suggestions

Back when bots2 was a thing ender had a star lottery on his botsunauthorized site for ppl who voted for the game... the stars were temporary and i think it was drawn once a month? might have been once a week... i dont remember cause its been awhile and also those of us that trusted ender just let him log on and move the stars himself.... the stars were donated by various ppl who loved his site and also the game. Since he owns the game now maybe he can do a percent of votes = temp stars

i'm not sure if thats against any rules of the voting sites... maybe if it is then we can get players to donate stars like back in the day

I'm very open to ideas for promoting the game. I've been spending $5/day on Google Ads for about a month now to try to boost player numbers. About 20% of the people that click on the ad end up making a bot, but of the 11 bots created from clicking on an ad, only ~half got past level 1 (and only 1 bot got past level 2, someone went to level 32). I think I need to do a lot more to streamline the new player experience - simpler registration, faster pace at the start, a bit more guidance, etc.

Anyway, that's my long-winded way of saying that I'm open to investing time (in addition to money - the BU bots2 voting system was actually pretty complex) into things like voting sites, but I want to first tweak the new player experience enough to the point where people that are landing on the homepage are more likely to register and then stick around.

Very interesting to hear and welcoming news that you are taking measures to improve the playerbase.

The learning curve is the obvious barrier to new players, how you solve that I'm not sure.

Yeah, that will for sure be an issue too. My current mental model for the new player funnel is something like this:

1. [ad impression] Awareness of game
2. [ad click] Interested in looking at what the game is
3. [register] Interested enough to register
4. [toes wet] Interested enough to play more than 5 minutes
5. [basic play] Interested enough to level up past level ~20
6. [intermediate play] Interested in returning to the game for multiple play sessions
7. [advanced play] Interested enough to play for multiple months

I'd be thrilled to get to the point where #7 is an issue (or even #6), but right now most people are getting stuck at #3 or #4. The drop-off for those steps is pretty steep right now, but I have some ideas for removing some friction from them.