#318302
(NOTE: I make a lot of absolute statements in this post. Feel free to argue with them.)
We can't stop attrition. Attrition is part of the life of all games -- all things, really. Life changes; Trek becomes impossible. One day, I will stop playing this game. (Indeed, I already have -- I spent a decade away and chanced back at just the right moment.) And so our problem is not attrition -- which strikes me as actually being extremely low around here -- but the fact that we struggle very, very much to recruit new players. We have three great, totally free games. So why aren't people playing them?
(1) I think people who would generally be interested in our game don't know it exists, and those who do remember it don't know that it's still running and free to play. Practically every time I'm at a tournament, some rando walks by, does a double-take, and says, "Wait, is that Star Trek cards? People still play that?" Then we immediately try to squeeze in the CC's sales pitch. Sometimes we actually have a New Frontiers Business Card handy, and hand that out. It's... somewhat effective, by which I mean that I think we got a new player this way once.
Advertisement-by-random passerby, though, is not going to bring in enough new players to save the game. We must have stronger outreach efforts. Tournament notices can't simply go up online, where only active members see them; they need to be posted on paper in local gaming shops, with information about how to learn the game. While playing, we need one of those table-sign holders that says "Star Trek CCG - Free to play - Find out more at TrekCC.org". (At my last event, the venue literally gave us Star Trek Attack Wing placards. This was not helpful.) The goal should be to get people to check out TrekCC.org.
(Yes, ideally every player would be introduced to the game by a friend and carefully mentored into full bloom. I have gone through this process a few times, with one real success, and it is very good -- but most of us have pretty much tapped out all our IRL friends who might be into this. That means we need to recruit anonymous people into the game, and that almost definitely means getting them onto the website.)
If we could win a few advocates for our game on the staffs of local gaming shops, that would be even better. Why not ask your friendly local game salesperson to play a game or two of this community-run, grassroots game? (Gamers love grassroots stuff.) Build him a top-notch, tons-of-fun deck to play and have him at the table during the next tournament. If you win him over, he is the best possible evangelist we could possibly have.
(2) Now we're driving more traffic to the website. New person traffic. Yay! So they hit the website and what happens?
They leave.
Our website is extremely powerful and extremely useful -- for active players. For new players, it is a total nightmare. There are not one but THREE games on the front page, crammed into tiny spaces with no explanation; if you don't know that the TrekCC supports three different games, you can't even know where to start. The number of links on the front page is totally overwhelming; there are nine separate navigation contexts (I'm told that three is really the maximum users can handle) with a total of over 200 links (half of which are expansion icons). We know what it all points to. But to a newcomer... what the hell is all this? I often repeat this, but it bears repeating: the first time my wife saw this site, she yelped out of sheer intimidation. She has a degree in Computer Science. This is not good.
The first thing I do on a lot of confusing sites I visit is click About Us, because the basic About Us overview can often tell me what a place is trying to do, even if their front page is a stygian nightmare. (Note that, according to research, most people are not this patient -- they will leave the instant they are confused.) But our About Us page is worse than useless; it's an org chart. Literally. Confusion upon confusion. Where does the website say, "We are the Continuing Committee; we are a player-run community that designs and develops three Star Trek-themed card games. Here is a little about First Edition (here are some links), here is a little about Second Edition (here are some links); here is a little about Tribbles (here are some links)"? As far as I know, the website never does anything like this, and, if it does, the fact that I still don't know about it after several years of high activity here is no less an indictment.
The big thing that our website gets right is that, right smack in the middle of the homepage, we have a big button that says "New or Returning? Click here!" The odds of a new or returning player even seeing this strike me as fairly low amid what they can only see as a massive jumble (I missed it my first visit here), but at least it's there, it's a big visual anchor, and it's a call-to-action aimed squarely at the target audience.
