People would love this game if only they knew about it. Can we please just market this game a little more. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, anything. Right now I haven’t seen this game advertised anywhere and it’s a shame because it’s so freaking good and fun. Is there anything going on to help people find out about this game?

I just got two friends started in the game and they said the same thing. "I can't believe more people don't know about this game." I had to tell them this game has no marketing because I have no idea why not.

The game is doing so poorly they can't even afford to hire another programmer. Marketing is a pipe dream.

How is it doing so poorly I don’t understand. How can a game that’s so big and complex only have a few programmers without falling apart? There’s multiple sports games with so many different coaches. If you could even do just a tiny bit of marketing everything could be in great shape and grow so much. Target the people who would be interested in these games and get these new people to see your product.

Agreed tiptop it's incredible

Posted by Tiptop00 on 4/24/2019 9:51:00 PM (view original):
How is it doing so poorly I don’t understand. How can a game that’s so big and complex only have a few programmers without falling apart? There’s multiple sports games with so many different coaches. If you could even do just a tiny bit of marketing everything could be in great shape and grow so much. Target the people who would be interested in these games and get these new people to see your product.

Here are the population numbers

	D1	D2	D3	Total
~9/27/15	1357	1206	1156	3719	1 year before 3.0
7/13/16	1247	1023	1059	3329	2 months before 3.0
4/22/17	986	805	871	2662	7 months after 3.0
9/30/17	1048	712	641	2401	1 year after 3.0
6/18/18	1105	694	684	2483	21 months after 3.0
10/17/18	1076	587	624	2287	2 years after 3.0
1/30/19	1075	568	611	2254	2.5 years after 3.0
Reduction	21%	53%	47%	39%

Some of us had a theory during 3.0 beta that the lack of caps on D2 and D3 recruiting would render those divisions wildly unbalanced and no longer fun for new guys. They'd have to spend their first several mandatory low-division seasons getting destroyed by vets before possibly qualifying to play the game they actually wanted to play (D1).

And here we are.

“Lack of caps” is a poor explanation. The game has had a retention problem from long before 3.0. Same goes for vets parked in lower levels and racking up credits against newer players. “Imbalance” is not new, nor is it worse.

The structural retention problem this game has always had is the forced stratification. This game loses a sh!tload of players at the point, usually somewhere between the 1st and 3rd seasons, when the user realizes how long it’s going to take to get to just low-level D1, and how much it’s likely to cost. Anyone who talks about retention and doesn’t start and focus on that point is just pushing some pet preference they have.

If you like the product, the best thing you can do is ignore the toxic folks who want to spend their time telling you why you shouldn’t like it, and how many other people don’t like it, and just go tell your friends about it. This is not designed to be a massive multiplayer game. It’s complex, the learning curve is steep, there isn’t any action, payoff takes a while. I hope they do some marketing, but any mass marketing is going to be a waste. Probably 90+% of gamers just aren’t going to find this interesting. They need to find the right pockets of user communities to make marketing effective.

I was waiting for shoe to show up to defend his "no cap" mantra behind a wall of text.

The numbers don't lie. User numbers at D2/3 have fallen, and strength of teams' ratings has spread.

There's lots to like sbout 3.0, but destroying the old Juco logic for D1 recruits was a big and unnecessary harm.

Posted by kcsundevil on 4/25/2019 1:14:00 PM (view original):
I was waiting for shoe to show up to defend his "no cap" mantra behind a wall of text.

The numbers don't lie. User numbers at D2/3 have fallen, and strength of teams' ratings has spread.

There's lots to like sbout 3.0, but destroying the old Juco logic for D1 recruits was a big and unnecessary harm.

The numbers don’t lie. But the people who use population numbers to push a “fix” for whatever specific 3.0 change they didn’t like are certainly misappropriating data (if not outright lying).

It doesn’t have to be huge mass marketing that they need to do. All they need to do is target the right people on Facebook or Google. The amount of Onlinr marketing money doesn’t have to be much to see huge rewards. Does SportsHub not have a digital marketer? We’re in 2019 figured every company would.

I do do agree that it does take way to long to get to D1 and people probably don’t like rebuilds. When I first started I took over a rebuild but only cause it’s where I graduated from which made it more fun for me. I went 3 game years until I was able to win more then 10 games. I can see why that can be boring for some, but also some can find it really fun. It depends on the person. But you have to get the word out about this game first. With the amount of games, seasons, teams that are in this game; this game has the potential to make so much money for whoever is running this thing. Just need to market it digitally.

anyone willing to pitch in a mil or two to start our own WIS marketing campaign? Ill throw in 5 if there's any interest.

"Anyone who talks about retention ... [as being due to just one thing] ... is just pushing some pet preference they have."

Totally true. There are two examples right here on this page:
"the lack of caps on D2 and D3 recruiting" and "The structural retention problem this game has always had is the forced stratification."

User retention is a lot more involved than that.

Posted by Benis on 4/25/2019 11:51:00 AM (view original):

Posted by Tiptop00 on 4/24/2019 9:51:00 PM (view original):
How is it doing so poorly I don’t understand. How can a game that’s so big and complex only have a few programmers without falling apart? There’s multiple sports games with so many different coaches. If you could even do just a tiny bit of marketing everything could be in great shape and grow so much. Target the people who would be interested in these games and get these new people to see your product.

Here are the population numbers

	D1	D2	D3	Total
~9/27/15	1357	1206	1156	3719	1 year before 3.0
7/13/16	1247	1023	1059	3329	2 months before 3.0
4/22/17	986	805	871	2662	7 months after 3.0
9/30/17	1048	712	641	2401	1 year after 3.0
6/18/18	1105	694	684	2483	21 months after 3.0
10/17/18	1076	587	624	2287	2 years after 3.0
1/30/19	1075	568	611	2254	2.5 years after 3.0
Reduction	21%	53%	47%	39%

Basically, 3.0 killed D2 and D3... I still enjoy D2, having a hard time enjoying D1. Can't stand D3.

Posted by Tiptop00 on 4/25/2019 1:45:00 PM (view original):
It doesn’t have to be huge mass marketing that they need to do. All they need to do is target the right people on Facebook or Google. The amount of Onlinr marketing money doesn’t have to be much to see huge rewards. Does SportsHub not have a digital marketer? We’re in 2019 figured every company would.

I do do agree that it does take way to long to get to D1 and people probably don’t like rebuilds. When I first started I took over a rebuild but only cause it’s where I graduated from which made it more fun for me. I went 3 game years until I was able to win more then 10 games. I can see why that can be boring for some, but also some can find it really fun. It depends on the person. But you have to get the word out about this game first. With the amount of games, seasons, teams that are in this game; this game has the potential to make so much money for whoever is running this thing. Just need to market it digitally.

I don't disagree with you that this game has the potential to be huge. But I think you're missing the big picture.

WIS - the ENTIRE site of WIS, which includes a couple dynasty games and a few sim league games, is currently run by 1 guy. There are many improvements that need to be done to the site and to all the games in order to make it successful long term. How much time do you think this one guy has in his day? Either spend it on answering tickets, keeping things going, making little improvements here and there OR spend it on marketing. We've already seen some marketing efforts fail miserably where only a very small % of new users stick around for more than ONE season. The ROI is simply terrible at this point in time considering the landscape of the site.

FYI - Seble said he was going to hire a 2nd programmer and then later said it wasn't in the budget. So again, you tell me - Are they going to spend their limited money on advertising (which has a terrible ROI since the game does a bad job of retaining new users) or should they hire more employees so the games on the site can actually get some real improvements?