test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
How to get people to play your quest (Guide/tips)
grimah
Member Posts: 1,658 Arc User
Okay hello! I know how hard it is to get people to play quests and ALOT of authors get demoralised and leave whilst their quest just disappears into the void (I've played some of these good quests months ago and they still only have 40 plays)
Some Authors also believes that no one is interested in playing story foundries. But there is an audience! Trust me! It is finding those people that is the hard part. You can see from featured quests that people DO play foundries (1000ish unique plays per week for 1 quest, not counting this contest.)
However, the only way to get plays autonomously right now, is to have the quest in the top 20-30 or featured. Yes this is stupid I know, and the farm/achievement quest do not help either, but it's the only system this game has right now. Players tend not to scroll down very far (majority of foundry players are new players, the MMO ones are the ones who tend to stick around.) And you all know how messy and off-putting that list is.
So yes, the situation sucks, But I will share with you ladies and gents my method I have used to get my foundries out there (I've tried a few different ways). And before I begin, Spamming in zone is not a method that works! (UNLESS it is a grind, farm map. Because zone = MMO player territory)
I’ll just guide you through the process I used from beginning to end, and I think these points are very important in trying to get your quest to the level it can look after itself.
1. Make your quest as good as you possibly can. This means bug testing, heavily scrutinizing it, checking dialogue.
I know the feeling of finishing the last map you just want people to play it! But try and hold back until you are REALLY happy with it before you get people to play it. It will just save you time in the long run. But wait, even if you think you are ready this is still the alpha stage, expect to do a edits and polishing!
2. Before you get your friends and guildies to play it... Do as many review trades as you can (don't be picky!). If you can get experienced authors to do trades, even better! During this phase you want those nice high star ratings that authors will trade for to help get your foundry through the abyss. This will take you quite along time, but instead of working on the foundry and playing other people's can be a refreshing break and you will see/pick up things from playing other people's things and identify problems of your own map too.
More importantly you should use this opportunity to fish for the right feedback. The negative feedback. Even if you think your quest is great, you need to tell yourself it sucks but you do not know why. Ask other authors for honest negative criticism so you can find out these things, namely pacing and quest structure, dialog etc. Hard to see these things when you already know what its suppose to be like.
3. Once you made your countless edits and revisions. hopefully taking on the feedback your quest will be alot better, time to get your guildies and friends to play it, keep going with the feedback but the reason why I don't ask guildies/friends to play so early on is because you just end up being the annoying person who wants people to play their unpolished maps, and just nod and say its great. During this phase you are just working up on your map until it hits the daily eligable mark. This is what I would call the Beta phase, guildies can be less useful when it comes to honest feedback.
4. Okay now you have a pretty good map! Hopefully you took note of all those under 5 star reviews and addresssed them, and you look back and think what a mess your map used to be and how amazing it is now! Time to get it out to the public! Continue to do the review trades if you can, but you can start by looking for foundry quests which are popular and similar to yours in (story quest or campaign, humor, FR lore, combat heavy etc).
Got some popular quests? Good! Now you want to write up a nice letter, being honest and also big up your foundry where you can, telling them what it and its duration, but try to keep it short. but you want to try and sell it, but also make sure they know what its going to be like, e.g. let them know it has alot of dialogue without saying theres TONS of dialogue and scare them away. Tell them the good things about it without making yourself sound delusional. Save it somewhere on your desktop.
Now you want to go through the reviews of these quests and send your compelling, interesting, charming or cute advert to these people, (tip: if you copy/paste your letter into the title it will only paste the first line, so you can use the first line as your title to save time.) Yea! now you are like a gold spammer, but trying to get people to play yoru foundry. some will delete it or not bother, but It may surprise you how many people will try it out. (though you should have a good starting collection of star/rates by now, and it should be polished.)
5. Hope to get featured. Now you just want to keep at this whenever you can, though at this point you could stop doing review trades as it can take quite alot of time. Keep sending out some mails to new reviewers when you login (shouldnt take much time). Until you manage to get quite high up in ratings.
If you are still struggling and getting hit by alot of 3-4 stars (which hurt at the early stages), then you are either targeting the wrong people or you just need to fish for more negative feedback to find out what you missed. many of the 1-2 star angry reviews i got in the earlier stages helped me ALOT more than the good reviews, identifying problems that would i could prevent from happening again (even if its ones like bad loot in chest), Some of these can be addressed like putting a quick note before the last chest, or if they got angry with the difficult either make it easier or put a warning of its difficulty, just ways to get the right audience.
