I am EM. AND I LOVE ORKFIA. I have played this game for like.. ever.

Even when you think I'm gone, I'm not. I make a little tribe out in the boondocks, under some random name so I won't be bothered, and don't come out of my shell until I feel like playing seriously.

ALAS I HAVE DISCOVERED WHY ORKFIA HAS A SMALL PLAYERBASE, WHILST INFERIOR GAMES HAVE THOUSANDS.

Couple things actually. Domain changes and obscurity are of course huge detriments to any small player-ran game. But those can't be avoided. And can only be overcome by spamming of more popular sites and forums to try to get more traffic.

To me, the true reason why new players don't keep playing is the instant playability. I noticed this recently when I tried a few new games. One is called Imperia Online. A rather cookie-cutter game, that kept me playing for over an hour to start, and keeps me logging in, is that it caught me quick. In AatW, when you sign up, you have maybe 2 minutes of playtime before it's back to waiting. Imperia Online on the otherhand had a “stream-lined” into process, with instant ticks and rewards that kept you able to play for much longer before you have to start sitting around waiting for ticks.

People are crude and impatient, and when they find a game like orkfia, that they might love, they don't give it a chance.

So I think we need a 24-tick new player tutorial. Meaning, with restrictions, allow a player to manually create ticks on their own time. It would give them enough time instantaneously to try the game out, make a couple attacks, do an explore, something to extend their first login time so they can get hooked the way we do. Of course obviously there is a scope of abuse, which would make it more reasonable to restrict attacks and ops to one-per-tribe-per-tutorial. Meaning you can't keep attacking the same tribe multiple times.

I don't know. It's christmas eve. And I was just sitting here playing Imperial online and it made me think about AatW more :(