The 2011 Alter Aeon "Cleric Update" is now live! This update contains a lot of changes to improve traditional cleric spells, add a new mode of casting for mages, and clean up other spells and skills that have traditionally not been as awesome as they could be. Here's a list of the most major changes:
- Mages now have the ability to 'channelcast' (ccast) certain elemental spells in combat. Channelcasting takes longer than regular casting, but is interruptible and costs substantially less mana. This feature allows mages to become a true 'blaster' class without compromising healing mana.
The channel casting skills are 'fire focusing', 'ice focusing', 'lightning focusing' and 'crystal focusin'. The fire plane is easiest to reach, and hence it's the lowest level and easiest to channel. The crystal plane is much harder to reach and only high level mages will be able to channel from it.
- Added a necromancer spell 'bone dragon', which allows you to fly around over the landscape.
- Ice imprison and crystal prison have been updated.
- Ward good and ward evil are now more powerful.
- The charm spell has been updated to make it easier to land and to use control points similar to controlled necromancer minions.
- The peace spell has been improved.
- A level 19 curse, 'overconfidence', has been added.
- A level 19 spell, 'hold undead', has been added.
- A level 28 spell, 'sacred touch', has been added.
- A level 29 spell, 'solace', has been added.
As always, you can use the 'spell find' commands to find the teachers or trainers for new spells and skills.
For those of you who don't know anything about us, Alter Aeon is a multiplayer text-based game with a lot of features and settings to help make it blind-friendly. Over half our playerbase is blind or visually impaired, and we have blind builders and staff helping to expand and improve the game.
Everyone is welcome to play, so if you're new to the game feel free to stop by and check us out. For more information and soundpack downloads, see our web site at:
http://www.alteraeon.com
Happy hunting!
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label propaganda. Show all posts
Monday, September 19, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
We're famous! (Again!)
If you've ever tried to get attention in the gaming world, you know how well-neigh impossible it is. There are literally tens of thousands of game developers of every budget category, from the smallest single-person outfits to kings like Blizzard and CCP. Even getting someone to review your game can sometimes be a lost cause.
With that as a backdrop, Alter Aeon this weekend got a spontaneous review on the GamingHUD web site. This is a pretty big website that reviews a lot of mainstream games. For AA to even be seen by fish of this size is pretty amazing.
The review also isn't some slapdash piece of filler material. The reviewer spent a lot of time on the game and even emailed me for additional information. The final article came out very positive and very long.
The link is:
Alter Aeon MUD - A World of Infinite Possibilities
Feel free to check it out and maybe drop a thank you to the author for their hard work.
With that as a backdrop, Alter Aeon this weekend got a spontaneous review on the GamingHUD web site. This is a pretty big website that reviews a lot of mainstream games. For AA to even be seen by fish of this size is pretty amazing.
The review also isn't some slapdash piece of filler material. The reviewer spent a lot of time on the game and even emailed me for additional information. The final article came out very positive and very long.
The link is:
Alter Aeon MUD - A World of Infinite Possibilities
Feel free to check it out and maybe drop a thank you to the author for their hard work.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
We're Famous!
Ok, not entirely famous, but it's a start. We have our first reviewed and edited article on an external web site:
Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon
The site BrightHub is a large site with articles about nearly everything, and people who act as dedicated editors to make sure that articles pass a minimum sanity check before being posted.
This is important because articles like this can be used to bolster notability in Wikipedia, and get AA out there to a much larger audience. Stop by and take a look, and spread the word if you've got any friends that might be interested!
Mudding Communities Are Alive and Well in Alter Aeon
The site BrightHub is a large site with articles about nearly everything, and people who act as dedicated editors to make sure that articles pass a minimum sanity check before being posted.
This is important because articles like this can be used to bolster notability in Wikipedia, and get AA out there to a much larger audience. Stop by and take a look, and spread the word if you've got any friends that might be interested!
Friday, April 16, 2010
Myspace
Today, I did the unthinkable: I constructed a myspace page. I suppose technically, I had already done that with my personal page last year; but in reality it was simply the bare minimum login and I had done nothing at all to it since it was created.
I really have to hand it to the myspace developers; they've created one of the single most dysfunctional, hard to use, and unconfigurable interfaces I've ever seen that still happens to mostly work. It reminds me a lot of Gimp.