If anything behind that call-to-action were remotely helpful to new or returning players, we might stand a chance. But it's not. It's a collection of articles that kinda-sorta touch on what new players might be interested in, once they get on their feet. But -- if we are positioning ourselves to succeed -- we are dealing with raw recruits, many of them (hopefully) teens with a lot of free time, who have never seen this game before and very probably have only seen one or two series of Star Trek, if that. We can count on them having a familiarity with Magic: The Gathering and/or Pokemon... and that's about it. First question: "What are these games?" The entire website is silent. Second question: "Which game do I want to learn and play first?" The entire website is silent.
Third question: "How do I play the game I have chosen?" Second Edition is a little bit better at this than First Edition, because Second Edition actually has a rulebook that contains and explains the actual rules of the actual game. First Edition currently does not. And I don't really know about Tribbles. And all games at least have rules documents online. But how does a new (or returning) player find them? Not from the New/Returning page! And they aren't available anywhere else at all, actually, except directly from the front page, which (as we've discussed) is an extremely unusable page. It gets worse: we don't provide any guidance to users about how to sort out the rules documents. Look at First Edition: we have posted there a Rulebook, a Glossary, Current Rulings, Conversion Rules, a Converted Cards List, OTF Rules, Revised Rules, X-List Rules, the Block Legal Cardlist, the Organized Play Guide, and the Dilemma Resolution Guide -- and that's just the rules documents! The new player has absolutely no idea what any of this means, and gives up in frustration. Heck, JUST TONIGHT the 1E forum had a guest asking whether the Rule Of Four would apply at 1E Worlds! Sunsetting 1E Revised and X-List is a helpful first step, but it is quite frankly impossible for a new player to figure out how to play this game by using our website. You have to go to the forums and ask someone to sort it out. And how many people are going to engage with a community that has done nothing to interest them and made it so extremely difficult to figure out the most basic information about what we do? A miniscule percentage.
The CC is working on more content to help explain the game to new players, in the form of tutorial videos. This is great. I applaud it. From a recruitment perspective, it's the best news in years, and I was excited to hear about it. But how are new players going to find these videos? Are they going in those sidebars? Because, if so, you may as well just burn that money on a pyre, because new players will never actually find them. We already have content -- tons and tons and tons of it. (There's even more non-official content out there: Jeremy Commandeur's Open Format tutorials are out-of-date, but still pretty handy and still chilling out on my website. Zef'no's Brief 1E introduction is great. My rulebook is pretty snappy, IMHO.) But it's impossible for a new user to find the content relevant to him in the torrent we hurl at him the moment he navigates to the homepage.
At this point, we've lost probably 999 out of every 1000 prospective players who visit our website. But the ones who have stayed aren't out of questions yet! Question Four: "Now that I now how to play, how can I find my first deck, something to get me familiar with the game?"
Crickets, sayeth the homepage and the new-and-returning page.
Let's say that the player doggedly searches the site, though, and eventually stumbles into some starter decks, which are buried on the expansion pages for 1E, on article pages for 2E, and don't seem to exist at all for Tribbles. But, God bless him, he finds 'em, and he's like, "Aw, yeah, I'm gonna play Dominion! They were so cool in DS9!"
"...wait. How do I get the cards?" (Question Six)
We don't actually state clearly the most awesome part about this game -- YOU CAN PRINT THE CARDS OUT ON YOUR PRINTER FOR FREE AND IT'S TOTALLY OKAY -- anywhere a new player might look. The only place I can think that includes the printable card policy at all is the OPG. And it's on, like, Page 13 or some deep, deep place of disinterest. And we really do need to not just state the printable card policy prominently, but clearly and repeatedly: I have tried to introduce friends to the game who didn't even believe me the first time I said it, and misunderstood the second time, because they couldn't wrap their heads around the true power of the policy. The printable card policy is radical, and it takes a few statements for people to get it. Right now, a new player who somehow survives our site long enough to find a starter deck is liable to think that it's just for display, and he has to go off and buy the cards somewhere. When he can't figure out where to buy Star Trek Cards, boom, he's gone, lost prospect.
