TomUjain

I was prompted to make a thread on this to get some feedback / numbers. I came up with the idea while FPI was founded; the concept to try and keep things as fresh, new and exciting as possible without adding any code or custom content. The core concept is this: Every Sunday, I would set up a 'PUG' but instead the game will be setup in a specific way which will change weekly as an example: One SBH on nod (the sole player) the rest of the team on GDI has to seek out and destory the SBH within X mins. Another example: Tank hunt, each team has a crew of 1 engineer / 1 tank the team to first lose all their tanks, loses. Just throwing this out there to see if this sort of thing is something anyone would be intrested in.

Thanks for your views on this guys. I have been running through plans to try and attract casual devs to the community, something I will be experimenting with this month in our new marketing campagin -- I may also do something similar with the local community (not offical yet) offering prizes i.e. PS4, Xbox one consoles and Amazon giftcards for those who enter a 'competition' where the 'winner' is voted in by the community. This competition would consist of, new, creative content for RenX -- this could be a new tank, new map, new AI etc... etc... but the fine details of this would need to be worked out, and I need to know enough people are commited to entering before I go ahead with that -- no point going forward if only 3 people are willing to enter. In regards to the ad campagin (results below) -- its been looking a lot better than last month; 28% of all 8,000 views (thats 2,200 people) watched the video till the end without skipping, 3% of those (67 people) ended up downloading and trying RenX -- based on past data, we expect to lose 80% of those meaning between 5 - 9 new players have been gained, 1 - 3 of which we expect to be regulars. Each view cost me roughly 2p -- at 8,000 thats roughly £85 for this month, each player costing around £1.27, and each (expected) staying player costing £28.30. Performance? OK, could be better -- I believe targetting RTS / C&C demographics would help those numbers but again we default to our old problem -- yes we are getting new players, but we are not retaining those numbers, where are they going, and why? I don't know -- but I do believe this core issue needs to be looked into to encourage new players to stay and not leave after one session, never to be seen again. My theory? Could be timezone related, FPI / CT cater to the EU timezones, it could also be down to the brutailty of getting 'thrust' into the middle of an intense battle with no guides / help -- with the added confusion of buildings getting destroyed, for a newb this can be very disorienting. It could also be down to bad marketing. I strongly recommend the devs to 'modernize' the download page to make it look more attractive to the viewer, a landing page would also greatly help our case. Ryz has been working on a landing page for RenX -- it isn't perfect, but it is a good foundation for us to work with. Over the next few months I'll be trying to work with Agent to get a professonal landing page, and better download page. I noticed a thread on this already that looks promising, something I'll be keeping tabs on for sure.

I've been thinking this over at work and have come to the conclusion that I might as well be pouring this ad money down a bottomless sink hole. We are getting 'players' and with optimization the convertion rates could be vastly improved. But I can't shake off the current state of the game and the slow progress made to address the huge amount of issues at hand. I bring this up because this is the most defining factor when retaining players. Yes I can bring new blood in -- but the odds of them staying as a regular player is very, very low. In short my ads bring in short bursts of new players, temporarily with the odd one or two sticking around. I don't think the issue lies in the devs not caring, truthfully I think it lies in man power (or lack of). Thus I am leaning towards focusing the campagin primarily on Unreal 3 developers in the hopes new features can be put out faster, and more stable. The big issue (at least in my view) is the lack of 'pull' aka - goals available to the player on a more personal level. I strongly believe Renegade X would greatly benefit from some form of 'level up' system or achivement unlocks -- something, anything for the players to work towards. player 'ranks' were a step int he right direction, as was the 'best def', 'best off', best support' etc... badges but this can be expanded upon. Evidence shows this is a feature the community craves highly (leaderboards and !tank, kills, score etc... reflect this). Bottom line is this: where is the ad money better spent? Refining / optimising to bring in new players, targetting and incentivising new developers, server improvements or is it better spent elsewhere? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Ads do work, granted they have a lot of stigma -- but if they didn't work, then no body would use them. EA games (for example) get most of the sales through very heavy and expensive marketing -- I myself have had success as well. But it is all trial and error, some things work; other things don't. If it didn't work, YT would have been shut down long ago. The performance from this YT campaign was poor; primarily because I optimized the ad wrong (i.e. age groups, interests etc...)

