The Campaign Archive > The War of Ostermark Succession: Evaluation & Nostalgia

Reaching out to the non-Warhammer-Empire.com community

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Carlo Chaimo:

--- Quote from: General Helstrom ---We did seem to have some trouble getting word out beyond the campaign forum
--- End quote ---


As a now current community member who was drawn to join both the Warhammer-Empire.com community and the campaign itself by the advertising for the campaign, both on site and at Bretonnia.org, I would like to start a thread addressing this issue which General Helstrom has raised. To start the discussion I would suggest that we first need to assess if this statement is in fact true.

Can anyone prove or disprove this statistically?

Anecdotally speaking, I am inclined to half agree with the good General to the extent that it seemed to me that the most active participants during the campaign were in fact members before the campaign; however, it is quite possible that the problem was not so much "trouble getting word out" as it was a problem of getting people to "buy the product".

Assuming that there was in fact a problem with attracting outside campaigners, then, I will make several suggestions which seem obvious to me to hopefully provide some possibilities for resolving the assumed problem along the lines in which I see the problem:
1)What is my motivation
None of the other armies in the Warhammer world were written into the campaign (maybe Vampire Counts might have felt some motivation via their past connections with Ostland, Martin, etc.). My team was very cordial and warm and made me feel welcome; however, the fluff while superbly written and entertaining did not make any concessions for a non-Empire player.
2)Stretching the "Reality" of the Unreal
As a Bretonnian player it did not stretch my imagination very much to join this campaign on the side of Talabecland; however, if I played Lizard Men, Druchii or Tomb Kings it most certainly would have. This detracts from the fun of the story for the player. At the end of the day this is fantasy, and concessions could be creatively worked in to include even a Tomb King.
3)Late Start Date
This ofcourse was not the campaign teams fault; nevertheless, the fact is that very few people were going to wait around and check in for months for the campaign to begin.

Off the top of my head I think these are two possible problems (and I think that three is pretty much a given) that the campaign may have run into in terms of garnering outside campaigners. I fully recognize the intention of the campaign writers to keep this campaign within a close historical reading of Imperial history, and thus the onus of writing was necessarily negligent of other armies. In the future, then, I think that we will have to ask ourselves whether we want to sacrifice fluff for external numbers or vice versa or try harder to achieve a synthesis between the two as the campaign coordinators at Druchii.net seem to have done with their campaign last winter.

Again, my post to start this analysis assumes that the problem was not on the fault of supply, as I found the advertising to be adequate and the marketing via the newsletters, fiction, external website and maps to be beautiful; consequently, I have assumed that the problem is that players of other armies were not entirely happy with the product do to the extent that it did not engage their imaginations given their various armies. Therefore, the question will be what do we really want?

Nevertheless, I am open to being convinced that it was poor advertising.

General Helstrom:
Some very good points there, Carlo! The original post mostly concerned communications outside the campaign forum, in the context of the W-E.com forums as a whole; that is, we obviously had a lot of sign-ups to the general forum during the months we were working on the campaign, and I have always felt that we weren't reaching the general forum very well with our communications.

Involving other forums is a different matter entirely, and it was a process which went through several stages during the design phase and the run-up to "Plan B". Allow me to explain...

We had originally planned for a small-scale campaign. The "mission brief", if you will, was to see what we had available to us within the confines of our own forums. As the design progressed, we monitored the campaign forums and got worried about participation - the type of campaign we were planning required at least a half-dozen fairly active players per faction, and maybe twice that number as moderately-active participants (with no distinct upper limit, of course). We weren't sure we could get that just from our own stock.

During the spring we did make some plans for outside advertisement, and the campaign background provided for Dwarf and Dogs of War participation, and a degree of Bretonnian influence could have been grafted on without too much trouble; we had some very nice advertisment material prepared as well. Then, however, the design process came to a halt as we sat around waiting for the engine to be completed. The critical factor in putting off the advertisement effort was the lack of a solid launch date.

When we finally did switch to "Plan B" and got ourselves a date, we had been on hiatus for about four months; we had made a mockery of the term "winter campaign"; and we would be conducting the campaign through a rather crude and involved method of people posting results in a forum. Frankly, the system was entirely untested and we had no way of knowing whether it would work anywhere near as expected. We were lucky and the system worked fairly well, of course, but at the time we were looking at a "fudged" solution. The advertisment effort was therefore not revived; the hiatus had been quite embarassing, and if the system broke down half-way, we figured it would be better to keep it to ourselves this time around. Also note that the sign-up process had yielded a far higher number of participants than we had expected, and it was probable that we could pull it off with just our own members.

So, in a nutshell: The campaign was never intended to incorporate large-scale outside participation. The involvement of a limited number of other races/forums was not pursued due to the difficulties we encountered in the design process, and the fact that our in-house resources turned out to be quite sufficient.


