Got a few interesting answers from getafreelancer.com, are thinking about enganging at least one of them. I'll update on that at a later stage. This will cost, hopefully ill get something back...

Fiddled a bit with design today, the new AJAX layout and the old one should be pretty similar now. Time will show if we end up with a merged version in the end :)

However i discovered that tournament server is dead. Its a bad sign when noone even bothers to post about it in the bug section.

First shot in the dark

Yesterday i signed up for getafreelancer.com. Posting a "cry for help" for someone to help me make the game turn inot the success it deserves. 24H later i have gotten 20 bids, mostly from SEO experts, but also some more versatile. I've contacted a few that seemed interesting, and ill keep you updated on the progress.

Todays rock in the wheels are that the host have problems and I cannot log in doing my admin chores (more about them later)

The fightback

The curves have been downward now for about a year. I have tried analyse what's gone wrong, but have not seen the light yet. We have tried lots of stuff lately, but nothing seems to work. We have used a LOT of money on advertising, but there has only been one channel that has paid off slightly and that is Google Adwords. This gives us a lot of hits but analysing the data, it gives slight to none persistence.

I have two theories that i suspect are the reasons for the demise.
-Change of the gamers
-No change of gamers

By change of gamers I mean the young players today are less likely to use time getting to know a game. And a complex game lie The Five Pillars needs time getting into. That makes it hard to recruit new players. However, similar games like the various Mobster games are also hard to get into, but they got 100.000's of players. So i stand puzzled.

Ny NO change of gamers i mean the exixting players i got, i got a core that has played since the start, making pretty much a hegemony. I wouldnt say they are unfriendly to new players, but they do like to meld them into their own viwes :) To hinder this, I've changes radical concepts of the game several times to make them rethink their old strategies and ways of playing. Not very successful, but in the process we have gotten concepts that no other game can match.

So where does this analyze bing us? Frankly, nowhere... I might be onto something with both of them, but i cannot see any of them as a main factor in our miserablilty. And that leaves us for shots in the dark...

The start

Hi I'm the admin of the web game "The Five Pillars".

It is a game created in 2001 as a impulsive act, when my favourite game Archmage folded. Having a job that was easy to multi task at that time i used a few months to make a framework that was supposed to be a generic framework for web games.

In time though, the generic bit fell apart, as good ideas made their way into the core of the code. However settling with the idea of making THE web game instead of making THE web game tool, the development went forward in leaps. By the start of 2002 the game was up and running, having almost a thousand users, and lots coming in.