It's February 1 in this corner of the world, though, and that means six months of Mizahar. Our first six months. We launched on August 1, 2009 and it's been a great ride. Most play-by-posts don't even last this long; they die within the first few months as the initial drive runs out and people move on to the next great idea. My worry when we started Mizahar wasn't that we would fold, honestly. I knew we wouldn't, because what causes a site to collapse is the admins/owners abandoning the project. I like to think I'm someone who gets things done, and so are the other Founders. My worry was that we might have a lot of trouble attracting people to the site, partly because of the difficulty in advertising a PbP and partly because of Mizahar's nature. The decision to keep Elves out the door did not come without a discussion on appeal and demographics. In truth, we didn't really know much about our 'market' as we didn't play on a lot of sites before Mizahar.
It turned out I'd underestimated the RPers on the web. I think the setting is now one of our main selling points, so to speak. The other side of the problem was a little more frustrating. Advertising a new PbP is kind of hard. Advertising without taking affiliates is even harder. You always start out at the bottom of all lists, surrounded by tons of dead sites. I think a lot of sites die while in the process of climbing through the piles of deader sites. I won't even talk about all the rejections I got from specialized directories, and the huge waiting times elsewhere. That's why I did Google ads for a little while, and they helped us a bit, bringing a few really cool people to the site.
But yeah, startup's not easy. We tried a banner exchange, only to discover that one site was cheating and appearing all the time on our banners. They were probably auto-generating tons of banner views on their site, which monopolized the exchange. The few players we did get through the program did a good job of convincing me to remove the banner, too. So, no affiliates, no exchanges... an interesting challenge. The best piece of advice I can give to anyone in the same spot is, stay calm, don't get discouraged and just be active. A game survives if its participants are ready to pour hours into it. Little by little, it will grow. You have to keep going through the ups and downs.
I won't lie - we are ambitious guys. We want to build a big site with a big community. Aside from fanfics and multi-RP places, most of the old sites are either dead or far smaller than they used to be. Shouldn't someone else take their place? We've already beaten the odds of surviving this far, and our monthly bandwidth in January has been nearly four times higher than in August 2009. We are past the immediate stage of fighting for a player base. We are easing ourselves into the next phase in which we structure our community and hopefully form a staff-base that will let us satisfy more players. People need to get involved fast when they join, or they lose interest. It's a virtuous circle in a way: people flock to where people are. That's why it is important for people to consider becoming Storytellers. It's a lot of fun too.
Anyways, the real point of this blog entry was to say thank you. Thanks to the Founders for being on this beautiful adventure with me. Gossamer was the one who roped me in, actually. She brought it up almost daily until I gave in - I'm the kind of guy who needs a little push sometimes. For Mizahar I learned a new programming language and several software packages (my fault for not taking Web Technologies at Uni... a story for another time). So, thank you Jen, Sam, H, Mish and Matt.
Thanks to everyone who has ever made even a single post on the website, or dropped by in the insanity that is chat. This would not have been possible without you. You give us all more than you can think. I hope Mizahar has been and will continue to be a source of fun and good times for you all. In the end that's what a game is supposed to be.
Now I'll shut up before I destroy my image of a cruel tormentor of PCs with more of this mushiness.