***


What I'm interested in is how the advertisement struck you as sufficient, when we actually didn't make any organized effort to do so :-D It seems, then, that something here worked well.

In case you're interested, here's some advertisment material intended for Bretonnia.org that never made it off the drawing board:


--- Quote from: Campaign Team ---
Johannis Breytefelt looked up from his oaken field desk as sergeant Senf entered the tent. The scarred veteran raised his hand in a sloppy excuse for a salute, accompanied by a half-toothed grin.

"Som'un outside to see yer, sir," he said "Real fop-like if yer ask me."

There were, in fact, two men outside the tent. Breytefelt was briefly flabbergasted by their appearance. One was on foot, dressed in fine silks over chainmail, a long copper trumpet clasped under his arm. The other was sat on a magnificent charger, clad in plate armour with an impressive, ornate helm, the visor raised to reveal a stern face. Both were soaked by the rain that pattered down relentlessly.

The one on foot raised the trumpet to his lips and gave out a loud blare, then exclaimed at the top of his lungs: "His lordship the Baron de Villiers, lord of the Estate Villiers, loyal servant to the Roy Breton, templar of the Lady of the Lake, drinker from the Grail Sacrale, viscount of Chautre-sur-Neuf, hero of the Battle of Brionne, slayer of the Rat King of the Forest of Charlons, scourge of Greenskins and Half-Beasts alike, protector of the faithful, defender of the weak, crusader for justice!"

An uncomfortable silence settled over the small gathering. Several Imperial soldiers moved closer from their tents and watchfires, curious as to what was going on. The man on horseback - pardon, the Baron de Villiers - eyed the two men in front of him as they shuffled awkwardly under their black-oiled rain capes. Breytefelt nudged Senf in the ribs with his elbow.

"Oh, er..." began the sergeant "Uhm, 'is Lordship-Cap'n Johannis... von Breytefelt, lord an' ruler of the Breytefelt Estate, keeper of Schloss Breytefelt, victor o' the battle for Annabelle's Honour, drinker from the keg of..."

"That'll do, sergeant." muttered Breytefelt, noticing the suppressed chuckles from the men who had started to gather around. "What brings you out here, Baron?"

"Captain Von Breytefelt, word has reached fair Bretonnia that a war is afoot in these parts - a war in which a noble Empress by bloodright seeks to protect what is rightfully hers from usurpers, usurpers who would install some common wench or an uncouth Northener on a throne which belongs to one of pure blood."

Breytefelt scratched behind his ear. "Well, you're right about the war part at least. Methinks you'd better find Marshall Gernot, the whole noble bit is more his thing. You'll find his headquarters about fifteen leagues up the road."

--- End quote ---

rufus sparkfire:
When this campaign was first begun, it was intended to be a small scale, intra-site afair (and presumably that is why we ended up with a war of Ostermark succession). We were stuck with a campaign that could really only interest Empire players, and in fact could really only involve Empire players.

In the Ostermark war, it would have been unrealisitic to have involved large numbers of Bretonnians (since there was no real reason for them to be there, and no way to even get there easily). It would have been simply insane to have written in the Tomb Kings or Lizardmen.

Now, I enjoyed the Empirocentric (!) nature of this campaign, largely because I don't much care for the other Warhammer races. But next time, we will try for a campaign storyline that, by its nature, will require the participation of other races. I don't know if it will be as pleasing fluffwise (to me anyway), but it should at least be bigger.

Carlo Chaimo:

--- Quote from: General Helstrom ---Some very good points there, Carlo! The original post mostly concerned communications outside the campaign forum, in the context of the W-E.com forums as a whole.
--- End quote ---


Oops... I apologize, I did not understand that you meant the "campaign forum" as opposed to the whole forum.


--- Quote from: General Helstrom ---What I'm interested in is how the advertisement struck you as sufficient, when we actually didn't make any organized effort to do so :-D It seems, then, that something here worked well.
--- End quote ---


It must have just been word of mouth at Earl Cadfael's court, Bretonnia.org. and some of the other major sites then. I have posted at the former forever, and cruise most of the other sites. I am sure, though, that I must have noted the advertisement on the front page of this site as well. Before the campaign started I had vistied this site a few times and read some of the articles, but I had never posted and would not have considered myself a regular visitor until about March/April of this year as campaign discussion and smack was building up (I believe that I actually joined in June).

In any case, then, should we just let this thread drift into oblivion or leave it open?  Eventually we will have to tackle the technical question about other sites and the fluff question about other armies. Should we start that discussion now or later then?