Hey guys, late update. Ryz has set up a landing page -- which I'll be using as the main source of traffic for the ads. I've been trialing the ads over the last month and 1/2 and managed to drive some new blood to the community; roughly 0.5% of the traffic is turning into new players; not ver efficent -- this works out at about 2 - 4 players a month, at £91 a month I think we can do a lot better. Over the next few months I'll be testing and refining the ads to try and bring that number upto around 15%.

Hey guys, A quick update; number 1) I apologies for the lack of updates regarding the renx campaign, between learning how to fly in my spare time, learning C++, my full time job and full time business as well as regular travel and meetings my time is extremely limited and I am always kept on my toes. With that said, things are on the way -- and from the data; it appears that adwords / Google ads are doing very poor; but the YT advertising seems to look promising and has brought in a few leads. I have no current way of checking what happens to the traffic when it hits the renx download page (on the forums) but judging from reports, it appears the download exe is broken? When I get a chance, i'll check on my laptop. My marketing manager recommend I record the data on the 'landing page' aka download page via hotjar (www.hotjar.vom) which records a video 'snapshot' of everyone who lands on that page. I also think it would be beneficial to have a proper, and professional landing page as an example: Example of a landing page for RenX Without a proper landing page then the results from this ad campaign will be extremely underdeveloped and we would lose a lot of potential. I can develop something similar to the above, but my plate is very full atm so it may take a long time to get the ball rolling -- I would permission to upload the hotjar code / tracking code / add landing page to the www.renegade-x.com domain. @everyone If anyone has any good ideas for an 'official' landing page -- or could design one for us, please let me know. For the sake of time; I believe that the FPI website designed by @taisho with the map shots -- overlay-ed with a download link and a short few lines about the game would be enough for our needs. @yosh56 Would the dev team be OK with us having an offical landing page on this website for marketing? (See above link)

As Sarah said, the marketing manger is mine -- who I use for Eco-Earth (my company) their buisness can be found here. It is roughly £450 a month, plus the £80 monthly ad budget added on -- plus any additonal donations. The FPI server (currently £70 a month) is also paid for, by me -- but I am not accepting donations for that and don't plan to in the future either. just to be clear this is coming out of my pocket -- the £80 budget was once part of the FPI prize draw but as very few people were exchanging points I opted to put that money to better use here. I am doing this to try and help RenX, as I see a lot of wasted potential and feel a well manged ad campagn is what renx needs to plug 1) the player gap and 2) to bring in new talent. I do not expect any donations for the ad campagn; but the option remains for anyone who wants to drop anything towards it -- just to be clear all the data I get from my 'agency' (aka manager) will be posted here every week for the community to see. This will include total clicks, cost per click, downloads, views etc... etc...

Hello guys, using this thread to keep you all posted on the updates of the ad campaign. I will be running as of the 30th July 2018. This campaign will be funded by the monthly budget used in the FPI prize draw. It will run indefinitely and will be focused on the following areas; Google Adwords (30% of the budget) YouTube Video ads (40% of the budget) Facebook ads (10% of the budget) Content creaters i.e. Bloggers / YT (10% of the budget) Promotional and/or giveaways (10% of the budget) Figures placed with the current default budget expect to bring in between 500 - 2,000 clicks with roughly 10% of those becoming players and 5% of those becoming regular players. For every addidonal £1, we expect between 3 - 5 addional clicks and between 1 - 2 downloads. The cost of the marketing manager, as well as a £80 a month ad budget will be absorbed by me -- any addional donations will go stright into the next monthly budget. All stats and figures will be posted here every week on Friday for everyone to see where / what the money was spent on. The goal of this campaign; Bring in new players to fill more servers Spread awareness of the game Bring in new coders / developers / map and, or content creaters Anyone wishing to donate to this campaign as a one off, or monthly may do so -- regardless, the default amount will always be £80 per month, with donations for that month added on the following month (if applyable). I will be using my buisness account for this setup which is currently set up to be funded by my debit card for the default of £80 a month anything else left over will also be added to the budget. PayPal Address: [email protected] Stats

