Increasing the Kronos population

This started out as an answer to a forum post.

The Kronos population has been getting lower since the server launch. The pattern doesn't seem to have changed much in recent times and with the ZG announcement. Consequences can be seen when looking at the PvP status and asking players about it. There is thus a demand/need for interventions targeting an increase in population.

I think to resolve this issue we must look at the history of private servers (Feenix, Nostalrius, etc) and of their populations. And the history of Kronos, what was tried, what worked, what didn't.

We can safely say that the Kronos hype before it launched worked. Over 2400+ players had joined at launch and the trailer has been seen 64'000 times. By the end of june the decline started to stabilize at a slow rate. Whatever was done during this time may have had a small effectiveness (ex: 1-50 players joining, or it kept players playing) but on overall it wasn't enough to bring a noticeable positive change. That's not to say no one tried anything, but what was done had low effects on the population and on population spikes.

Maybe to make a bigger change those interventions should have been more intense or frequent (ex: more trailers, more frequent updates, more incentive to share Facebook posts, more messages, etc.). Or maybe they could have been done differently instead (ex: posting messages on retail or other servers forums, making the trailers funny but not heroic, etc.). Or perhaps new ways should be thought of (ex: moderators sending messages to all players that haven't logged in the last 3 months, cosmetic rewards for the players actively sharing about the server, etc.). Or old ideas could be brought again (ex: weekend bonus experience, stars for voting, community help for levelers, etc.).

The first step in increasing the server population is to define a common server strategy and goal (that could then be posted by moderators on the Kronos main page, like getting 2k population peaks on sundays, or whatever number or indicator would show that the population is on average good enough). Then we can work out what possible interventions we can try (or avoid) by considering possible options. Those interventions should then be tested, adapted, modified, abandonned, incentivized or encouraged.

Here is what I tried to get players to find and join Kronos and how it fared :

	Interventions	Results	Effectiveness
1	Writing and creating this very blog and creating comics about the server, interviews.	30-200+ views per day	Low
2	Making Kronos videos about raiding, farming and some dungeon runs.	<300 views after a month	Very low
3	Participating in a community driven effort to help leveling players.	Project stopped	none
4	Grouping Kronos videos on a forum thread and adding those to my signature.	630 page views after 1.5 months	Very low
5	Participating on the forums and in-game, reporting bugs, sharing ideas, trying to help players connect and find ways to enjoy the game, making polls, etc.	n/a	n/a

I encourage all Kronos players to participate in this discussion and present their results or synthetise others. We can't do it alone. Every little bit helps, even just saying "Kronos" can make players curious. But if only one does it, with no goal, without considering the past, then no major changes should be expected.

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