Actually, Gimp is worse. But not by much.
At any rate, if you still have a MySpace account, feel free to add us! Our myspace URL is:
http://www.myspace.com/alter_aeon
I really have to hand it to the myspace developers; they've created one of the single most dysfunctional, hard to use, and unconfigurable interfaces I've ever seen that still happens to mostly work. It reminds me a lot of Gimp.
Actually, Gimp is worse. But not by much.
At any rate, if you still have a MySpace account, feel free to add us! Our myspace URL is:
http://www.myspace.com/alter_aeon
Monday, May 18, 2009
Advertising/Public Relations
Last night on a whim, I searched for the mud Dragon Realms just before I went to bed. DR is arguably one of the biggest and most successful muds of all time; they are fully commercial, with accounts going for as much as WOW accounts. They regularly top 700 concurrent users, and that's just for the one server. They have at least one additional.
An hour later, it was way past my bedtime and I must have had over 50 browser tabs open. This sort of thing is an amazing way to get ideas of where to post and link to Alter Aeon; they've already done most of the hard work, and Google has made it accessible.
Today, I began trimming tabs. I'm down to probably only 15 or so, most of which are waiting for some event to occur. I know I can repeat this process for a handful of other large games easily enough. I'm about 90% certain that the main AA pages can breach Google Page Rank 5 by the end of the year, possibly sooner.
While copying isn't a great way to be a leader, it can at least get you into second or third position. Given that we're in about 30th place right now, I'm totally up for doing some copying.
An hour later, it was way past my bedtime and I must have had over 50 browser tabs open. This sort of thing is an amazing way to get ideas of where to post and link to Alter Aeon; they've already done most of the hard work, and Google has made it accessible.
Today, I began trimming tabs. I'm down to probably only 15 or so, most of which are waiting for some event to occur. I know I can repeat this process for a handful of other large games easily enough. I'm about 90% certain that the main AA pages can breach Google Page Rank 5 by the end of the year, possibly sooner.
While copying isn't a great way to be a leader, it can at least get you into second or third position. Given that we're in about 30th place right now, I'm totally up for doing some copying.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Articles and Propaganda
There's a new article out for thieves. It's a pretty comprehensive overview of the various stealth skills, such as sneak, hide, stealthy movement, searching, and even how these affect other skills such as backstab. It's a real treasure trove of information:
The Thieves Creed - Stealth and Hiding
With this addition, we've now cleared 30 official articles, not counting things like FAQs, the quest guides, or other related things. The web site is actually becoming useful to players.
The articles are continuing to show their value, both in greater and lesser extent than I had expected. I regularly refer people to the articles when discussions and Q/A happens on public channels. I really had not expected this, and I'm constantly surprised at the things people ask. A good example is the article on Time, Age, and Aging, which I refer people to regularly. Other articles, such as the article on attack strategies, are much less active, though much more comprehensive.
One other area that did not work out as I had expected has to do with the web traffic to the articles. I was expecting substantially higher numbers in regards to web traffic than what we've been seeing. I think this might be a critical mass problem however, in that traffic has been picking up recently.
In other news, the maps and quest guides have been very, very popular on the web pages. They are now the second and third heaviest hitters on the site.
The Thieves Creed - Stealth and Hiding
With this addition, we've now cleared 30 official articles, not counting things like FAQs, the quest guides, or other related things. The web site is actually becoming useful to players.
The articles are continuing to show their value, both in greater and lesser extent than I had expected. I regularly refer people to the articles when discussions and Q/A happens on public channels. I really had not expected this, and I'm constantly surprised at the things people ask. A good example is the article on Time, Age, and Aging, which I refer people to regularly. Other articles, such as the article on attack strategies, are much less active, though much more comprehensive.
One other area that did not work out as I had expected has to do with the web traffic to the articles. I was expecting substantially higher numbers in regards to web traffic than what we've been seeing. I think this might be a critical mass problem however, in that traffic has been picking up recently.
In other news, the maps and quest guides have been very, very popular on the web pages. They are now the second and third heaviest hitters on the site.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Web 2.0
Begrudgingly, I am being dragged into the 21st century. First it was XML formatted output of various pieces of data; now it's XML RSS feeds.