Hello guys, Firstly I want to thank everyone who has shown support and faith in FPI and its ideals - FPI will always do what we feel is best for the community at RenX which leads me to the main purpose of this topic. Players. I feel that many of the issues we face stems from the small community, and, ideally -- I would like to see several full servers as I feel having one dominating server, be that mine or any other is unhealthy in the long term. Over the last few months FPI have had a system in place where players have been incentivised to play via the points system, which allows players to 'exchange' points for 'prizes' -- my hope was that this would give people more motivation to play. However, I've had only 6 people come forward to claim a reward, and I feel that this money could be better put elsewhere. Thus I will be removing the reward points system as of today and instead putting all of the monthly prize budget into full RenX marketing with the overall goal to atleast double player count by the end of this year. I would also like to have specific ads to bring in new coders and developers with the end goal to help bulk out the dev team. This budget will be roughly £40 a month for adwords and £40 a month for YouTube, If anyone would be willing to donate to help with the advertising I would be extreamly greatful. I will publish the full data for everyone to see here. Just note that this 'project' won't go live until the following month (Aug) but this is something in the pipe line. Until we go live, I will not be excepting any donations. What I need in the meantime Several 30s trailer videos to be posted on YT Ideas for a 'landing page' where the ad link will take the person to I welcome your input and ideas and will be checking in every now and then to listen to what you guys have to say

I understand where Dr.Schrott is coming from, we all have our hidden fustrations with RenX, the big issue for me (and the reason that lead to FPI) was the stacking issue that was becoming increasingly common and leading to rapid declines in game sessions. I'm fortunate to be blessed with people like Sarah who put in so much hard work and effort to make places like FPI as it is. My point is that it would have been very easy for me to just rant and rave about it, but as it was said above a better approch is to try and come up with soloutions to the problems, because otherwise you are not really making anything better for anyone. It is also important to note that the dev team is very under staffed, and under a lot of stress to get things done so a bit of leeway should be given to Yosh as I imagine it isn't easy writing up patches for such a buggy engine.

Not incorrect, Goku did say he was going to start resetting the ladders monthly -- I even double checked the log to make sure. Wasn't my idea lol, but if enough people feel strongly about it I can review this again with Goku.

Just a heads up, Goku does a monthly clean up of the server leaderboards; so if you want to exchange any points I recommend doing so before the end of the month (contact me).

I agree, the player count would be healither around 40 - 50; but to do that, I feel we need more players overall, which can only really be done via promotion.

Mods will have the power to manually shuffle teams at the start of the session (if needed) hopefully this will help a little if teams do get a little too stacked, though I understand this won't address 'friends / pro players' from playing together. The most popular way to address stacking is to have a smarter 'team shuffle' based on total score; and something we can try and look into as the 50% / 50% 'randomizer' has a small chance of re-stacking a team at the start of every session. Another idea was to give the 'losing' team a small boost based on total score difference - the idea behind it is if a team is stacked, it is reflected in the team score and giving buffs to help remedy that evens it out, alternatly if the score re-balances, or goes the other way then the bonus scales accordingly. an example; 1000 point difference - 5% att / def bonus 2000 point difference - 7% att / def bonus 3000 point difference - 9% att / def bonus 4000 point difference - 12% att / def bonus 5000 point difference - 15% att / def bonus 6000 point difference - 20% att / def bonus 7000 point difference - 25% att / def bonus 8000 point difference - 30% att / def bonus 9000 point difference - 35% att / def bonus 10,000 point difference - 40% att / def bonus The point (pun intended) of this system, is to help prevent the 'base locking' that takes place in several maps (i.e. under) and to help the game flow a bit better, but I welcome feedback on this idea. I understand the concern about the 300 starting credits -- but after a month trial it seems to work well; arguments can be said on both sides, but generally I've noticed having a 300 starting credit system prevents a lot of inf rushes as the base tends to be mined before they can get through. It also dampers the effect of losing the harv, allowing the team to get some basic tanks on the field to counter. Though this doesn't stop rocket rushes, a lot of recruit rocket rushes tend to fail due to the amount needed to successfully take out a building.

