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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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