What’s more important, recruiting new players or keeping existing ones?
Last week, Charles Star posted an article stressing the importance of recruiting new players (read it here). Crimsyn had an interesting point about this in the comments, I’ve pasted it here in case you missed it:
“No single factor plays a greater role in determining the success of a sim or club than recruiting”
I actually disagree a little. Recruitment is important and necessary, but I think player retention and development is just as, if not more important, than recruiting. If you have a boring, inactive simm, you might get people joining, but they’re going to quit as fast as they join. You need to keep activity up, keep the story moving, and most importantly, write with your new players! A good ad campaign can only go so far in selling a bad product.
I’ve been experimenting lately with a “player mentorship program” on my simm, which is basically a buddy system to ensure that new players can get involved in the story and integrated into the simm. I think it’s been successful, though it could be formalized a little more.
In short, I’d rather recruit two people who stay for a long time than recruit five people and have four of them quit in a matter of weeks.
This is of course a good point, and both getting new players and keeping existing ones is very important.
But what I’d like to know is what you do in your game to keep players around? Do you make sure everyone is equally invested in the story? Maybe you do extra social stuff outside of your game to make it more of a social experience and improve teamwork? Let us know in the comments below!
