What happened?

[Juniper Onyx]

Ok, so I know I was gone a few years due to RL, but I have been thinking lately about how to promote Illarion. Today, I was just looking around the forums and found this board of actual Promotional activities from 2015 to 2019! Wow!! Everyone was trying to post on social media, making videos, even talking about promotional items! There was some real energy and work here! I think everyone was on the right track and it seemed to be going well. So my question is...what happened?

The last post was Jan of 2019, Banduk lost his youtube channel* and even the facebook page hasn't seen any activity after that. Only the official Illarion channel has only two trailers.

What happened?

Is promotion a hopeless cause, was there a problem with German Law or was there some drama that drove away key people?

Before I get too involved in my own ideas, I'd really like to know the history here. If anyone knows, you can send me a PM if you like or post for those of us who may have missed it.

Thank you!!

*correction - Banduk's channel is still available. The link in his "Take over Illa Videos" post is a bad link. Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzhEho ... C7w/videos

[Brightrim]

Well here's my view on it, though be warned it will come off as negative towards the idea of promoting the current state of the game:

Reasons to put promotion on hold and instead work on other areas for now:
New player retention is pretty low.
We need a more stable release state (Including but not limited to such things as a magic system)
Slightly is creating a new new-player tutorial.
Save volunteers motivation for when the above conditions are in a better state.

Reasons to keep promoting right now:
There is always that tiny chance someone will ignore all the, by modern standards, "bad" graphic and controls. That this someone will then bump into a good RPer right away, get sucked into the roleplay immediately and then actually decide to stick around, all because they saw an advertisement for the game.

So I for one am instead putting what effort, motivation and time I reasonably can into both learning scripting and trying to help in the areas of development where scripting knowledge is not needed.

[Juniper Onyx]

Thank you Brightrim. Negative, positive, it's all good. I appreciate the input. I was just surprised at these posts and then the sudden drop.

Any promotion will have to be a community effort anyway so it's good to know where the current community stands on this. I'm not suggesting to spend a lot of money, time or go "dodge-balls to the wall", but a little here and there, evaluate and then try some more would always be good. I'm no expert here, but I'm learning and have the time and resources now to do "something" if that's what we want to do.

As someone said, "work smarter not harder".

I'd love to hear from more of you! Thanks!