miscellaneous

I'm not sure if this was already asked but who is truly a new player in bots4, this is, who never played bots2?

well i dont see such ppl...sadly

why the game has no publicity? it would be nice to see new faces around.

Publicity wouldnt help. Lets be fair, this game isnt newb friendly and in most cases its just boring and dont have much to do in it. There isnt anything that would attract new players to it either.

Publicity sounds good if you don't take into account it would probably take Kate Upton with lots of cleavage showing along with a $40 million dollar budget and a Superbowl ad spot to get people interested in playing.

And no, there's really no prize for joining or playing for long periods of time other than to show off how much bigger your epeen is. I mean, that's lots of games yes, but there's no clear way of showing off how big your epeen is, so therefore nobody cares.

Mr. Rat, Mr. Dragon, if that were true then how was there a player base to begin with? I found bots2 from one of those top lists that you could vote on. I'm surprised we don't have any kind of system to promote that yet.

surprised and disappointed

So there isn't any new players? I thought Leader and his brother didn't play bots2. Am I right? I don't recall any other players that can have this background.

I think one of the biggest issues with obtaining new players is retention. bots2 was a niche text-based game back in the early 2000s and now in the 2010s bots4 is even more niche. People today aren't going to go to the effort of registering - they need to come up with a username, a botname (a what?), and a password just to even see what the game is like.

To that end, I have something in the works to make the game playable until some low level (probably 10) without registering. As of about a year ago, this system is designed and partially implemented. The main idea is that it will greatly lower the barrier to entry for a 100% new person that has no idea what this game is about. This game will always be niche, but this will at least increase the odds of retaining the players that this niche appeals to.

This needs to be addressed before any advertising campaign can begin in earnest. I've spent around $500 in advertising over the years through various channels, all with very limited results. I'm willing to invest more into this, but I need to finish the foundation first.

Great idea..

I think everybody should share my review on Facebook, twitter etc. ;-)

one of the problems also is your first couple of trains they take 60 odd seconds that would put me off the game and i wouldnt want click again cause 60 seconds is too long and i wouldnt give the game a chance

Some suggestions for the homepage:

• A more obvious 'sign up' section would be good
• Game news doesn't need to be shown so prominently - it has no meaning to new people.
  Show some basic stats instead.
  "36,430 battles fought in the last 24 hours!"
• Perhaps make it look a little more appealing... Show a bot at least..
• Limit signup to just a username - the bot could have a default name at first, 'Bot46329', or whatever ID-number we're at. The player can pick a personal bot name later on.

Great work Jans, couldn't disagree with any of your bullet points :)

IIRC changing the botname was going to create some other issue so Ender wasn't too keen on the idea at the time without fixing the issue.

For easy sign up and testing it certainly would seem that changing bot name at least from default to user given x1 should become an option.

I also agree that displaying a bot with equipment and stats like block %, absorb and damage range would give a good snapshot example.

Also agree with cleaning up the home page. Having links like for each category would make it much cleaner. Then adding info display for new people wouldn't be just another thing added to the clutter. Links would be Donations, Clan Race, Tournaments, News/Updates. Above those would be the snapshot of a bot build with the equipment and def/dmg stats.

Changing bot names shouldn't be too hard, unless you've hard coded some crazy stuff in.

if($update){
  $update_roboName = "UPDATE myTable 
                      SET roboName='$newRoboName'
                      WHERE roboName='$_SESSION['roboName']'";
  if(mysqli_query($connection, $update_bio)){
    echo "Update successful...woo.";
  }else{
    echo "lolnope". mysqli_error($connection);
  }
}

^ oh wow... Mysqli in procedural statements. Lol..

aye... procedural is my first and preferred style. I'm not a fan of OOP in php.

NERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Shit you beat me to it.