This suggestion is based on the Streaming/ Watch Party concept. Currently there are 24 Leagues.
My suggestion is to re-arrange the start times of League (& Ladder) to accomplish a few things:
1. Group up Sim Times by Tier. Vet Leagues should play around the same time, early in the morning. Then Pro, Journeyman, etc.
2. With 24 Leagues, have 2 Leagues run at the same time. Thereby spreading out the game times over 12 hours with some consistency. Currently, there are 3 Leagues running at 11am, 4 at 12 noon, and 3 at 1pm.
3. ***Even better would be to stagger the Leagues on 30 min schedules.*** Then you'd have 2 Leagues per hour and every 30 mins new results. Combine this with #1 and you'd have a lot of Tier games going on in the same time frame.
4. Create an overall Game Day page for League and Ladder games of the day with the replay link provided. Allow people to "vote" up games (like Forum posts) and sort the games listed at a certain time by the # of up votes. This way Stobie/Parab00n/whoever could use a script to automatically stream the most desired game to watch.
5. Create a Highlight/ Top Plays of the Week page that has games from the Last League/Ladder. Exclude scrims. Use something other than Broken Tackles to weight rankings. Perhaps group them by Tier and allow "voting" so that the community can auto-sort/rank them by tier. This would allow the streamers to loop highlight plays on the Off Days.
6. On the (outside and logged in) Home Page of GLB2, you should include the TwitchTV stream instead of the Top Plays listed. Direct new users to the stream rather than Top Plays. They'll see live action and a community around it.
The above would create a more compact schedule of games being run in prime viewing hours. It would create more drama in the games. It would allow you to attract people that are already heavy users of TwitchTV and possibly bring them into the game. With a more consistent game schedule that encourages streaming, you would dramatically increase the referral possibilities.
You've mentioned that banner ads, etc. is a poor waste of $ resources. Don't go that route. Use the visual aspect of the game and allow the streamers to promote it through TwitchTV. You dramatically increase the ability of new players to understand the game and interact with it. Instead of sending someone a referral link/signup on the Home page and having them make a QB/HB that gets stuck on a CPU team, a new player's first experience with the game will be to watch the Twitch stream and interact with the community. This will allow them to get courted by experienced owners/coaches so that when they jump in and make a free player, they'll have some guidance.
All the above takes is some coding time. There's no direct outlay of cost to WG, while the monetary benefit could be significant.
My suggestion is to re-arrange the start times of League (& Ladder) to accomplish a few things:
1. Group up Sim Times by Tier. Vet Leagues should play around the same time, early in the morning. Then Pro, Journeyman, etc.
2. With 24 Leagues, have 2 Leagues run at the same time. Thereby spreading out the game times over 12 hours with some consistency. Currently, there are 3 Leagues running at 11am, 4 at 12 noon, and 3 at 1pm.
3. ***Even better would be to stagger the Leagues on 30 min schedules.*** Then you'd have 2 Leagues per hour and every 30 mins new results. Combine this with #1 and you'd have a lot of Tier games going on in the same time frame.
4. Create an overall Game Day page for League and Ladder games of the day with the replay link provided. Allow people to "vote" up games (like Forum posts) and sort the games listed at a certain time by the # of up votes. This way Stobie/Parab00n/whoever could use a script to automatically stream the most desired game to watch.
5. Create a Highlight/ Top Plays of the Week page that has games from the Last League/Ladder. Exclude scrims. Use something other than Broken Tackles to weight rankings. Perhaps group them by Tier and allow "voting" so that the community can auto-sort/rank them by tier. This would allow the streamers to loop highlight plays on the Off Days.
6. On the (outside and logged in) Home Page of GLB2, you should include the TwitchTV stream instead of the Top Plays listed. Direct new users to the stream rather than Top Plays. They'll see live action and a community around it.
The above would create a more compact schedule of games being run in prime viewing hours. It would create more drama in the games. It would allow you to attract people that are already heavy users of TwitchTV and possibly bring them into the game. With a more consistent game schedule that encourages streaming, you would dramatically increase the referral possibilities.
You've mentioned that banner ads, etc. is a poor waste of $ resources. Don't go that route. Use the visual aspect of the game and allow the streamers to promote it through TwitchTV. You dramatically increase the ability of new players to understand the game and interact with it. Instead of sending someone a referral link/signup on the Home page and having them make a QB/HB that gets stuck on a CPU team, a new player's first experience with the game will be to watch the Twitch stream and interact with the community. This will allow them to get courted by experienced owners/coaches so that when they jump in and make a free player, they'll have some guidance.
All the above takes is some coding time. There's no direct outlay of cost to WG, while the monetary benefit could be significant.
Edited by Xars on Feb 14, 2015 03:21:59
Edited by Xars on Feb 14, 2015 03:20:11
