Not necessarily pushing for this, but wanted to give you guys in management some more ideas to work with, especially regarding increasing the population.

There is another game I play online (often have it running in the background while playing BD) and there are a couple aspects of how they draw population that I'd like to share.

-There are two currencies in the game: silver and gold.
-Monsters drop silver, and it is infinitely less valuable than gold but not worthless by any means.
-Gold can only be acquired in one of three ways: 1) Buy gold with real money; 2) Sell an item to another player for gold; 3) For every hour or two you have a character logged online, you get 1 free gold

The brilliance lies in this. You draw a huge population of poorer players who cannot afford games like WoW or other games that have a monthly or substantial cost associated with them. These players then fill up the server making the population seem large (some even sit multiple characters to get free gold which makes the population seem larger than it actually is). With a large group of players constantly playing and chatting, it feels like a big world to be a king of. Well who are the kings? The players who can afford to buy lots of gold. Nobody wants to spend money to be the king of a small world, but when you have lots of players online, people want to compete to be king of that realm.

In essence, the rich players buy lots of gold, and then buy items from the poorer players who collect items to sell to the richer players. Poorer players can still make strong characters if the constantly play, because it is possible for them to get gold slowly (by being online) while also defeating bosses for items they can sell for gold. The rich players essentially pay for the poor players to be able to play for free, and it has a booming and vibrant economy, because even the poor players are able to slowly collect wealth by simply playing the game for free. And when the poorer players get birthday, Christmas, or simply a little extra money, they will spend it on gold from the site to give their character a boost.

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BattleDex is not an mmorpg, but I think some of their principles should be considered.

Principle 1: If you encourage players who say "I can't afford to spend money on a video game" to play your game, it helps rather than hurts. The reasons are this: 1) Players who can afford to play are willing to spend more money if the population is large; 2) Those players who say they can't afford to pay to play, occasionally will spend money if they become hooked on the game.

Principle 2: To encourage poorer players to play, they actually have to feel that they can build their character (or in this case their deck) by simply playing for free. While BattleDex does have free coops and free tourneys with prizes, a new players often tell me they don't feel their deck is good enough for coop or that they themselves are good enough to win the free tourneys.

I will give a specific suggestion but in reality it can be molded, changed, and shaped any way you like:

- For each account (perhaps one account per IP address to avoid abuse) that plays, say, 15-30 games of any type in a month (including tournament games), that account will get 1 free pack of cards and 25 points.

Or perhaps a month is a long time to wait. Maybe if your account plays 10-15 games in a given week, you will receive 15-25 points.

My thought process is this, as long as you take precautions to avoid abuse (the game I mentioned in my introduction eventually limited the amount of clients you could open from one computer to three, to avoid have a player log in 5 characters at once just to get free gold) you will get the points back because players will spend them on packs or tourneys.

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Example:

Player A is currently not in a situation where he can afford to spend money on an online game, or perhaps he lives in a country where he does not have a current available form of paying to play online (no credit card, etc). Suppose he has given BattleDex a try and likes its format overall, but feels that it is a game that HE MUST spend money on in order to build his deck.

Option 1: Let him find a different free to play game where he does feel he can accumulate in-game wealth. While he will not be using BattleDex server space, he will also be absent from the population. It will be as if he never existed on BattleDex.

Option 2: Give him some free points if he plays enough in a given week. If he plays the necessary games, the search time will be shorter for others because he will be out there searching. His name will constantly be in the online players list and the game will look, and be, fuller. After a few months of playing for free and slowly accumulating some decent cards, he gets some birthday money and decides to buy some points to boost his deck or enter tournaments. He feels it is worth it to spend this precious little money since BattleDex has become a hobby of his over the last few months.