Phew! that was alot more than i was intending to write, hope its not too wall of texty and helps someone atleast. Promoting your foundry is as much work as making it the first time round, I understand why some people give up, until we have a better platform to show our work.
If anyone has questions about ways to get plays feel free to ask or suggest/discuss them here. I've tried a few other methods too without much success.
Some Authors also believes that no one is interested in playing story foundries. But there is an audience! Trust me! It is finding those people that is the hard part. You can see from featured quests that people DO play foundries (1000ish unique plays per week for 1 quest, not counting this contest.)
However, the only way to get plays autonomously right now, is to have the quest in the top 20-30 or featured. Yes this is stupid I know, and the farm/achievement quest do not help either, but it's the only system this game has right now. Players tend not to scroll down very far (majority of foundry players are new players, the MMO ones are the ones who tend to stick around.) And you all know how messy and off-putting that list is.
So yes, the situation sucks, But I will share with you ladies and gents my method I have used to get my foundries out there (I've tried a few different ways). And before I begin, Spamming in zone is not a method that works! (UNLESS it is a grind, farm map. Because zone = MMO player territory)
I’ll just guide you through the process I used from beginning to end, and I think these points are very important in trying to get your quest to the level it can look after itself.
1. Make your quest as good as you possibly can. This means bug testing, heavily scrutinizing it, checking dialogue.
I know the feeling of finishing the last map you just want people to play it! But try and hold back until you are REALLY happy with it before you get people to play it. It will just save you time in the long run. But wait, even if you think you are ready this is still the alpha stage, expect to do a edits and polishing!
2. Before you get your friends and guildies to play it... Do as many review trades as you can (don't be picky!). If you can get experienced authors to do trades, even better! During this phase you want those nice high star ratings that authors will trade for to help get your foundry through the abyss. This will take you quite along time, but instead of working on the foundry and playing other people's can be a refreshing break and you will see/pick up things from playing other people's things and identify problems of your own map too.
More importantly you should use this opportunity to fish for the right feedback. The negative feedback. Even if you think your quest is great, you need to tell yourself it sucks but you do not know why. Ask other authors for honest negative criticism so you can find out these things, namely pacing and quest structure, dialog etc. Hard to see these things when you already know what its suppose to be like.
3. Once you made your countless edits and revisions. hopefully taking on the feedback your quest will be alot better, time to get your guildies and friends to play it, keep going with the feedback but the reason why I don't ask guildies/friends to play so early on is because you just end up being the annoying person who wants people to play their unpolished maps, and just nod and say its great. During this phase you are just working up on your map until it hits the daily eligable mark. This is what I would call the Beta phase, guildies can be less useful when it comes to honest feedback.
4. Okay now you have a pretty good map! Hopefully you took note of all those under 5 star reviews and addresssed them, and you look back and think what a mess your map used to be and how amazing it is now! Time to get it out to the public! Continue to do the review trades if you can, but you can start by looking for foundry quests which are popular and similar to yours in (story quest or campaign, humor, FR lore, combat heavy etc).
Got some popular quests? Good! Now you want to write up a nice letter, being honest and also big up your foundry where you can, telling them what it and its duration, but try to keep it short. but you want to try and sell it, but also make sure they know what its going to be like, e.g. let them know it has alot of dialogue without saying theres TONS of dialogue and scare them away. Tell them the good things about it without making yourself sound delusional. Save it somewhere on your desktop.
Now you want to go through the reviews of these quests and send your compelling, interesting, charming or cute advert to these people, (tip: if you copy/paste your letter into the title it will only paste the first line, so you can use the first line as your title to save time.) Yea! now you are like a gold spammer, but trying to get people to play yoru foundry. some will delete it or not bother, but It may surprise you how many people will try it out. (though you should have a good starting collection of star/rates by now, and it should be polished.)
5. Hope to get featured. Now you just want to keep at this whenever you can, though at this point you could stop doing review trades as it can take quite alot of time. Keep sending out some mails to new reviewers when you login (shouldnt take much time). Until you manage to get quite high up in ratings.
