The Merits of Redwall

[JesterAverageJoe]

Before finally coming here a google search revealed that this were the last playable Promisance anywhere online, but a curious thing I noticed before last round began; 7 active players out of 9 who'd started to play given June 2020's results (which is an improvement over the last site I'd burnt myself out over). It can seem a blur from the last time I was active in the game, but I've experienced the death of Promisance elsewhere whereon the same depressing server(s), populated only by 1-3 jaded players, the admins bore the burden of maintaining & hosting stagnating rounds to little personal benefit. Perhaps there've been declines & negligible rounds here as well, but there seems to be some difference here I'm finding difficult to articulate.
In the last round I was able to enjoy some dialogue between relative strangers who'd given me some hope that the game was not yet extinct. There, I felt inspired to create a thread to explore the concept that maybe the Vanilla themed (default, high fantasy oriented) Promisance so prolific once upon a time wasn't enough to keep it relevant. It has always been my go to theme in other games because I happen to be a fan of Tolkein, Salvatore, et al. and also, different, was at one point scary to me :P
Now that I'm here though & I see that there have been significant surges in activity in more recent history, I wonder if this variant has some quality that better supports this ageing game's shaky legs? There seems to be alot to like here, & while relearning that Leaders were just Wizards w/ a bigger plume in their hat, there seems to also be an otherwise solid community that has kept this beloved game alive. I believe that perhaps if I can understand it better, I can then appropriately promote it elsewhere online & in real life. I figure every little bit counts, but what are the thoughts of others?

[Krowdon]

I've always struggled to understand the game but I'm around for the community!! I made a lot of good friends here, and even people who don't come around anymore I find myself thinking about from time to time.

I do like to play but I like the people more!

[windhound]

Woo critter prom reigns supreme (...many of the other promis kiiinda looked down on us, lol). 
Our playerbase has tended to be pretty friendly, esp compared to some of the other promis.

It's probably mostly the community that held people here, though the theme can bring people in. 
We were loosely attached to the ROC (Redwall Online Community), which has largely faded away, but we got a chunk of our membership from there.  

tbh we're about dead here. 
Many of the other promis shut their doors while they still had a larger playerbase than we do now.   But /shrug, one of my other sites is basically paying for the host so it doesn't cost me anything to keep the site up.   
As long as a handful want to keep playing I'll leave the game up, takes me a few min at the end of each month to post the results and reset so nbd.  If we get to the point where noone signs up for a round I'll close it up.   

[Krowdon]

That would be really sad if it happened tbh

[JesterAverageJoe]

I've always struggled to understand the game

Well, I mean simplistic in that it's visual style harkens back to an era of pc games more populous with the theatre of the mind narrative (at least for me). Despite having played at least as early as 2005, there seems to be always more for me to learn. Like for the leader strategies & missions (seemingly wild magic elsewhere), until very recently I could not make sense of its mechanics but w/ the helpful note under the general's screen, I finally got a sense for the prerequisite ratios in order to use those abilities successfully :)
I don't s'pose you're the literary sort whose strength with the word comes at the cost of mathematic missteps? :P

Many of the other promis shut their doors while they still had a larger playerbase than we do now.

I s'pose I was surprised when QMT halted operations, but I'm inclined to believe that maybe keeping the same game up imposed on his other projects. As it was, I feel like that site had a highly competitive playerbase & that's probably why I never got through a full round there.

I think from browsing some of the events & such, it seems evident that leadership here has a phenomenal capacity to generate hype & make certain games more exciting with those themed events. Not that a policy of "Some rounds are more important than others" is something I would be entirely happy about, maybe that's the way to artificially excite some of us more Adultly Indoctrinated players & perpetuate a little more consistency? Holiday oriented rounds have some RP potential & could be relevant for those whose homes are still amidst community event cancellations, while some rounds like what I'm now anticipating will be more of an open, practice round. To the site's credit, the background Lore concerning Redwall, I think, does allow for a more RP-friendly environment.

Thank you for your respective input; regardless of why we're here (I'm finally coming around to critter-prom, so there's hope :P), there's definitely something special to appreciate & can warrant the occasional return of the other members of the community~

[windhound]

We're based on 18 year old QMT code and diverged from there.

And we do have built-in round themes I could run.
Forced teams, Emperor, Ladder, Storehouse, Race Roulette, no Leaders / Pub Market / Private Market....
None of them 'more important', just different themes with different styles of gameplay required.   

ie, for Emp rounds an admin would setup an account with a massive amount of troops, land, and resources with the goal being for the players to break him like a pinata. 
Those rounds were interesting to watch, different factions would form with different strategies -- some with the goal of simply swooping in and robbing the team that broke the Emp first. 
iirc one round the Emp remained unbroken not because he was too tough, but because the players squabbled amongst themselves, lol.   

The problem is most of the themes don't really work all that well with less than 20 active players, and we're lucky to pull five atm.   

In the past we've done membership drives, one of our admins even paid for Facebook ads.
But RWL faced the same issue as the other Promis, that when Promi was written there were much fewer online games and now there's a ton of 'em. 
And I think the ROC suffered with Jacques' death, but smaller websites have been mostly abandoned for Facebook, Reddit, etc... 

Basically...   yeah.
Wish you would have come around earlier  :P   
fwiw, I found RWL a few months after it launched, #116 first round.  Haven't always been active, but never really left.   A bit sad to see it so quiet, but then again I don't really have the time to devote to it anymore.   