Simply put, I think some method should be considered to better attract players who cannot afford to spend much on an online game. A large population encourages rich players to spend their money on this game, because while they probably don't want to admit it, most strong online players want to be king of a realm, and the bigger the realm, the greater their interest in spending the money and time to become that king.

so basically give free stuff for playing.. you have my full support

i also like the idea of getting things for free (doesn't everyone ) but ::

''There is another game I play online (often have it running in the background while playing BD) and there are a couple aspects of how they draw population that I'd like to share. '' == this what is happening now it seems . people are loged on to the game , but are not playing

''For each account (perhaps one account per IP address to avoid abuse) that plays, say, 15-30 games of any type in a month (including tournament games), that account will get 1 free pack of cards and 25 points.'' == doing something like this would only stop people paying for premiun

dont forget the people that have made this game and are spending time keeping it running / thinking of new things to add to it , to make money out of it and you have to take into account that for everything they give away ,that is money out of there pocket .... saying this i do agree something needs to be done to try to get more people playing the game and not just loged on like it seems to be when i log on at around 3pm uk time ..
sorry if this is a bit blunt , ive been woken up by my kids when it was still dark and im sitting here still drunk for last night with a set of headphones on to try to cut out all the noise in the house .

again, i believer doja has earned the Contriibutor Badge

i believe a commercial or two would fix the lack of population too bad they're so expensive... word of mouth seems to be the cheapest way but with such a small population now, i doubt we could spread it to that many people.

I like the idea of giving 1-3 point for every match in a tournament.

+10000000 to this idea.

Honest to god i really like this game and i would spend money on it if i had some way to do it, so i would love a way to get some more cards that involved just playing the game.

I understand that this game exists to make money, and giving stuff for free doesn't help that cause, but giving some small insentive to us non paying players to be more active can only help the game in my opinion.

If you are going to give anything, give it just for winning a number of games (like each 20 or each 50).

The reason is simple: if you don't do it that way, people would start games just to conceed them (lose them, surrendering fast).

making the win thing will make people create secaccs and play against themselves, which will just cause a lot of work for the devs. also this does not encourage noobs to be playing and will encourage good players not to take the time to help new people but will just crush them to gain there "20 wins of the day for 15 pts" or whatever it is.

I agree with the potential problem Geral, but I agree with Schlumpfi that if you switch it to wins it will just encourage collusion to get wins, where the goal is simply to encourage players to play. I had already thought a little about this before my original post. Here are my thoughts:

Suppose the method is, every Sunday at midnight, if you have played X games that week, you get a certain reward.

1) There will be an incentive for a player who is close to this number to make sure he/she is at this number. The worst thing would be for a player to throw games "just to be sure" they have played the correct amount, when they have actually already reached that total. To prevent this problem a ticker or something would be necessary to let players know when they have reached the mark.

2) I'd like to see Geral surrender 20 games worth of rating points to get 15 points and a free pack. I don't think that will happen with legit players, but it may happen with new players, who this system is designed to get to play more. This is the problem Geral was addressing...

My comments regarding this problem:

1) Generally players will only throw games the day before the awards are given, if they have not logged enough games in a given week. I don't think we will see players surrendering all week long, though in the hypothetical situation I presented we may see mass surrenders on Sunday.

2) There are numerous ways to combat this without putting to much pressure on the mods. I would suggest a combination of written in coding that would do the following. Only count a game that lasts min 10-15 rounds. Have the system ignore any game against the same opponent past 2 or 3. The system will only credit one account per IP address, that being the most active account. I'm sure there are other things people can thing of too, in order to combat potential negative side effects.

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One person mentioned that no one would buy premium and this would replace it. Well that is assuming that the prize is significant enough to negate the value of premium. First off, the game designers would well calculate the free points or packs they give out and value it relatively low compared to premium.

But lets assume you can get 25 points a week for playing 30 games... in a month, if you contributed playing 120 games of BD, you could get a combination of FOUR 25 point tourneys or packs. (So 4-0, 3-1, 2-2, 1-3, or 0-4).

Right now my membership gets me two free premium tournaments a week, for a total of 8 tournaments. Premium also gives a special unique card each month ( I love the two cards so far, squadron leader and sniper). Premium also gives points and packs, more than the maximum of four free packs you could get each month (and that's if you don't spend the free points on tournaments). Premium allows you to trade, period. Have fun collecting cards on a second account only to not be able to pass them to your primary account.

I think something of this design can be implemented with safeguards to minimize potential abuse, and I don't think it would discourage people from buying premium. It would probably take two years to get a complete deck of cards opening only 4 packs a month, and that is a helluva a lot of games that player would contribute over two years to accomplish this feat.