On Boosting BUSINESS! for RSI and Duel2/ADM in general

Posted: Wed Jun 15, 2011 9:37 pm

johnh10 wrote:

RSI can take a bit of strategy from other companies that have been successful in retaining past customers.

After a manager has been inactive X months, RSI sends them a letter saying 'we miss you!' + a free team rollup.

It costs them a stamp, and the response rate doesn't even have to be high for RSI to make a good return on this almost 0 investment.

They should do this with their other games Forgotten Realms and Hyborian War as well IMO.

They did this before back in the early 90's. I remember recieving a folded piece of paper with mini-overviews of and old team and a new team rollup below the mini's. It worked and got me playing again even though the new team rollup was ugly as hell.

Posted: Thu Jun 16, 2011 6:28 am

If they even sent out 1,000 letters with mini's at $0.44 per stamp, that's only a $440 (call it $500 even when you include the cost of envelopes, paper and toner) investment for the chance to increase the player base. Even if they only receive a 3-5% success rate, that would still more than pay back the cost of the mailings.

Site Admin Joined: Jun 20, 2002 Posts: 1298

I got started in 92 or so any my fights now read exactly like they did back then. So in the last 19 years there hasn't been much change from my point of view.

If I wanted long fights I could design warriors for that. I usually design to win without considering fight length though.

As for crits (the fancy statements) you can have those almost immediately as well. (Although not with average to poor roll ups.)

I see definate progression in a warrior's skill as he trains up.

Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2011 9:24 am

This perspective is from one recent and active fighter that is a PL with master in attack, initiative and parry that i reactivated recently. 4 arena fights and 3 from the last mail in tournament the fights i lost i basically got 1 or 2 shotted and i parried less than 20% of the attacks against me. graduated to ADM and won the last 3 fights. my PL actually parries 80% or more attacks against him and seems to take more damage than before with no armor changes. fights are definately more "flashy" and exciting to read. the regular fights were short and boring while the adm he seems like a totally different warrior. limited experience as i just started playing again after being out for about 20 years. so far the adm part of the game is better. chance or luck, who knows.

Grandmaster Poster Joined: Jul 14, 2003 Posts: 753

PecKiller wrote:

This perspective is from one recent and active fighter that is a PL with master in attack, initiative and parry that i reactivated recently. 4 arena fights and 3 from the last mail in tournament the fights i lost i basically got 1 or 2 shotted and i parried less than 20% of the attacks against me. graduated to ADM and won the last 3 fights. my PL actually parries 80% or more attacks against him and seems to take more damage than before with no armor changes. fights are definately more "flashy" and exciting to read. the regular fights were short and boring while the adm he seems like a totally different warrior. limited experience as i just started playing again after being out for about 20 years. so far the adm part of the game is better. chance or luck, who knows.

More likely you started running him/her with his/her favorite weapon and using his/her preferred battle rhythm, which you might have learned upon graduation. Both of these add to the 'Flash" of a fight because they boos the abilities of the fighter.

You can achieve some of the same results in regular arena if you correctly guess the weapon and rhythm of the fighter before he/she graduates and you're told what it is.

Grandmaster Poster Joined: Jul 14, 2003 Posts: 753

MarmaDuke wrote:

If they even sent out 1,000 letters with mini's at $0.44 per stamp, that's only a $440 (call it $500 even when you include the cost of envelopes, paper and toner) investment for the chance to increase the player base. Even if they only receive a 3-5% success rate, that would still more than pay back the cost of the mailings.

This might work, but to be honest I think a lot of people stop playing because there is limited tournament turnover. Of the large group of managers that play/have played it's always for the most part been a select group that brings home the TC's

And the more TC's a person collects the more prizes are applied, meaning the better chance for more TC's. It's a grueling curve to break into.

A free team roll up and a fight or 5 on the house would probably only bring limited return for a limited time.

I think a better and longer lasting advertisement would be to offer door prizes at the tournament. If the ladies randomly offered even two additional prizes at every tourney to two random individuals it would:

1) increase the tourney size as players would try for the random prize.

and possibly

2) If this was advertised to old players who became disenfranchised as a way to "spread out the competition" it would likely bring a few back that got tired of trying to "break" into the elite.

I don't think a half dozen extra prizes a year would break the game, it might actually spread out the competition.

Just my $0.02

Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2013 11:19 am

There was a time period of more descriptive text pre 1986. One of the changes that occured during the "fight called by the ref" changes was certain text lines were eliminated. Somewhere around 1985 TP scum were a problem and they did a code tweak to stop unpopular fights and award a winner. This did not last long, but at that time the text lines were changed during the "fight called by the ref toggle on/toggle off.

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2013 12:33 pm

I was thinking about this: RSI could save some money in postage if they stopped sending us turns where we don't fight. As everyone knows, they send us a newsletter for every arena, if we fought there the previous turn. I, for one, never even look at these and just toss 'em in the pile... I would be perfectly fine with not getting them. Especially with the newsletters being available online, they are quite unnecessary.