That's right! Alter Aeon now has its first RSS feed on the changelog page:
Alter Aeon Changes and Updates Page
It just so happens that I have a player that's a web developer for a living, which is really nice - he helps me work through protocol and presentation issues that otherwise would take me quite a while to figure out. He tells me that I've not quite got the right idea for the descriptions in the current feed, but I should have that fixed in the next day or two.
I'm also planning on having the player boards in both XML and RSS formats by tomorrow, now that most of the infrastructure is in place. One of the big showstoppers for doing work on the boards (which are the logical place for an RSS feed anyway) was the lack of unique message IDs. As of yesterday, this is no longer an issue.
Honestly though, I'm not sure how much of this is relevant or useful. How many people will use the feeds? Will anyone other than my resident web guru bother to use the XML output?
Either way, Alter Aeon is rapidly heading into the world of new media, and it's really hard to tell where we're going to make the most gain. An excellent example of this is my recent experiment with Twitter.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a Twitter just for the hell of it and linked it up to the main web pages. I've been using it to just drop periodic status reports about what I'm working on, and hooked up the game to post reboot notifications there. In virtually no time, I have 8 followers there, while this blog currently has only one, despite being active for months. Additionally, I've received quite a few web hits from new people through Twitter, also more than from here.
You never know what's going to work, and just to make things complicated, things work differently for different numbers of users. As the game grows, I'll have to constantly be adding and reorganizing. At least it'll be fun.
That's right! Alter Aeon now has its first RSS feed on the changelog page:
Alter Aeon Changes and Updates Page
It just so happens that I have a player that's a web developer for a living, which is really nice - he helps me work through protocol and presentation issues that otherwise would take me quite a while to figure out. He tells me that I've not quite got the right idea for the descriptions in the current feed, but I should have that fixed in the next day or two.
I'm also planning on having the player boards in both XML and RSS formats by tomorrow, now that most of the infrastructure is in place. One of the big showstoppers for doing work on the boards (which are the logical place for an RSS feed anyway) was the lack of unique message IDs. As of yesterday, this is no longer an issue.
Honestly though, I'm not sure how much of this is relevant or useful. How many people will use the feeds? Will anyone other than my resident web guru bother to use the XML output?
Either way, Alter Aeon is rapidly heading into the world of new media, and it's really hard to tell where we're going to make the most gain. An excellent example of this is my recent experiment with Twitter.
A couple of weeks ago, I set up a Twitter just for the hell of it and linked it up to the main web pages. I've been using it to just drop periodic status reports about what I'm working on, and hooked up the game to post reboot notifications there. In virtually no time, I have 8 followers there, while this blog currently has only one, despite being active for months. Additionally, I've received quite a few web hits from new people through Twitter, also more than from here.
You never know what's going to work, and just to make things complicated, things work differently for different numbers of users. As the game grows, I'll have to constantly be adding and reorganizing. At least it'll be fun.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
New AA forum
Hey all, just a quick line to let you know that the new Alter Aeon forum system is up and running. This should hopefully provide a place for people to go on the web, instead of to the user boards in the game. It may also provide a place for new people to search and look for miscellaneous information.
On other news, I've been sick, but even so there's been a raft of changes. Most of these are minor little things, but there's a handful of very important ones such as the changing of object lists from singly linked to doubly linked. That particular change got rid of some fairly nasty lag spikes we were seeing due to very large storage lockers. As always, see the Alter Aeon changelog for full details.
For the rest of the week, I have a handful of web page things to do and clean up, and I need to figure out how to handle moving over a bunch of builders from bport to the main port. I may also get screwed for a few days next week working for my old job.
On other news, I've been sick, but even so there's been a raft of changes. Most of these are minor little things, but there's a handful of very important ones such as the changing of object lists from singly linked to doubly linked. That particular change got rid of some fairly nasty lag spikes we were seeing due to very large storage lockers. As always, see the Alter Aeon changelog for full details.
For the rest of the week, I have a handful of web page things to do and clean up, and I need to figure out how to handle moving over a bunch of builders from bport to the main port. I may also get screwed for a few days next week working for my old job.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Somebody Likes Us...
