the future of winbolo from a noobs point of view

Just sum random thoughts from a noob. I played bolo back in the early 90's, winbolo for around a year in 2007ish and back again for who knows how long. Dont get me wrong, not bitching or anything like that just a few ideas.
I would love to be able to come back and play this game 10years time but for that to happen the community needs to grow. Since i played 2 years ago i see the same 10-15 names floating around and not many more.


Development direction:
As far as development of the games goes im all for those that do the coding to code what ever they think is best but i personally think that our future is in making winbolo as close to macbolo as posible so that one day in the future the 2 could merg.

But i would like to suggest that winbolo is pushed towards a package deal that could with one click be downloaded will all features. Ie IRC/team speak ect. Mabe with the focus of marketing the game to internet cafe. The other day i found myself burning a few hours playing AOE in a Internet cafe (while getting new car tyres). This is a huge potenial market that is simply not available to us at the moment due to the way the game is fragmented.

Too many web sites:
At a guess i would say that there are about 50 weekly players at the moment. I would also guess that there are around 10 official winbolo web sites, winbolo.com/winbolo.net/wiki/igm.com/ect... and non off which are even close to being upto date or well maintained. I would like to suggest that they all be rolled into one, keep the domain names but all paths should lead to the one site. This would make the maintenance of the sites so much easyer for the powers that be as well as make live so much simpler of us players and the noobs/first timers.

Marketing
There is only so much most of us can do as far as coding, in my case nothing as i think the case is with others. Is there anyone out there that would be interested in taking control of marketing. If 5 or 10 players can give an hour a week we could easy get winbolo an every free bbs/games review site out there. I for one would be willing to do a few hours a week but the marketing leader would have to be someone a lot more respected around here than me.


Ok so just a few quick thoughts,
questions/comments/doubtful points.

Please do not comment on the development bit as it has been more than coered in other posts.

I like the idea of merging platforms. Unfortuantely though there has already been a 'noobs point of view' this week. I like your enthusiasm though, do stick around

justme1122 wrote:

I would love to be able to come back and play this game 10years time but for that to happen the community needs to grow. Since i played 2 years ago i see the same 10-15 names floating around and not many more.

I doubt that this community is capable of supporting more than 20-30 players. There are a few reasons why but I won't get into it to much here. People who like to play bolo still play bolo. People come and go otherwise, that's just the way it is. We've had lots of players come and go in 2 years time. I've been playing for 12 years approximately. I've seen alot of players disappear.

justme1122 wrote:

Development direction:
As far as development of the games goes im all for those that do the coding to code what ever they think is best but i personally think that our future is in making winbolo as close to macbolo as posible so that one day in the future the 2 could merg.

Umm, if you read the version history for the last 2 versions, you will quickly see quite a few notes that read something like this 'changed this thing to make it more like macbolo'. I've been the main developer(sticks has also contributed a ton) on the last 2 versions and that has been my main goal. However the two will never merge. The best we can hope for is to make winbolo close enough to macbolo to convince some of the oldtimers to come play.

justme1122 wrote:

But i would like to suggest that winbolo is pushed towards a package deal that could with one click be downloaded will all features. Ie IRC/team speak ect. Mabe with the focus of marketing the game to internet cafe. The other day i found myself burning a few hours playing AOE in a Internet cafe (while getting new car tyres). This is a huge potenial market that is simply not available to us at the moment due to the way the game is fragmented.

Well, first off, those things you mention are not really a 'combined' deal. You don't need IRC or teamspeak to play bolo. Just open the game, join one and play. What more do you need? I've never used teamspeak for bolo, it feels like cheating to me. Not saying other people shouldn't use it, but its not a 'package' deal. IRC should definitely be left out of that mix also. When you get on IRC you get hate, spite, and all the good things that go with it.

justme1122 wrote:

Too many web sites:
At a guess i would say that there are about 50 weekly players at the moment. I would also guess that there are around 10 official winbolo web sites, winbolo.com/winbolo.net/wiki/igm.com/ect... and non off which are even close to being upto date or well maintained.

Ok, first, there are only 3 official winbolo websites. www.winbolo.com, www.winbolo.org, and www.winbolo.net and buddy, they are all up to date. www.winbolo.org is for coding the game and things related to that. This website is for playing the game. And www.winbolo.com has always been for general information about the game. They all serve their purpose. Any other websites are not 'official' and www.lgm.com for example is not a winbolo website, its a macbolo website. And its also more or less up to date. Not much changes in the macbolo world.

Anyways, enough blah blah blah

Min