Hey all! I've been thinking for a bit about perhaps building some hype/publicity for rEvolt ant TMW-Legacy to attract more players. Here's a list of things we could do roughly sorted by type and difficulty.
Have and maintain website/forums/wikis
Edit: actually, some of our websites (mostly Evol) are a bit outdated
http://evolonline.org/
http://wiki.evolonline.org/
http://manaplus.org/
TMW-Br LoF etc. . .
Not to be mean, but as far as I can tell other servers don't have a lot of media presence so outsiders are unlikely to land there. I'll try to limit this list to mostly places where someone who doesn't know about TMW might possibly discover it to keep it reasonably sized. . .
Code management and review
Social media
Discord
Check!Facebook
Somewhat activeYoutube
The 'official channel' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheManaWorldOfficial seems to be dead, but kytty and others have been uploading a few videos.https://www.reddit.com/r/themanaworld/
Not a lot of activity it seemsTwitter
Abandoned also, don't search twitter for 'manaworld' search for 'the_mana_world' insteadTwitch
I dunno how 'stream-able' TMW is tbh. . .
Ranking and listing sites
There are a surprising number of sites dedicated to just listing and ranking games. It probably wouldn't take much effort to add TMW, so I think I'll just go ahead and do that if I can. (I'll wait a bit in case someone tells me it's an awful idea though)
Todo (does not list TMW):
* = website does not have an easy to find 'submit game' page.
Done (lists TMW):
External Wikis
Wikipedia
There are Chinese and Portuguese pages but not English!?! I expect this to be fixed anonymously in the near future. . .
Edit: Apparently there was some drama about TMW not being 'notable' enough by Wikipedia's standards.https://libregamewiki.org/The_Mana_World
A bit outdated. . .
Press release
-
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/ ... 9005096/en
We probably couldn't get a press release in businesswire, but this is a decent example of a press release for an mmo.
If we wanted big review sites like say IGN to take us seriously it would be useful to have an official looking press release. I could write one, but it'd be nice to have someone check it over. . .
If we're going big we'd probably need to appoint someone as an official press contact, so game reviewers could ask them questions and stuff. I'd volunteer, but it might be a bit silly as I don't really know that much about TMW to be honest
It would also be good to set a specific date for rEvolt if we were to make a big announcement about it.
Review sites
Has never reviewed TMW:
GamingOnLinux.com
Gamasutra
IGN.com
pcgamer
pcworld
mmobyte
(some of the above mmo sites)
Has already reviewed TMW:
https://www.linuxlinks.com/NotableGamesPart2/
*This is more of a listing than a review, but they did call us a 'notable game'.
afaik to get publicity on these sites, we'd just have to ask real nicely for one of their writers to write an article about us. It's a lot easier to write an article if you have a press release to plagerize
Distribution platforms
Linux Packagelists
(afaik Arch is the only linux distro that can install ManaPlus without adding a custom repository or compiling from source)Lutris.net
Itch.io
Steam
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... =232178669
Edit: apparently TMW was 'greenlit' back when that was a thing, but there was some drama over whether Steam is GPL compatible. There are valid arguments for and against.GoG
With the exception of perhaps Lutris, puting the ManaPlus client on these platforms would require support and continued maintenence from the Manaplus team.
Any thoughts? Is getting publicity even a good idea?
Edit: I'll add new links above as I find them or as people mention them, just so we can have a summary of current and possible future external media presence.
Scientific papers
Not really relevant to the discussion IMO, but I think they're cool, thanks Jesu