19 May 2008

Eternal Lands demographics

Few weeks ago I made a demographics poll on our forum, to see where our players are from, how long are they, and for how long they've been playing.
Here are the results:

Age:
0-17 14.95%
18-25 26.17%
26-35 28.27%
36-49 25.23%
50-60 4.21%
60+ 1.17%

Continent:
North America 44.39%
South and Central America 2.34%
Asia 2.10%
Africa 0.47%
Europe 48.13%
Australia and Oceania 2.57%

Started playing
0-30 Days 0.47%
1-3 Months 1.87%
3-6 Months 6.31%
6-12 Months 10.05%
1-2 Years 23.60%
2-4 Years 43.93%
4+ Years 13.79%

The age results are virtually the same with the poll we had last year, and the conclusion is that most of our player base is 18+
I am little bit surprised that we have more players from Europe than from North America, and I also thought we had more Central and South American players.

One other surprising thing is that very few people that responded to that poll (less than 20%) started playing for less than a year. Of course, many new players do not have forum accounts, but I would assume that someone that's been playing for more than a few months would already get a forum account, so it's strange that we have so few new players.

Partially because of that fact that our population remained constant in the last +1-2 years (just a slight increase in the number of people playing), I made the newbie tutorial easier, and gave new players more attack and less penalties when they die, until level 12 overall.
Not sure if this will make a difference, it is too early to tell.

We are also considering spending some money for advertising some time in June, and since we are doing that I want to change the website a little bit as well. For example, the main page could tell people more about the game, what happes in the game, who is the game for, etc.

We don't really need a lot of new players, but adding 100 or more players online at a time won't affect the server in any way, and there are a lot of resources and spawns in the game for much more players than there are now.
The schools will be over soon, and that is a good time for advertising.

02 May 2008

Sky client

Thanks to the work of quite a few people, especially Emajekral and Schmurk, now we have a sky dome, and a much larger viewing distances and viewing angle.
Everyone is very happy with it, and we hope to make it the next official client. There are some more tests to be done, but things are coming up nicely.

People with slower machines might have to use the 'standard' mode, where the camera angle is limited, but they will still benefit from the new light colors, which are much better than what we used so far. For example, the light color changes at dusk and dawn.

It is really amazing to see how much our little game evolved. Here are two screenshots, the first being about 5 years old, and the second is with the new client (pre release).