Outwitters' low revenue - Marketing suggestions and ideas for OML

[Ravernoth]

(10-14-2012 04:49 AM)CombatEX Wrote:  I advise against 30 min turn 'speed' games. If you want a speed game the turn limit has to be more on the order of 2 min. Why? It's easy enough to set aside something like an hour for a game which is pretty much guaranteed with a 2 min turn game (chess clock mode would be even better though, see below). 30 min turn games on the other hand can drag on for something like 5 hours even if you take your turn quickly every time. Let's say you average 1 turn per 2 min, but your opponent decides to take their turn once every 20 min. Then a 30 turn game would take over 5 hours. Not to mention games can even go up to things like 50-60 turns so even if you both take reasonable turns, once every 5 min, the game would still take a long time. Since this is a speed mode if you ever have to go away for more than 30 minutes throughout this 5 hour period... well too bad. You lose.

Instead I would suggest you change the 'Speed Mode' to something more akin to speed chess. Maybe give each player a 1 hour clock. This serves the duel benefit of guaranteeing a hard limit to the amount of time a game can take and also allowing a player to take a semi-prolonged break to go do something if they've been good about playing quickly during their other turns.

Yes, sorry it wasn't clear - I meant that to be a time limit for the game, not for a turn. As in a chess clock. I've expanded on the point in the OP:

7) Add 'Speed Games' or 'Semi-Realtime' Games with a time limit

Again, for players wanting an instant fix. There is a large audience of strategy gamers who just don't want to deal with waiting for a turn.

Then once they're hooked they may well see the appeal of async turns when they're busy.

• There could be say 2 options: 15 minutes per player, or 30 minutes per player
• The timer would work like a chess clock, i.e. once a player submits his turn, the other player's timer starts counting down
• The timer is on the server, i.e. it counts down whether the player is in or out of the app.
• The player receives a notification when it's his turn, e.g. "It's your turn with X, you have 12 minutes 25 seconds on your timer"
• When a player's timer runs out, he loses.
• OR another option is: When a player's timer runs out, he enters 'Sudden death' mode where he has say 45 seconds per turn
• If we want to help account for long games, we could add say 15 seconds to each player's timer per turn.
• If we think that Speed Games aren't as accurate at assessing skill as the normal league rankings, we could have Speed Games count for say 75% of normal games in terms of ranking points
  

Thoughts?