I just thought I'd put up a quick note pointing at a post on ehowton's blog:
Eric's perspective of Alter Aeon
It's a neat little piece on AA, including screen shots.
Eric's perspective of Alter Aeon
It's a neat little piece on AA, including screen shots.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Gaming Articles Suck!
It's been a while, so I figured I should post some observations about the web pages and traffic. Things work differently than I had expected, though honestly I didn't know what to expect anyway.
The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.
Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.
Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:
1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.
The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.
[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]
I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.
The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.
Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.
On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.
As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.
The biggest surprise so far is that all of the articles we've written and put up over at the Mudding and Gaming Articles page are worthless.
Ok, not completely worthless; in fact, there's a huge amount of good information in them, ranging from general gaming hints to specific strategies for advanced players. But in terms of web traffic, they've so far shown to be worth substantially less than I expected. The obvious impact of the articles on the overall site, from the standpoint of driving external traffic, seems to be minimal.
Take for example the heaviest hitting articles:
1) [48] The glossary of mudding terms;
2) [45] The muds and mudding faq;
3) [37] Alternative mudding clients;
4) [30] Equipment optimization;
5) [28] High level attack strategies.
The number out front is unique pageviews per month. The heaviest hitter has 1.5 views per day, while the main AA pages have over 100. Note that even fan fiction, artwork, and the historical archives beat several of these. Further, an eyeball's estimate places the -total- hits from the articles pages at approximately the same value as the new player mudding guide. In short, one of the more time consuming aspects of the web pages, article development, has virtually no obvious impact on the overall site quality.
[Note - 'no obvious impact' is not the same as 'no impact'. The pages have definitely improved the site in other ways. It's just not obvious.]
I can think of a couple of good reasons for this. One might be that the articles are buried, and having to click through two layers to get to them is a real hindrance. To unbury the articles, it would be simple enough to have an 'article of the day' show up on the main page, if I can find screen real estate for it.
The other, more obvious reason is that the articles don't have wide appeal. They are for the most part written for a very narrow audience of Alter Aeon players. The search engines seem to be reflecting this, in that the most general of the pages, the glossary and mudding FAQ, are the only pages with nonzero page rank.
Wider scope articles that still sell AA are more problematic. Adjusting some of the existing articles to have broader gaming scope may help. Even so, there's a limit to how broad an article on turning the undead can be.
On the plus side, each article contributes some non-zero amount of traffic to the site, and helps give it breadth and depth.
As a side note, this blog is equally boring as a source of information for people. I don't post anything overly controversial or interesting to the general public. Because the site is so narrow, and because my prose is so mechanical, the Alter Aeon Mob Factory drives virtually no traffic as well. It probably doesn't help that the layout is still the basic default.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Google Adwords - The Content Network
In preparation for the advertizing bump due in a little over two weeks, I've started looking at little harder at statistics, and at some of the other options. One of the easier things I can test out is to turn the Google 'content network' back on, as this is known to bring in a lot of web page hits for not a huge amount of cash. I've been fiddling with this for the last couple of days. But it's clear that the content network has some problems:
1) Even after these last couple of days, I still don't have things set up properly.
The content network has huge numbers of impressions, and above certain thresholds it's possible to blow your entire advertising budget for the day in a -very- short period of time. I've finally got it cranked back far enough that I don't run out for the day, but it's still about four times higher than the level I'm shooting for.
My advice if you're going to use the content network is to start out at $0.01 and raise it up by a penny a day until you figure out the appropriate level for what you're trying to do.
2) Content network click rates are stupidly low.
Expect at best one tenth the click through rate of regular adwords ads. Rates like 0.04% (four clicks per ten thousand impressions) so far seem typical.
3) Content network clicks are damn near worthless.
If you don't have some way of tracking or testing content clicks for click through, you're fooling yourself. Keep in mind that there's a fundamental difference between someone searching for information, and someone presented with information incidentally while they're looking for something else.
Regular adwords suffers much less from this problem than the content network, because of 1) the negative feedback ad system which kills bad ads, and 2) because people searching for something are still looking for something instead of being shoved things they don't care about.
My own experience and statistics for this show that the content network is 10 times (!) less likely to result in a saved character or a new player than regular adwords search traffic. Price your content ads to reflect the difference for your own site.