Even once the new players wrap their heads around the printable card policy, they are going to need some further guidance about it. I have had other friends end up finding the whole printability thing off-putting, because they didn't understand exactly what they needed to do to make a legal deck, they didn't have a huge box of old commons (for this game or other games) and card sleeves to actually follow the printable card policy, or they simply underestimated how much time and work it takes to print and cut all these cards. An FAQ or something to that effect seems to me to be essential.
But let's pretend our prospects overcome these hurdles. They print out some starters. They play with their siblings. Good times. Maybe they actually use 2E's multiplayer rules for the first time since 2006. But they realize these starters are boring (NOTE: we should advertise very clearly that starters are much less interesting than the full game, or players are liable to think our game actually IS that boring!), which leads to Question Seven: "How do I graduate from starters to building my own decks?"
Again, here, the site has some guidance, but it's not very much, and it's not very well-aimed at the audience. It's aimed more at us -- players of long standing who are looking to branch out. Just look at the "Beginner Series," which are supposed to be aimed at newbies more than any other kind of article we write. The three top articles are Andreas's fascinating but extremely advanced Dominion strategy article (29 dilemmas?!), then Niall's awesome but inherently advanced Borg overview (because Borg are hard, entendre intended) that isn't really written to the newbie, and then (skipping the virtual deck and another Andreas Dominion article), Lucas's breathtakingly cool but totally-irrelevant-to-beginners "Cost of a Card Play" article.
My understanding is that the new video content will teach players how to play, but not how to come to grips with the massive universe of cards and build a functioning, reasonable competitive deck in the modern meta. So the video content will not solve this, either.
Our player is left to fend for himself, latching onto a few key concepts from certain articles, never really clear on how his dilemma combos should work, what Ref cards are for, and even what options are available to him. He needs an article that says, "Here are the affiliations in the game, and here are their play/draw engines, and here is how hard it is to play each of them." He needs another article that says, "Here is how you build your first dilemma pile." Another that says, "Hey, here's how you choose which personnel to put in your deck." He needs another that just says, "Here are the cards you need to be aware of right now." Time was, we would get cards in packs, which allowed us to learn them slowly, one by one, but now the entire 4000-card universe gets thrown at the player's head on Day One. I thought 363 cards was intimidating back in 1995. Can you imagine what it's like now?
1E Block is a good stab at this last problem, by limiting the card pool... but where does a player find out about Block? The 1E expansion list mentions Block, but doesn't tell the new player what it is or what it all means. (And it shouldn't; that's not that page's job.) There's a Block Legal Cardlist on the homepage, but (1) it has the same problem of not explaining itself, and (2) it doesn't show you cards, but just tells you the names of sets which you have to go look up somewhere else. And even once you know about Block, you're still being asked to look at nearly 1000 cards. That's not reasonable; we need to be able to point players at a single, narrow set of cards (like, say, The Next Generation) and say, "Hey, if you know and understand what every red- or black-bordered card in this set does, you can be a fairly successful Klingon TNG player on the tournament circuit, even without touching a single other card from this or any other set." This gives them what every player needs when they enter any new game: a beachhead. From there, they can slowly spread out and absorb the whole game at their own pace. But they need a beachhead. Starters are useful educational tools, but aren't competitive and are not as fun as the main game, so they only get us halfway there.
Okay, so let's say we told our new player to look at all the black cards in Emissary and Emissary supplemental and all the tan or black cards in The Gamma Quadrant. (A bit too ambitious, I think, but we are obviously dealing with an ambitious and dedicated player if he is still interested after all the hurdles our website has set before him. One might argue that a new player shouldn't make his first competitive deck around the Dominion, because they're complicated -- but, if that were the case, why would we have made a Dominion starter?) He's built a decent, modern Dominion deck with Reward From the Founders as his main engine. But his siblings are done with this game, and he needs people to play with.
Question Eight: "Where can I play this?"
