I have sent this idea to someone on this site (not Paul), but before my departure I want to make sure this idea is recognized as I believe it will help the community more than any game change that Paul can think of:D2jsp.org has grown expedentially since it’s conception nearly a decade ago. Or has it?!? Well… lets just say it had some phenominal growth from morphing into one of the top online social networks. For some time the site has actually been declining in it’s stats as shown below:
I mention this for a simple reason as Paul is, in my eyes, a classic case viewed in MBA classes. He was highly successful, experienced fast/expediential growth and is still trying to manage his business as if it were small.
Think of it this way, how many different hats does Paul wear? From my POV he’s among other things: Admin (for 500k+ users, XXX Mods, etc), Boss of all the Mods, Coder for site improvements, coder for LS, RND (with community help) for the site / game, financial guy (I’m sure he takes care of the bills), the entire marketing dpt, Security for the Site, answers an unfiltered mailbox of probably 500-1000x pms a day, etc, etc. Ofc Paul still has his family / personal life to juggle in there as well.
Paul does a great job for this site and the activities he has time for. I’m assuming he has a list stretching a mile long for ideas he’d like to implement for both LS & d2jsp. However, he should be able to admit what I’m about to state, he’s bottlenecked. When I stated above that his biggest shortfall that I can see looking in is that Paul may have difficulty relinquishing power to others and delegating various duties to others. What I mean by that is this: Paul probably loves to do everything and may still try to do much of everything as he did when the site was in its infancy. However, with the size it has become, he has now actually become a bottleneck on the site and in my eyes is stunting the potential future growth and expansion of this site. I’m sure you guys saw the movie “The Social Network”. Think of the role the Napster guy played for the future of Facebook and it’s growth…
Alright, I don’t need to get to deep into the analysis of d2jsp and the interworking, but I want that to become a prelude of the purpose of this pm. I want it to be realized that this Bottleneck for future expansion has reduced the marketing dpt for d2jsp & LS in general to nothing. How can we look to the future without at least 1 person fully dedicated to marketing? This is crazy! You may be satisfied with where this site is now, but realize your numbers are declining steadily and god only knows what is about to happen with D3. From here on out I’m solely going to focus on LS, but I believe you can understand the implications of what I’m about to state bleed off onto the site as a whole.
Facebook is working hard and has been very successful on integrating gaming & a social community. Obviously, when you are in facebook, you have a plethora of games that you can view and choose to play. However, what I found interesting, is that not all the game links that you see advertised are integrated into facebook. Basically, when you click the link for a particular game, you are simply taken to a 1 page overview layout regarding the game with a link at the bottom taking the reader to an offsite location to play the game. When I first saw this, my jaw dropped, adrenaline shot through my veins, and I thought “OMG, why the hell can’t LS have this”. We could bring ppl into this game by the 1000s.
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http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics• More than 750 million active users
• 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
As seen above, there are more than 750 Million facebook users. Even if we were able to get such a horrible response of every 1 in 100,000 ppl decide to try out the game, you’re still looking at 7500 ppl coming over to the site, creating an account, and trying out his game. Do I need to even mention the positive implications of what this would do for the game? Could ppl imagine creating a 5 player cata and seeing hundreds of ppl at every level to group with?!?
Now this leads us into the question of creating this 1 page ad. There is a phenomenal pool of talent on this site that could be tapped into for no cost to Paul. This is evident with his tagged staff and ppl like myself who are willing to invest their time, ideas, and efforts to making this community a more pleasant and occupied place to invest our time. Basically, I believe Paul should create a contest. He’s done these contests before as the original LS graphics came from this. He creates a contest where ppl create this 1 page ad for him. Financial compensation could be rewarded, but becoming the author and having the bragging rights of creating that add would be reward enough.
So, now we see this ad can easily be created cost & effort free. Now Paul would have to invest a little effort to work out the details with facebook on getting his game on the list. I’m sure this wouldn’t be too difficult.
What we have here is a win-win situation: Little investment, little effort, huge potential reward. Now with this small example I am presenting, I don’t think there is ANYTHING Paul can do in the game of LS short of having the mobs drop FG to increase the player base as significant. I truly believe these simple steps will bring 1000s to 10s of 1000s of ppl into LS.
The community needs someone constantly thinking about the future expansion of this site and an increased player base for his game. Regardless if he is satisfied on resting on his laurels, the players desperately want it and the survivability of this game need it. I believe Paul should seriously consider having tagged ppl whose sole responsibility is marketing. Not relinquishing some of these powers, tapping into the creative minds of marketing minded ppl, and bottlenecking the expansion of this site and game are only going to cost him monetary potential in the future, but lead to a continual decline in activity and numbers for both LS and d2jsp.org
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Respectfully,
Nick