4) Content clicks can be gamed, sometimes badly.
I have so far had only one serious incident of content network click fraud, but it can and will happen if you run an extended campaign or one with wide coverage. Sometimes, Google will refund and clear the damage to your account; in my case, they did nothing, even though it was clearly and obviously fraudulent.
The only recommendation I can give for this is set your daily limit to the lowest possible value that still serves everything you want to serve. Then watch carefully for days when the budget is exhausted more quickly than usual. Assume there will be no recovery for click fraud; your only recourse is to limit the damage.
1) Even after these last couple of days, I still don't have things set up properly.
The content network has huge numbers of impressions, and above certain thresholds it's possible to blow your entire advertising budget for the day in a -very- short period of time. I've finally got it cranked back far enough that I don't run out for the day, but it's still about four times higher than the level I'm shooting for.
My advice if you're going to use the content network is to start out at $0.01 and raise it up by a penny a day until you figure out the appropriate level for what you're trying to do.
2) Content network click rates are stupidly low.
Expect at best one tenth the click through rate of regular adwords ads. Rates like 0.04% (four clicks per ten thousand impressions) so far seem typical.
3) Content network clicks are damn near worthless.
If you don't have some way of tracking or testing content clicks for click through, you're fooling yourself. Keep in mind that there's a fundamental difference between someone searching for information, and someone presented with information incidentally while they're looking for something else.
Regular adwords suffers much less from this problem than the content network, because of 1) the negative feedback ad system which kills bad ads, and 2) because people searching for something are still looking for something instead of being shoved things they don't care about.
My own experience and statistics for this show that the content network is 10 times (!) less likely to result in a saved character or a new player than regular adwords search traffic. Price your content ads to reflect the difference for your own site.
4) Content clicks can be gamed, sometimes badly.
I have so far had only one serious incident of content network click fraud, but it can and will happen if you run an extended campaign or one with wide coverage. Sometimes, Google will refund and clear the damage to your account; in my case, they did nothing, even though it was clearly and obviously fraudulent.
The only recommendation I can give for this is set your daily limit to the lowest possible value that still serves everything you want to serve. Then watch carefully for days when the budget is exhausted more quickly than usual. Assume there will be no recovery for click fraud; your only recourse is to limit the damage.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Where do we go from here?
There's been a lot of development and other Alter Aeon activity over the last couple of weeks, but the bigger question is, to what end? While making ad-hoc changes can improve things, it's not necessarily the best way to get to a particular destination.
There is a method to the madness here, and a specific end goal. In February, I'll be approximately tripling the advertising budget, and if I'm going to be spending that kind of money we damn well better be ready for it. I have no intention of getting traffic to the site only to fail the new arrivals in other ways.
This still leaves a lot of things to be done:
- Getting proper ad and propaganda materials ready.
- Level 33 should be in and available. Happy high level players advancing to a new goal will help new players feel like there's something interesting going on.
- A proper new version of the dClient should be available, hopefully with a prettier automap and better blind support.
On the plus side, the statistics collection on new players is rapidly improving, and we have a much better idea of where people drop out and where problem spots are. The 'saved character' rate is actually quite high now that false negatives have been properly weeded out; of the new connections that begin the character creation process, approximately half of them get to level 1 and save. This is excluding multis - it's a pretty close measure of brand new people who have never seen the game before.
The 50% 'player save' value is also consistent against the dClient numbers, which I had not expected. I would have thought that the dClient numbers would be higher, and they are after a fashion - but not nearly as high as they should be. The dClient clearly needs more work and polish.
In addition to this, I'm in the process of collecting statistics for the islands to see where new players drop out. This is a longer term collection, which will hopefully tell us how to streamline and improve areas on the islands.
There is a method to the madness here, and a specific end goal. In February, I'll be approximately tripling the advertising budget, and if I'm going to be spending that kind of money we damn well better be ready for it. I have no intention of getting traffic to the site only to fail the new arrivals in other ways.
This still leaves a lot of things to be done:
- Getting proper ad and propaganda materials ready.
- Level 33 should be in and available. Happy high level players advancing to a new goal will help new players feel like there's something interesting going on.
- A proper new version of the dClient should be available, hopefully with a prettier automap and better blind support.