PygmyHippo:

--- Quote from: Carlo Chaimo ---Anecdotally speaking, I am inclined to half agree with the good General to the extent that it seemed to me that the most active participants during the campaign were in fact members before the campaign; however, it is quite possible that the problem was not so much "trouble getting word out" as it was a problem of getting people to "buy the product".
--- End quote ---


Quite possible.  Since we don't have any hard numbers regarding the effectiveness of advertisement, we should err on the side of caution and say that perhaps people weren't thrilled with the premise of the campaign, rather than lack of effective advertisement.  This, from a business perspective, makes sense.  The campaign was "empiro-centric" as rufus said, so generating interest with other races would be the biggest hurdle.  I think one thing that works in the favor of an Empire campaign is that Empire models come with every boxed game, and by extension, every player who owns the boxed set is a potential or actual Empire general.  It would seem logical then that there should be no shortage of Empire players.  Perhaps this campaign could be the impetus to get those folks to buy the Empire armybook and finally assemble those models.

In the opposite direction, however, is the professionalism in the development of campaign materials.  The premise of the campaign was original and beautifully written, the research was first rate (vastly better than anything GW has attempted and free from those annoying and obvious inconsistencies that they are so routinely guilty of) , the published materials (newsletters) were attractive and, in my humble opinion, better than anything GW produced for their worldwide campaigns (Battle for Armageddon, SoC) based upon wealth of information upfront and being free from errors.  Oh yeah, and that they were 100% free of charge.  GW did produce a few articles which appeared in WD, and they put out the SoC book, but the ham-fisted handling of the source material forces them to take a back seat to the W-E.com campaign writers.  And of course, they charged you money for those materials.  Based upon the quality of the materials this campaign created, the opposite view would be that we (campaign crew) didn't adequately put the material in peoples' hands.


--- Quote ---1)What is my motivation
None of the other armies in the Warhammer world were written into the campaign... the fluff while superbly written and entertaining did not make any concessions for a non-Empire player.
--- End quote ---


Agreed.  There isn't much to involve other races.  Most of that is by design; it was originally intended solely for the Empire.  Part of the hope is that there are Dark Elf players who own an Empire army, and Tomb Kings players, and Orcs, etc.  Beyond getting folks who own Empire armies in addition to other races, our interest wasn't in getting outside races.  So if we didn't manage to get non-Empire participants, we weren't really concerned since the campaign wasn't really about them anyway.  I, for one, was hoping to see more Empire players register.


--- Quote ---2)Stretching the "Reality" of the Unreal
As a Bretonnian player it did not stretch my imagination very much to join this campaign on the side of Talabecland; however, if I played Lizard Men, Druchii or Tomb Kings it most certainly would have.
--- End quote ---


Agreed, though for my part I considered the inclusion of other races just to ensure participation was high, and even then that participation would always have to be against an Empire opponent.  That's part of the reason for the control-rating bonuses for playing versus a faction army rather than just any army.  This way we could include everyone and keep interest high, but still keep it about the Empire and reward those who kept to the campaign fluff.


--- Quote ---3)Late Start Date
This of course was not the campaign teams fault; nevertheless, the fact is that very few people were going to wait around and check in for months for the campaign to begin.
--- End quote ---


I disagree with the first part.  The late start date is absolutely the campaign team's fault.  I can't imagine where else the blame would go.  I believe the planning was good overall, mainly because of the commitment of the heavy-lifters, but one big error that was made was lack of redundant systems.  We should have made a better effort to recruit backup programmers at the start or come up with several systems at once.  We didn't prepare in advance for the potential loss of our programmer, and we didn't switch to a different system fast enough once we did.  

The system we used in the end worked, but I feel that the battle results gathering we did (forum post) was the cause of quite a few problems.  Personally, I believe it was the cause of our biggest problems in inter-faction BS, claims of malfeasance and unrealistic commitment of forces to specific locations.  Keeping the numbers behind the curtain is crucial, it should never have been any other way.

I agree with the second part.  After what advertising we did, we kept setting back the start date.  Who would stick around through that mess?  It's understandable that interest waned (though gauging the interest in the first place is something we are still trying to determine).  The initial response for the newsletters was fantastic.  They were released on a pretty tight schedule and were packed with material.  Striking while the iron's hot sounds like the lesson here.

We did attempt to assign an official advertiser/spokesman for the campaign, but they went MIA for a while.  In any similar volunteer endeavor, there is always a certain amount of attrition, and going into it, everyone knew that many people would get weeded out.  I believe we started out with around 30 folks on the campaign team, but by the end there were only 8 or so contributors:  the heavy-lifters.  They wrote, tested, re-wrote, tested, implemented.  A great volume of quality work by volunteers.

-
A few of my additional thoughts:

Next campaign should be kept secret until 75% of all content is completed, 100% of all programming work.
The deadlines are made public only after we have already finished those pieces of the campaign that relate to deadlines.
The results-input engine needs to be out of the view of the participants.
There should be backup programmers.  
Advertisement needs to be made a top priority.
All campaign staff get free beer while working on the campaign.  Preferably Pabst.

Marcus

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