Ways of gaining players these days?

[Deleted member 49793]

Something that makes you stand out from the rest. It's increasingly difficult for non-real map servers to stand out as almost anything and everything has been done before. You need to be so unique and different that people will sway away from the norm.

It is very possible to have a very big custom server still, but it is much harder.

Countdown can be important, but in the past 18 months ive seen dozens of servers with long countdowns be dead after 7 days.

So as the title states, Im going over the ways people advertise to get players and what seems most effective.
Ive recently launched blazera.net, and the players have been scarce with a max online of 8 at the same time.

Everyone that plays it states, this is a great server but where are the players? I ask myself the same thing when I preform daily updates; interact with the players and advertise everywhere I can.

So my method is to advertise on all the forums that possibly comes up when googling "open tibia forums" and has an advertising forum as well adding the server to all the lists. I have coins purchased waiting to use for a highlight, but I prefer to use it when there is 15+ players already to atleast get some visibility.

What methods do you guys use to get 15+ online, its been known alot of servers mc people in trainers just to get higher numbers and have more people join but thats also how you get banned from server lists lol

I dont recommend you using a highlight unless you are on the first page.

I wouldn't support doing this unless players provided their information knowing it would be used for this purpose, but...

Extract the email address & highest level player name of each account and put it in 'name,email' CSV format.
Ta-da, you now have a mailing list. (You absolutely "should not" do this unless you have their permission)
There are a few free e-mail sending services out there that still look totally professional. I'd recommend mail chimp.

Pretty sure @R.yan uses this method.


EDIT: You will want to eliminate the fake email addresses prior to compiling your list. There are probably some free services that do this too.

This is illegal in many countries and can get you in a lawsuit. Unsolicited Spamming is at the least exceptionally frowned upon/can land you in alot of trouble.

Also you have to be lucky. Or at least pray from problems on server like Archlight or Hexera which would make them offline for quite some time
.

Please dont pray for this :'(