On the plus side, the statistics collection on new players is rapidly improving, and we have a much better idea of where people drop out and where problem spots are. The 'saved character' rate is actually quite high now that false negatives have been properly weeded out; of the new connections that begin the character creation process, approximately half of them get to level 1 and save. This is excluding multis - it's a pretty close measure of brand new people who have never seen the game before.
The 50% 'player save' value is also consistent against the dClient numbers, which I had not expected. I would have thought that the dClient numbers would be higher, and they are after a fashion - but not nearly as high as they should be. The dClient clearly needs more work and polish.
In addition to this, I'm in the process of collecting statistics for the islands to see where new players drop out. This is a longer term collection, which will hopefully tell us how to streamline and improve areas on the islands.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Google Page Rank
As I posted a while back, the AA website's page rank recently went up; since the site went from 2 to 3, there's been a factor of 1.5 increase in overall traffic to the site. Newbie logins, and Google Analytics stats all seem to reflect this general increase.
However, I'm not sure I buy it. When I look at the competitive analysis trend lines in Analytics, I see a pretty regular pattern leading up into December, then things start to look a little different. Going into January, it appears that the global amount of traffic in all categories has increased by the exact same factor of 1.5 I'm seeing on AA. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. I've seen January increases before, but I never paid much attention to it. I always figured it was people waiting to go back to school, bored and without much to do.
One possibility is that the competetive analysis numbers I'm seeing are related to reclassification of the web site. When a page/site changes page rank, does Google reclassify the site to compare it to the new group? It's possible that the wierdness I'm seeing is simply the new competition in the new page rank category. It would be nice to have more information on this.
Whatever the reason, this influx of newbies is really refreshing. I can only hope that it's not a temporary blip, and that it continues going forward. For too many months did I work on the web site to see no gain whatsoever.
In other news, I found out the reason for the massive drop in players around the October time frame: competition. A rather large group of dedicated blind mudders for all intents and purposes got bored and left to go to another (very large) mud. I've learned several things from finding this out:
1) I need to pay more attention
2) My mortals are bored
3) It's possible to do what I want to do. The target mud has on the order of a thousand players on it. That's the short term goal for AA.
4) I'm slacking. This is my fault. See #1 above.
So I suppose I have a belated new-years resolution: I will pay more attention to the competition and what they are doing.
However, I'm not sure I buy it. When I look at the competitive analysis trend lines in Analytics, I see a pretty regular pattern leading up into December, then things start to look a little different. Going into January, it appears that the global amount of traffic in all categories has increased by the exact same factor of 1.5 I'm seeing on AA. I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. I've seen January increases before, but I never paid much attention to it. I always figured it was people waiting to go back to school, bored and without much to do.
One possibility is that the competetive analysis numbers I'm seeing are related to reclassification of the web site. When a page/site changes page rank, does Google reclassify the site to compare it to the new group? It's possible that the wierdness I'm seeing is simply the new competition in the new page rank category. It would be nice to have more information on this.
Whatever the reason, this influx of newbies is really refreshing. I can only hope that it's not a temporary blip, and that it continues going forward. For too many months did I work on the web site to see no gain whatsoever.
In other news, I found out the reason for the massive drop in players around the October time frame: competition. A rather large group of dedicated blind mudders for all intents and purposes got bored and left to go to another (very large) mud. I've learned several things from finding this out:
1) I need to pay more attention
2) My mortals are bored
3) It's possible to do what I want to do. The target mud has on the order of a thousand players on it. That's the short term goal for AA.
4) I'm slacking. This is my fault. See #1 above.
So I suppose I have a belated new-years resolution: I will pay more attention to the competition and what they are doing.
Monday, January 12, 2009
More xml
The ongoing XML saga continues, with updates to the code to properly escape the font color tags and the addition of the wholist at http://dentinmud.org:8080/xml/wholist.
Beyond that, the main web pages got another facelift, and I think I'm done propaganda blitzing for a while. That gets old real quick.
Time to try to get some bug fixes into the server and the client if time permits today.
Beyond that, the main web pages got another facelift, and I think I'm done propaganda blitzing for a while. That gets old real quick.
