Sedgistan wrote:The concept is promising though, but would need to be an attractive flashy new page that advertises some potential regions to move to, with there being a technical solution for determining what regions appear, not a staff one.
I've got something I think fits this vision. But I'm not sure if this belongs with Gameplay or Communications development.
Guide New Players to the Page
If we want this feature to be used, it needs to be prominent. There are multiple ways to do this, but whatever is done it needs to look good and stand out, especially to new players. I'm going to throw out a few ideas here:
- A blurb at the top of the region page or the world page, for the first few hours of a new nation's existence.
- A link contained in the welcome telegram.
- Another icon in the top ribbon, that starts out with a notification upon founding.
- A temporary icon on the nation page, in the area in or around the region box.
Page Setup
The page would effectively be a more intuitive tag cloud, but region order would appear to be random (it wouldn't be totally random, but I'll get to that later). Just like with the normal tag cloud there would be 10 regions per page. However, the regions would contain a bit more information than they currently do. I'm currently envisioning that each region would be expandable (sort of like a telegram) which would contain a short description and a "Move to %REGION%" button.
Searching for a region would involve checking some boxes, dragging some sliders, then clicking "Search". Of course, these check-boxes and sliders would be based on region tags. For example, region size could be filtered on a slider from "Minuscule" to "Gargantuan", so the user could intuitively select a range of region sizes to their liking. Political ideologies could be in an expandable tab with check-boxes, as could the various RP tags.
Background Filtering
As I mentioned above, regions would be sorted apparently randomly. However, for this page to be really useful and make the game a better experience, it needs to have a tendency to display regions that are likely to be active and eager to engage new players. It also needs to act in a way that rewards regions for filling a particular niche. So in addition to user filtering, there needs to be a tendency for regions meeting certain criteria to appear higher on the list. And some regions should not show up at all.
Here are some ways to keep the list useful for new players:
Exclude Class and Puppet Storage Regions - The point of the page is for new players to find a community to be a part of. Class and Puppet Storage regions don't help with this, so they should not even show up.
Exclude Regions With no WA Members - I know this sounds harsh, but I don't want trophy regions clogging up this page. If everyone in a region really doesn't want to join the WA, but they also want to show up in new player searches, nothing is keeping them from having one person use a puppet. At the end of the day, WA nations get certain perks that non-members do not, and nothing is preventing this kind of region from recruiting via other methods.
Has a WA delegate - Regions with delegates tend to have more activity than those which do not. So regions with a WA delegate should tend to appear higher in the list than those which do not.
Recent Recruitment - Regions that are putting in an effort to recruit obviously have an interest in building a community, and are more deserving of getting new players than those which don't. So it would be nice if there was a mechanic like: All the regions that sent at least X recruitment telegrams via method Y in the past Z days will tend to show up earlier on the list. Perhaps there could be a new system tag "Recruiting" to identify regions that meet this criteria.
Good Tag Use - It would be unfortunate if we set up a system for finding regions that encourages regions to just pile on all the user tags to maximize visibility. To prevent this from becoming too much of a problem, I suggest that beyond a certain number of tags, additional tags decrease the chances of good visibility. This means regions can still tag themselves however they like, but if they want to attract new players they will need to use them in a way that matches general expectations, and hopefully fills a meaningful niche.
Some Nice (But not totally necessary) Add-Ons
- A way for new players to "save" potential regions they would be interested in joining. I know there's the dossier, but new players have no idea what it's for or how to use it.
- Give new players some kind of heads-up about the recruitment telegrams. They shouldn't be encouraged to ignore them, but they should be given guidance if they want to block them. Perhaps this information could appear at the top of the find-a-region page?
- A lock icon next to regions with passwords. While I don't think many new players want to deal with obtaining a password to join a region, I don't want this to punish passworded regions that do in fact want people to seek membership with them (such as Hell). So if players can immediately see which regions have passwords without having to go to the region page, this should maintain their visibility without being too annoying for new players to sort through.
- Means for regions to have more targeted visibility. This could be based on national policies, nation stats, answers to survey questions, etc. Basically regions could tailor their visibility to the kind of nations and players they want to attract.
