It’s my firm belief that a large advertising campaign at this time (with existing materials) would be highly counter-productive.
Here’s an interesting number:
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40% of people who loaded the game never left the sanctum
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Nearly 70% never made it to assigning a single skill point
Now, This is something to consider. However especially given a free weekend promotion, we can dismiss a certain number of these people as idly curious or those who just wanted a peek.
Rough humbers I’m not using calc for percentages of percentages at the moment but there seems to be a common perception that the game is losing players at “mid game” Personally looking at the follow on numbers I try to see them as a percentage of the 61% of people who actually tried.
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Less than half of those who left the sanctum ever broke a single tool.
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Less than one third of those who left the sanctum made it to level 10.
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Just over one tenth of players who left the sanctum made it to level 20.
Again, just my opinion but new player acquisition is not where the focus needs to be right now. With fall off numbers like that there needs to be a heavy look at retention and the new player experience before advertising and reaching out to additional people who are unlikely to come back to the game after a frustrating or dull initial experience.
Personally I think there needs to be a solid look at available in game information (or in some cases just how it’s presented) for a newer player. There needs to be a proper map. There needs to be a way for a player just starting on a level 1 planet to see that there ARE active shops in the universe and get a feel for an existing economy.
There needs to be an explicit tutorial around using the knowledge base and the tips/info system and there’s no call for that information to be hidden or revealed like little nuggets of bait only as a player progresses along a certain path in the game.
Get a color wheel or something in there PRONTO. Removing the bad light from the character creation area was a huge step but the process is still tedious and distracting. Trying to compare and select between two colors? By the time you’ve clicked through the 80 colors in between you’ve lost the sense of what you’re trying to compare.
Getting a basic map should not require two machines and when i started (yes this is fixed now) there wasn’t even a recipe for glass in any machine. Then once you have that map it doesn’t indicate settlement information or really anything useful. Even if you want to have a warp augment in it and see the info you could see from the sanctum you need a third machine and more resources and crafting.
Those of us that are still here, still active - the 1.7% of players that have made it to level 50 - are often worried about mid game experiences and clearly many people feel like getting more eyes on will result in a larger population in general, but with numbers like this more eyes on just means generally more negative sentiment, comments and reviews about the game, and more people that are unlikely to take a second chance down the road.
Address some basic items here, get people the tools they need to move forward from nothing. Stop shedding 83% of players who are willing to try the game before they’ve ever achieved level ten or made it off of their starting world.
THEN talk about advertising.
The players that make it to mid or upper level and then get bored (or frustrated) are a follow on problem, and a very small percentage of those who have tried the game.