Time to try to get some bug fixes into the server and the client if time permits today.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Deathlogs
One more real quick post before I bail out for tonight: I got Alter Aeon an entry on deathlogs.com, which is a repository of PK kill logs for a handful of muds. While I don't anticipate that this will bring in a huge amount of traffic, it's yet another external link.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Propaganda
I've been reading SEO stuff off and on for a few months and I've been trying to incorporate various principles into the AA pages as I run across them and understand them. Recently, I got a guide with a whole bunch of short tips in it, and I've been going through it (very slowly.) This week's tip was deep linking.
So tonight, I spent several hours submitting various AA pages for deep linking to other web sites. This was mostly the glossary and article index, but I learned something very unexpected from this adventure: trying to get sub-pages linked with indexes means that I have to make the sub-pages useful to said indexes.
In short, by doing this, I'm improving the web page content in the most meaningful possible way: I'm making it more useful to external parties. In retrospect it's obvious. But it's something I could have missed for a very long time if I hadn't bothered to try it out.
So tonight, I spent several hours submitting various AA pages for deep linking to other web sites. This was mostly the glossary and article index, but I learned something very unexpected from this adventure: trying to get sub-pages linked with indexes means that I have to make the sub-pages useful to said indexes.
In short, by doing this, I'm improving the web page content in the most meaningful possible way: I'm making it more useful to external parties. In retrospect it's obvious. But it's something I could have missed for a very long time if I hadn't bothered to try it out.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Hooray!
After all this time and effort, something finally paid off on the main Alter Aeon web pages: at some point in the last week, we went from page rank 2 to page rank 3. Yay!
I'm actually really jazzed about this. Finally, something I did had a positive effect. That said, looking back at the historical analytics data for this year, I really don't see any change in overall traffic to the site. A long term average since may seems to be about flat. Granted, I didn't start really hitting the site hard until september or october, but not seeing any impact at all over the course of several months is discouraging to say the least.
The only real solution to this is simply to spend time linkbuilding and getting us listed everywhere I possibly can. I suspect my latest push for that here is what raised the page rank.
In other news, the quest to add useful content continues. I added a bunch of stuff to the Blind and Visually Impaired Player Support page, including more downloads and scripts for GMud and a raft of MushClient sound and data files.
I also spent a good chunk of the morning going through Scribe's old mudding site, and imported a couple of articles for the current AA pages. A number of dead links were killed in the process, which hopefully will cause the google webmaster tools to complain less. The two new articles are:
Player Types and Styles, and
So you want to be a Player Killer?
This brings the article total up to 21, not including other things scattered around the site but not in my high-tech document management system. This is pretty low as far as SEO goes, in that most SEO sites recommend at least a hundred pages of solid content, but it's a start.
I'm actually really jazzed about this. Finally, something I did had a positive effect. That said, looking back at the historical analytics data for this year, I really don't see any change in overall traffic to the site. A long term average since may seems to be about flat. Granted, I didn't start really hitting the site hard until september or october, but not seeing any impact at all over the course of several months is discouraging to say the least.
The only real solution to this is simply to spend time linkbuilding and getting us listed everywhere I possibly can. I suspect my latest push for that here is what raised the page rank.
In other news, the quest to add useful content continues. I added a bunch of stuff to the Blind and Visually Impaired Player Support page, including more downloads and scripts for GMud and a raft of MushClient sound and data files.
I also spent a good chunk of the morning going through Scribe's old mudding site, and imported a couple of articles for the current AA pages. A number of dead links were killed in the process, which hopefully will cause the google webmaster tools to complain less. The two new articles are:
Player Types and Styles, and
So you want to be a Player Killer?
This brings the article total up to 21, not including other things scattered around the site but not in my high-tech document management system. This is pretty low as far as SEO goes, in that most SEO sites recommend at least a hundred pages of solid content, but it's a start.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Bots
Looking at the recent keyword search terms, I've been finding some unusual entries. One in particular has been more persistent than I expected, and can be summed up as "bots for Alter Aeon".
I don't know who is searching for this, but from what I can gather it might be a spider looking for game cracks or cheats. So, I honor said spider by giving it a new article on the topic:
A Guide to Bots and Botting for Alter Aeon
If someone thinks it's important and it drives traffic, who am I to complain?