Ironically, while this is the last question (therefore the least critical), it's the one we are best at answering. There are problems with the Tournament board -- it should be possible for someone who (1) doesn't have an account and (2) doesn't know his Decipher region name to easily find tournaments near his house -- but it is prominent, public, and smartly presented overall. The Player Map has a number of small problems, but really only one big one: it gives you no way to contact your regional ambassador. (The ambassador is easy to find, but you can only contact him if you first log into the forums -- and we can't assume our player has registered an account, since most people will avoid committing to an account until they are quite certain they are going to be part of the community... and our hypothetical player still isn't sure of that.) The Player map is also prominent, surprisingly public, and smartly presented. (It baffles me that we hide players' tournament records and reports for privacy reasons, but publish their real names and approximate addresses to the world on the player map -- but that's a score against our tournament report paranoia, not the player map. The player map is pretty good.) When there are local events, people sometimes return to the game by attending them, because they're easy to find. That's how many of us did, in fact, return after an absence.
No, the big problem we have with the question, "Where can I play this?" isn't the website. It's that the only answer we can provide is, "Several hundred miles away." And I've never heard of a single raw newbie willing to travel several hundred miles to play a game he's never seen before. Our playgroups are dying of attrition, so this problem is only getting worse while our recruitment problems persist.
...so why don't we have official CC support for Lackey? To play online -- which is, for 90% of the world's population, especially young people, the only logistically plausible way to play the Star Trek CCGs -- you have to dive into the forums and dig through some fairly messy threads just to get Lackey set up. You have to dig through some entirely different forums to actually find a game -- and, guess what, there's no orientation for new online players, no bag of tricks explaining how stuff gets done in Lackey, no etiquette guide, no "here's how online tournaments run." (At least, none I've seen, and, again, if there is one out there and a longstanding player like me hasn't seen it, that doesn't speak any better of us.) I've never played online because I'm afraid of committing a faux pas or just not scheduling enough time or not having the right software for it, and I know and like practically all of you. I just know from experience how different it can be online. So even if a player finds all the information -- buried deep, deep in the forums he (again) almost certainly hasn't registered for -- the odds of him actually playing an online game are almost nil. Despite all the other hurdles he has overcome, he's going to turn away at the very last moment, and this very stubborn would-be player finally slips through our fingers like so many others before him.
In all this, I've focused on the needs of totally new players. But the needs of returning players are almost identical: they need to know about the new games (my experience is that most returners last played in PAQ, so 2E and Tribbles are totally mysterious to them), they need to know the modern rules, they need to know the modern meta, they need to know about printing, and they need to know where to play. Returners might need slightly different content, but almost certainly need just as much as raw newbies.
If we can get a player to an O.P. event with a deck he built himself and he wins one or two games, then our odds of retaining him as a new player are very good -- maybe two out of three, in my experience. Our ambassadors are really very good at making new people feel welcomed and part of the game, and practically everyone is willing to take byes for the sake of the newbies. It's a gay old time. But we make it almost impossible to get to this stage. We don't tell people we exist, and, even if we get them interested, we make it extremely difficult for them to convert their interest to the desired outcome -- learning about us and the games, knowing the rules for one of them, building a deck, attending an event, having actual fun. This leads to attrition which, even though it's quite low, massively outpaces replacement, and which has put our game on the road to oblivion. Once you account for the multiplier effects of attrition (the smaller the player base gets, the faster it shrinks), we are looking at the death of the game within the next ten years.
I have stated the problems (as I see them) here, and will try to suggest some solutions in a future post. My solutions will not be the only possible solutions to the problems I have presented here, but these problems are all real and really do need to be fixed in some way if we are to start growing again. We have three terrific games here, as good as anything on the market and better than any other Star Trek licensed product ever released. Our product is solid gold. We just need to get better at selling it.
I apologize for filibustering; I really like OKCoyote and found the loss of his playgroup alarming, and I've been thinking about these things off and on for months now.
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