[JesterAverageJoe]

The problem is most of the themes don't really work all that well with less than 20 active players, and we're lucky to pull five atm.

That is unfortunate, as some of those, like w/ the Badger, sounds like it'd've very much been a fun round~

In the past we've done membership drives, one of our admins even paid for Facebook ads.

It's funny you mention; Facebook was encouraging me to boost the dedicated Promisance page I run (albeit not entirely consistently), but for some reason I haven't been able to effectively use the $10 credit just yet :/
But as an advocate of the game, it is my intent to promote it for as long as willpower & feasibility permit. I do feel all-the-more responsible to see that it doesn't just go extinct online~

But RWL faced the same issue as the other Promis, that when Promi was written there were much fewer online games and now there's a ton of 'em. 
And I think the ROC suffered with Jacques' death, but smaller websites have been mostly abandoned for Facebook, Reddit, etc...

Not that stating simply, there's also more people around the world online than ever, it doesn't negate your point. But in that, I would like to extrapolate that the presence of more diverse, niche communities dedicated to retrogaming, the society for creative anachronism, wildlife rehabilitation, etc... -shouldn't rule out the possibility of player influx (although how many trickle in from that first, relevant, aforementioned example can only speculated), yet I'll admit the numbers won't quite be what they were... but maybe annually, they can be~
Or maybe I'm just a displaced cheerleader trying to back a horse that's content to retire? Can I speak to your manager? :P

[Disl]

What is special about this game originally is the Redwall series as that is what established the community. This then developed the rivalry and friendships over the game's code.  Now you have long time members like Shadow and Windy who have kept this game up as long as it does not inconvenience them. 


That's what happened to other promisance games: Mawerick shut down Valhall games due to lack of sign ups and own declining interest.  Quietust shutdown Qmt because 1 specific player was trolling the forums and there was no forum moderator . Lord Corwin had his own game for a bit. Shut it down due to server costs.  Heck Shoot mentioned shutting his down due to costs as well.


Now this is my own opinion but generally promisance players are just toxic human beings. Needlessly belligerent, uncooperative, egotistical and quite often terrible at the game lol.

Redwall is different. likely due to the age difference. typical promisance players are jaded 30+ year olds while the redwall players were mostly teenagers who liked to role play as a furry warrior. Redwall was welcoming while other communities had palpable hostility.

But now in 2020 the server is lucky to have 2 active players for the month. Basically to answer your question: the server still runs so it survives, which is not equal to thriving.

[JesterAverageJoe]

Kind of a late response to this thread (personally wanted to avoid over-posting as I feel like w/ the given, sporadic activity; I didn't want to oversaturate & appear unavoidably abrasive [but that could just be the anxiety talking ಠ_ಠ])...
Buuut, thanks for that bit of insight, it really helps me get some perspective on the state of things, being some guy that's come out of the woodworks wondering:[spoiler][/spoiler]
But I guess this brings me to my final position -if I haven't already stated it elsewhere; anybody know of some ongoing, patreon-esque platform whose proceeds go to anybody still involved in development or simply hosting a functional server?

[windhound]

Now you have long time members like Shadow and Windy who have kept this game up as long as it does not inconvenience them. 

This is a fair assessment.   

Kind of a late response to this thread (personally wanted to avoid over-posting as I feel like w/ the given, sporadic activity; I didn't want to oversaturate & appear unavoidably abrasive [but that could just be the anxiety talking ಠ_ಠ])...
Buuut, thanks for that bit of insight, it really helps me get some perspective on the state of things, being some guy that's come out of the woodworks wondering:[spoiler][/spoiler]
But I guess this brings me to my final position -if I haven't already stated it elsewhere; anybody know of some ongoing, patreon-esque platform whose proceeds go to anybody still involved in development or simply hosting a functional server?

tbh I don't think anyone is actively developing a Promi at the moment
Earth Empires is still trucking I guess;  it's along the same lines, but not really a promi (...iirc it's older than promi?)

There are some fairly mature versions of promi out there available for download, imo FAF is probably one of the more solid - https://github.com/jbarbero/frostnflame 
But QM(T) was probably the most widely used - https://sourceforge.net/projects/qmpromisance/ 

fwiw, it costs very little to host a promi with the normal <250 player count.   
Probs get by with the low tier $5/mo shared hosting plan most places offer.   
A loooong time ago when most internet sites were static iirc we did have a host get upset at us for CPU usage, but with the monsters most modern webhosts use it really shouldn't be a problem. 
's why I'm kinda surprised Disl said multiple people shut down their promis due to costs...  $60/yr + $15 or so for the domain isn't all that much.   'course, I say that while RWL mooches..   

If you wanted to launch your own go for it, I can provide some mild guidance if needed. 

[Durza]

I like to think that there was a fair amount of discovery of RWL due to it being a Redwall Game, or at least that is how I came across this site back in high school.  The community I felt was what kept you (AKA "the Supergule"). 

It was a few years after that which I eventually looked at other promi games, and what I saw was generic(?), something based around a stereotypical Dungeons and Dragons game setting or a Civilization setting.  I will admit that I did not dig much deeper into individual game lore so I might be missing the flair of a particular game *shrug*

If you asked around the community you'd always find someone willing to help the new player.  Silly clan themes for the Turbo round reset's.  The Spa room and the shenanigans that went on the Trolls, blobfish, Imperium to name a few.

just my $0.02