I agree that we need a clean secure server for a healthy community to grow -- but really the core issue we have is not many people are aware of RenX, is still a huge market of players who just need to be made aware of this gem of a game. The only real way to do that is to enlist the aid of big YouTubers like AngryJoe to do some small promotional videos for us, and possibly a few marketing campaigns. I have been playing around with 'community engagement' ideas (e.g. team deathmatch with one life, buggy racing etc...) but nothing has really been refined enough for it to work yet, and I still need to see how the other admins feel about it.

Having accounts will make it a lot harder for players to pose as someone else and/or different names; though it won't remove the problem wholeheartedly it will put up a barrier. Currently it is very easy for a player to join with a new name and unless we do regular ip checks it can be time consuming to address who is who. it would be silly to think we can balance every game, everytime perfectly; and impossible. However we can agree that there is room for improvement, if it is possible for a select group of players to all mush onto one team, causing endless one sided loose loops then it is pretty clear there is a problem, otherwise the phrase 'team stacking' wouldn't be popping up over and over. In order for matches to be as fair as possible, we need to take a hard look at the causes; and a big part of that seems to stem from team swapping at the start / mid match. I am not saying messing with the swap feature is the perfect solution, nor am I saying it will not be met without some hostility from the community, but it is a key step forward. I see no reason in implenting any system if the players have the option to swap over. I'll be speaking with Serah and Goku about this on Friday, and see if we can all agree on something; as I am willing to try anything -- even if I disagree with the idea.

it would be nice if the deves put in a loggin system, despite how much of a pain it would be-- it would for sure help tackle a lot of problems i.e traceabilty. We have played around with the idea of only allowing steam users onto the server, but as a good chunk of players do not use steam we would effectivly be cutting off a big portion of the community. Your idea is well thought out Ps212; but sounds hellishly complex to code in. Ideally if we do plan to use any more modifers we should try and keep it as simple as possible. Personally I feel having team swap turned off for the 'warm up' phase of the game might be a good starting point we can test from. Although I agree what Sarah is saying in regards to RenX being difficult to balance, I still believe systems can be put in place to atleast make the edges less rigid; one thing we shouldn't do is simply write this issue off or ignore it.

the suggestion posted in the image above is aimed at well known stackers, and yes in theory it will address part of the problem -- but these 'stackers' are hardly the only two we will encounter in the future, and this is where (I feel) your suggestion will begin to develop holes as it means we will need to keep on the look out for any more future stackers and that will be a time consuming job; people can always use a different name and easily pose as someone else. However, if I can get Goku and several others to agree to this then I am willing to give it a trial run. The point of this whole thread was to be more of an open debait not a who is right / wrong. It is important to have a good hard look at any big changes to the server before we blindly implent systems that may not work as intended.

This isn't an argument Sarah, just throwing thoughts on the table. Most of what I have said above is not if's and maybe's -- I doubt it will be as simple as looking at the specific people who we have in our sights known for stacking, because ultimately we have other good old and new players who come and go, i.e. after pugs. this system would mean that we would have to define what is 'good' -- because we have not done so. Do we define good based on how many people complain? their overall reputation? Or maybe score and/or K/D ratio? We need to be extreamly careful not to have this funnel into a hate and/or fustration compain. This isn't overcomplicating it, its being sensible because introducing such a heavy system like that will have huge effects if we don't atleast try to put it upto basic scrutiny first.

I agree with Sarah, auto-swapping on a script would work in theory, but has too many issues to make it an effective answer to the problem. I am unsure about the removal of priviliges because that rule would only apply to people who are good. As an example; if we had 2 'average' players who normally stack -- that is allowed? Yet we punish only the two 'pro' players because they are good? (which is what it boils down to), if / when Ren-X becomes more popular; more 'pro' players are likely to crop up; which would mean the admin / mod team would have to spend time enforcing this rule and defining what is classified as 'good'. This also begs the question; what happens if some players 'stack' by chance? -- we can't aways be around to check this, and it is very easy to join with fake names. in short, excuting this would be a mess. I am leaning towards turning off team swap for a set amount of time, that is the most fair and humane way to try and tackle this issue, with no needed input from the already busy team.

it would, for sure cause some annoyance and complaining -- but it is a brute force way of getting it all to work.

I don't see the harm in having the def buff effect buildings too -- if you think it can be done, and think it is a good idea might be worth looking into, otherwise we can drop the idea. on another note... Stacking, seems to still be a huge issue; and although I don't think it is wise to bring down the iron hammer on 'good' players who want to play together I do believe we have to come up with some sort of system to address the issue. I understand that more experienced players get a kick out of playing together on discord, but this fun is selfish and isn't healthy or sustainable, to quote a good friend of mine; because our community is small, 1 / 2 good players can easily tip the balance of the game, our solution to this was to 'randomize' teams as best we could to ensure the next map would even out the skill level, however this tactic has failed as people simply re-join, or spam swap. The result is a hailstorm of one sided slow or fast 'base locked / steamrolls' which can be over in as little as 5 mins or as long as 2 hours. Trying to enforce a 'no stacking rule' would not only be difficult to uphold, but also be difficult to define. The other admins of FPI agree this is an issue, but we can't settle on a humane and fair way to counter this issue without it looking like we are targeting a specific set of players. I'll forward some of the ideas the other admins have come up, as well as some of my own below. Easy quick fixes Intoducing a 10m - 30m timer on team swaps (giving mods the power to move players at request to address rage quit issues) Giving mods the power to auto shuffle teams if it becomes one sided Remove 'swapping' rights from players who continue to stack; with possible triggers from the players (if enough complaints come in) -- Not a fan of this idea, but something we could try. More in depth (harder to implent) fixes Team shuffle at start of each session based on score / skill (kills etc...) from last game to even out both sides dynamic scaling -- small buff increases to whole team based on score difference (i.e. 10k points nod, 20k points GDI would give nod small buff) A reward system to encourage swaps to losing team (in the form of unique units / tanks) i.e. "swap now and get a free perma 15% damage increase for this session only" (a few concerns about balance issues) we can't settle on a solid tactic, but these are some of the ideas we have currently -- ideally, we don't want to default to more server modifications as this increases workload / time.

Would be nice, but difficult I imagine as it requires messing with the buildings which from what I can imagine is no easy feat.

I noticed there seems to be a bit of a split debait about the commander buffs. Some people seem to feel they are too game breaking and need a re-think, giving examples such: as mid to late game -- combined with the VP levels, and buildings remaining static. The other side of this argument is that both sides have the option to use 'buffs' and players can easily counter if they are prepared. was wondering what you guys think on this issue? I personally don't see any problem with the commander mod, but agree it has room for improvement. On one side of the argument: Buildings remain static making the buff stronger (with VP bonus) late game -- melting buildings rapidly No offical counter to full scale tank assault -- defensive buff protects units, not buildings Both buffs can be used at the same time, leading to possible balance issues On the other side of the argument Well placed team work can counter a 'buffed' rush easy The other team has the option to use the same powers the buff duration is short and has to be timed perfectly A great tool for breaking stalemates -- or getting that final bit of damage to take out a building Possible soloutions to this problem? Removing buffs (extream case) adding delay to buff before it starts (not a grand fix, but it works) Allowing def buff circle range to effect buildings (tricky to code in but would work) Limit the amount of people in the buff Reduce the damage numbers Allow building to level up with players (extreamly tricky to code in, and wouldn't be flawless)

I think that was the overall idea, the beacons would re-enable when x buildings went down; but it seems that some section of this code is conflicting and thus keeping the beacons turned off.