The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 23, 2006

Official News - page 3

HELPING US PROMOTE FED - PART THREE: VOTING

In the last two issues of the Star I've told you about two ways you can help us to promote Fed2 and thus bring new blood into the game: by mentioning Fed on your MySpace profile or blog, and by rating and reviewing FedTerm on one of the download sites where we have put it.

In the final part of this short series, I will tell you why voting for Fed2 is important, and what a difference it makes. Long-standing players will probably be tempted to shrug and decide to skip the rest of this article because they have heard it all before, but unless you are already in the habit of voting for us every day, please resist the temptation and read on!

One of the biggest sources of new players in Fed2 is from users of The Mud Connector, one of the largest web sites for players of multi-player games. Although Fed2 isn't like most MUD games - it's all original code rather than using generic game-writing software, and it's not a fantasy dungeons-n-dragons orc-killing treasure-gathering hack-n-slash game set in a pseudo mediaeval Middle Earth-style world where you are encouraged to role-play being a celtic elf princess (is my bias showing at all here?) - the TMC web site is still a logical place for us to garner new players, so we have a listing on the site.

What's more important is that TMC ranks games based on votes by players, and lists the top ten (as well as a longer listing of the top 100). We are currently number 6, which is pretty amazing when you consider how many thousands of games are listed on the site. A couple of months ago, we were number 7, but we slowly overtook the game that was above us and we're now a comfortable couple of hundred votes ahead, so our position looks assured for now, so long as we keep up the pressure and keep on voting.

It would be great if we could move higher in the ranks. If you look at the rankings you might at first sight think that would be impossible. There's a good 600 votes separating Fed2 and the number 5 game - a huge mountain to climb.

But if you analyze the way the votes are counted and the rankings calculated, it's not quite as impossible as you might think.

Each person can only vote once a day - if you vote more often then subsequent votes that come from the same IP address will be discarded. Every day, votes that were cast 30 days ago were discarded. So if you vote every day, at any time 30 of the total votes will be yours. So in order to gain 600 extra votes over a 30 day period, we need to get 20 more people who are willing to vote every day. That doesn't sound quite such a daunting task.

So, if you have never voted for Fed2 before, please start now. Point your browser at the voting page at http://www.mudconnect.com/cgi-bin/vote_rank.cgi?mud=Federation+II and cast your vote, then make sure you do it every day. If you use FedTerm you can also tell it to remind you to vote once a day, using the 'Extras|TMC Voting' menu item.

If you have voted for Fed2 in the past, find a way to make sure you remember to do it every day - bookmark the page, put a post-it not on the side of your monitor, tattoo a reminder on your forearm (or equivalent) - whatever you need to do to ensure that you cast a vote once a day, every day.

If you already vote for Fed2 every day, well done - you can feel smug. Now how about getting friendly with a new-ish player who hasn't yet got the voting habit, and encouraging them to vote every day too?


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