Originally Posted by
Crimson Shadow
Pres, I know you don't want "when I first played" posts, but I feel that this one is something that is important.
Back when I started, nations were a tight-knit community. USA had friendly/joking messages going back and forth daily. Not just this is how to play, ask if you have questions. The internal forums were used for more than just sharing intels (which now they are never used), and USA even had an active off-sight forum. Now it seems that nations are just used to hold states that either want to war or net, and there is very little interaction between anyone.
Perhaps if we got back to socializing more ingame/offsite/MSN/etc, then it would encourage new players to stay. They will have a better time talking with others rather than being force fed how to run their states and learning complicated terms/rules that they can't grasp. If they feel comfortable talking to others in the nation, they will be more apt to ask for advice and possibly want to stick around.
I mean right now (I can't say it is the same for every nation, but it seems this way) most states, vets included, just do the same thing every day. Log in, play some turns, log out. There are rarely messages sent out, internal forums sit there useless, things are just dead.
This game is very community driven; without the community aspect, I doubt we would have more than 20 states playing. And even though it is a community game, we have taken the community out of it. This could be why new members aren't sticking around. They are just looking at numbers and text and thing wow this is boring, I'm going to do something else.
So, my suggestion for us all to improve on (myself included), is to just make yourselves more available to chat with new members. Don't just send messages about how to play, but get to know them a little, find out what their interest are or whatever. Just try to make them feel apart of your nation, rather than making them feel like a noob learning how to put numbers into a textbox.