If you are still struggling and getting hit by alot of 3-4 stars (which hurt at the early stages), then you are either targeting the wrong people or you just need to fish for more negative feedback to find out what you missed. many of the 1-2 star angry reviews i got in the earlier stages helped me ALOT more than the good reviews, identifying problems that would i could prevent from happening again (even if its ones like bad loot in chest), Some of these can be addressed like putting a quick note before the last chest, or if they got angry with the difficult either make it easier or put a warning of its difficulty, just ways to get the right audience.
Phew! that was alot more than i was intending to write, hope its not too wall of texty and helps someone atleast. Promoting your foundry is as much work as making it the first time round, I understand why some people give up, until we have a better platform to show our work.
If anyone has questions about ways to get plays feel free to ask or suggest/discuss them here. I've tried a few other methods too without much success.
Creator of the featured survival horror foundry: "The Silence of Haydenwick" Video Review
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
Post edited by grimah on
0
Comments
I concur: there are a LOT of people playing foundry works, but they are relying on the Featured lists and those "above the fold" in the general library listing. The problem is that hardly anyone goes into the "New" (for review) tab because the good quests are literally 1 in a 1000.
Hence these OP tips are a really good guide. I would add only this: Use your title and description well.
Think *very* carefully about how to name and describe your quest. And in your description I recommend you use bullet points to describe the following:
Light/Medium/Heavy Reading (Some is Optional)
Light/Medium/Heavy Combat (Some is Optional)
Light/Medium/Heavy Puzzles (Some is Optional)
Light/Medium/Heavy Humor
Story/Combat/Puzzle Focused
When people look to play Foundry quests they often have two basic criteria in mind: "how much reading must I do" and "how much combat is there". Things like 'humor' and 'puzzles' only help 'color' your quest's mood, etc. In a nutshell: your title and description are like a book: the title and back cover synopsis. Keep your description pithy and simple; a wall of text will get your quest skipped.
As for Featuring: it's best to not hold your breath on it. I created my "Blacklake Luskan" Quest *before* open beta began in Februarym, 2013. It was just featured a couple weeks ago (18 month later) - use the tips provided above to get your quest played. And remember: many low star ratings hurt, but useful. The way they are *supposed* to work is: 3 Stars is average (not good or bad) - then swing from there. But people don;t have a clue how to rate quests.
That's how I rate. Five stars is for the really outstanding quests, four for a good but not quite outstanding quest.
The problem with the star ratings is that they are easily exploitable by having lots of friends/guild mates who rate a poorly done quest with five stars. This, in the end, screws everyone rather than helps the author to improve.
j/k.
Actually, if it's obviously taken time and effiort and is above average I'll give 'em a four, or a five if really exceptional or interesting.
Otherwise I consider it a work-in-progress and try and PM the author with (hopefully) constructive criticism.
...unless it's an obvious farm/exploit/2-d editor placed quest and then I wrap chicken entrails around an effigy and burn it in the fires of Hotenow.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
About being featured, all my quests have been featured (not counting some RP maps I release once in a while) so I don't know if I've been just lucky or if it's not as hard as some people think it is. :S
Not really exploitable using guildies, that actually hurts it in the long run. If the author cannot identify the problems with their foundry, it will just disappear when the public gets into it. guildies can't really sway that much, all it takes is a few low stars to knock a foundry down. And that person then has ran out of guildies to fix it.
However with such limited listings (only the first 20-30 from the best list being seen by the public and the adjusted rating being very harsh), you cannot just accept anything below 4/5 stars (and you need alot of 5s) if you want to get past the first hurdle, this is why i advise you to do review trades.
Its very important to get those 5 stars at the beginning, which is why i advise doing the review trades and keep improving it before you get normal people to play it. Just a handful of 1-4 star rating can cripple your map, and if you have get too many of them. You are better off duplicating the more revised version of your map and starting the rating process again. Just be sure you do not fool yourself into thinking it is a 5 star worthy quest already.
EDIT: and angrysprite is spot on about the descriptions. filtering the right audience is just as important than the quest itself. An example from my own was, I did not tell someone it had humor it in, and he hated it.
EDIT2: gawd! so much bad grammar in this post, i hope it makes more sense now.
and also the featured satirical comedic adventure "A Call for Heroes".
This thread probably should be stickied.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics