Feedback Forum: Newbies, Part 1
Posted on April 19, 2017Our number of active users has slowly decreased from about 800 during the first "burst" when Open Beta began to about 200-300 this year. Though our small community is the most friendly and positive that I've ever been a part of, we need to get those numbers up in order to pay for our costs. From the last Forum, we identified one of the major issues, which was that the site was too confusing for new users.
So, our logged out homepage now has a gorgeous update for new visitors browsing the site! We tried to highlight the best parts of the site and emphasize what we believe are the best "hooks" to new visitors. I have also created a Tattered Weave History page with a counterpart on the Forums to explain past updates for any newbies who want to catch up on the story. Next week's update, Newbies, Part 2 will include a new interactive step-by-step Tutorial that should be easier to get through than our current version; plus Referred Rewards for new users who sign up with a Referral link.
Please take a look at these changes and let us know what you think! Is the logged out homepage compelling to you, or do you think it's missing something? Does the Tattered Weave History page cover the past lore well enough? Is there anything else you'd like to see that would help us get new users?
Once these changes are complete (including Part 2, coming soon) we intend to shift some of our programming costs into advertising. This does mean that we'll be slowing down our code updates for the foreseeable future. Tailoring will be finished in the next month or two, which should ease the difficulty of shopping in Tailored Fashions, but after that our updates will be limited to our HTML5 games and smaller site improvements.
We would also love to hear feedback on the idea of a subscription system. We would add this to the site by means of tracking your last purchase of Gems (and also offer ways to buy it as a gift for another user), and offering you access to premium-only bonuses for 30 days. This timestamp would renew every time you purchased Gems.
Some examples of these stacking premium bonuses would be:
100 Gems: Access to the Behind the Scenes Forum that was offered to our Kickstarter backers. Monthly polls on what art/writing to prioritize would be offered so you can make direct suggestions for certain art/writing to get done faster.
500 Gems: In addition, you get expanded Kith vocabulary across the site. Everywhere you see your Active Kith's dialog, you would get additional lines of dialog per Personality Type. For example, on the home page, you'd have 3 random lines of dialog instead of 1 static line of dialog.
1000 Gems: In addition, you get a bonus +1 Reputation per Daily Quest. That means catching up on missed days or vacations much faster!
2000 Gems: In addition, you get access to live streaming videos of our staff working on the site. I'm really not sure what content we'd offer - this is still very much in the planning phase!
5000 Gems: In addition, you get to design one Food, Book, Toy, or Quest item each month, which will be completed by our site artists.
Please keep in mind these are just ideas that we haven't decided on, and I'm looking for feedback specifically to determine what you'd be interested in seeing available in a subscription system!