I don't know who is searching for this, but from what I can gather it might be a spider looking for game cracks or cheats. So, I honor said spider by giving it a new article on the topic:
A Guide to Bots and Botting for Alter Aeon
If someone thinks it's important and it drives traffic, who am I to complain?
Friday, December 26, 2008
Propaganda followup
Something I noticed today and put into proper perspective for the first time was the groupings of the various search terms people use to find the Alter Aeon web pages. The bulk of the search terms boil down to three categories - people looking specifically for Alter Aeon, people looking for muds and text rpgs, and people looking for blind-friendly games.
The first group, people looking specifically for Alter Aeon, I can only assume is almost entirely existing AA players. There's not likely to be much I can do to increase that without increasing the playerbase itself.
The other two groups are smallish categories of people that are likely to only be a niche market at best. These two categories are also smaller than the main category of existing players looking at the web site - that's no good at all! The obvious realization is that I need to push the game into other markets; my plan in the short term is to try to push into the MMO/MMORPG acronym space and see if I can't get listed with more conventional games. Having the client download will help tremendously with this, as it starts to look less and less like a MUD, at least on first glance.
I'll keep things posted here regarding how well it works.
The first group, people looking specifically for Alter Aeon, I can only assume is almost entirely existing AA players. There's not likely to be much I can do to increase that without increasing the playerbase itself.
The other two groups are smallish categories of people that are likely to only be a niche market at best. These two categories are also smaller than the main category of existing players looking at the web site - that's no good at all! The obvious realization is that I need to push the game into other markets; my plan in the short term is to try to push into the MMO/MMORPG acronym space and see if I can't get listed with more conventional games. Having the client download will help tremendously with this, as it starts to look less and less like a MUD, at least on first glance.
I'll keep things posted here regarding how well it works.
Propaganda
After several weeks of doldrums and lack of incentive, I finally appear to be in the mood to do something useful. Maybe it's because I changed coffee yesterday.
At any rate, it appears that after multiple months of updates and additions, the Alter Aeon web site is finally starting to see more traffic. The site itself is pretty comprehensive and useful, but the big problem is PR: I'm abysmally bad at it, and I'm pretty sure I don't have the personality for it. But no-one else will do it, so I have to get better or go nowhere.
I've done some of that over the last week or so, off and on. I got the pages listed in a handful of new locations, as well as some general entries at places like gamerdna.com. This stuff is the real secret - having the best, most useful web pages in the world won't help, because at its core I'm trying to sell something people don't really need: entertainment.
Things are different if you're selling people solutions to problems, like the SEO websites. The winning formula for an SEO company is to simply provide a lot of useful information on how to solve SEO problems, all the while mentioning that it's cheaper to hire an SEO expert in some cases.
The winning formula for a game is very different, in that you have to convince someone that your game is more entertaining than what they currently have for entertainment. Further, because there's so much entertainment around already, you have to actively push it instead of waiting for people to find you.
At any rate, I have done some active pushing, and hopefully it will pay off in a measurable way. If I could get even a small consistent increase over time, it would do wonders for my motivation.
At any rate, it appears that after multiple months of updates and additions, the Alter Aeon web site is finally starting to see more traffic. The site itself is pretty comprehensive and useful, but the big problem is PR: I'm abysmally bad at it, and I'm pretty sure I don't have the personality for it. But no-one else will do it, so I have to get better or go nowhere.
I've done some of that over the last week or so, off and on. I got the pages listed in a handful of new locations, as well as some general entries at places like gamerdna.com. This stuff is the real secret - having the best, most useful web pages in the world won't help, because at its core I'm trying to sell something people don't really need: entertainment.
Things are different if you're selling people solutions to problems, like the SEO websites. The winning formula for an SEO company is to simply provide a lot of useful information on how to solve SEO problems, all the while mentioning that it's cheaper to hire an SEO expert in some cases.
The winning formula for a game is very different, in that you have to convince someone that your game is more entertaining than what they currently have for entertainment. Further, because there's so much entertainment around already, you have to actively push it instead of waiting for people to find you.
At any rate, I have done some active pushing, and hopefully it will pay off in a measurable way. If I could get even a small consistent increase over time, it would do wonders for my motivation.
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