG you back, even when you personalize a message to what little you can tell about them from their nation. Trust me, I’ve done it. Even once we get new nations into our region, it’s a constant struggle to think of ways to get them to register and then get involved on the forums. There are several nations in Equilism now, registered on the forum, who have been there for nearly a year, whom I have personally contacted to apologize for not updating their masking, who have yet to acknowledge that they even received my telegram. Probably most people are just not invested enough in the idea of online community to investigate it, and it’s not something we can just talk people into trying if it’s not their thing.

Could we be doing more to connect one-on-one with new players? Yes. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. A part of me would like to see how a feeder community would manage without the natural advantage of having a first shot at all new players. I can’t help but feel feeder residents who give recruitment advice are presuming to teach starving men how to fish, while sitting comfortably at an exclusive all-you-can-eat buffet. If I saw that you were doing half the things you recommended, I might listen. But you don’t have to; you get your fish whether or not you work for them. We don’t have that luxury.

3

I’ve actually seen far less spam. Any reason why?

4

— Begin quote from ____

I’ve actually seen far less spam. Any reason why?

— End quote

Could be less regions to advertise about. Then again, we’ve been inundated today. Maybe less tomorrow??

5

I believe we’ve seen about the same in TEP. It our spam busting campaign that makes it seem like less. I congratulate TAO and TM for this. As for the supposed increase today, remember our people probably aren’t on with the same frequency during the weekend that they are during the weekdays. Therefore less spam busting today.

6

easy way to get a response, ask them a direct querry about some of the User set fields, Flag, motto, currency, or animal, these will get a response more often than not.
and the no responders are a good thing for a founder, if they dont responde, then you dont wan them there in the first place.

7

I’ve done it. I think my response rate for that stands at 0/10 so far this month.

The userite dilemma is this: we can hedge our bets by sending out a 100 identical TGs to likely-looking nations, we can put a lot more effort into hitting a lot lower percentage of new nations by trying to build personal relationships with raider puppets (which, by my calculations, now make up something between 40 and 70% of all nations still in the Pacifics 4-6 days after creation), or we can try to hybridize the two and tack on personalized bits to our standard TGs when the nations in question are distinctive enough to make that possible. But as far as I can tell from my limited sample so far, that sort of personalization hasn’t make a statistical difference.

I agree with you about what works, Loop, and that’s TGs… if anything. But I do not agree that it works as well or as simply as you seem to think it does, and I find it grating to be told that all we need to do is follow an easy set of guidelines and all will be well.

To keep a userite region’s population steady takes literally hours of TGing every week. Break for a few weeks and you’ll lose all your progress to CTEs. To maintain any sort of growth in a userite region takes over 5 hours a week of some of the most mind-numbing work you will ever have to do, and again, you’d better never let up. A few months ago, Equilism was well over 200 nations. We’ve lost half that, even though we have kept up recruiting (at a lesser rate) for that entire time.

I don’t mean for this to be an attack, and I hope you won’t take it that way. But no one who has ever had to recruit for the survival of their region would ever talk about it the way you do above.