ACCOUNT DRIVE 2012!

Waldoff

Waldoff

Administrator
Staff member
It is that time again (this time for real!)

Overview:

This years account drive goes from OCTOBER 1st to OCTOBER 12th. On October 12th there will be a raffle (with details below) for all those who participated in this years account drive. Immediately following the raffle 9 days (October 13-22) of exp bonus will begin with a percentage based on the success of the drive.

We are going to be doing this a bit differently than previous years drives so be sure to read the post in its entirety if you want to participate!


Participating:
There are TWO WAYS this year to participate in the account drive.

Option 1:
First, you can donate cash to go directly and entirely toward advertisements. This is a good option if you do not have much online presence, do not know how to market things online, or are just lazy/rich. I will give you 1 fame for every dollar you donate. Further, every 10 dollars will get you an entry into the account drive lotto and 1% toward the serverwide exp bonus.

Use this link to send in money: DONATE HERE. Please be sure to put your character name in the "notes" section of the paypal to make giving you credit easy! If you forget just PM me here on the forums.

Money donated this way is completely separate from server costs and will only go to advertisements.

Option 2:
Second, you can advertise or promote the server yourself.

Make a post, buy an advertisement, upload naked pictures with SoD all over your body... whatever you want wherever you want within the rules outlined below to bring in people to the server. Do you know of a kick ass guild or forum who might want to relive their EQ glory days? Make a post about SoD.

For every 50 unique views to *any* SoD page (the main page or getting started page are normally the best to direct people to) I will give you 10 fame, an entry into the lottery and 1% toward the serverwide bonus.

The easiest way to get credit for your post or advertisement is to use this link "http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/?referrer=YOURNAME" with your character name filled in. If you do this all things will be automatic and you do not need to contact me at all. If you would rather not use a referral link just post in this thread with a link to your off-site marketing and I will use google analytics to give you credit. I can determine where facebook links come from BUT I will need a link to your facebook profile via PM so I can connect it in Analytics!

Some rules about self advertising:
  • The website must WANT us there. If there are rules against advertising or advertising game mods specifically do not post!
  • If you cheat and try to proxy a bunch of unique views I will trace back IPs and ban you as hard as I possibly can.
  • Using tricks to get people to click your ad is not allowed! No free Ipod banners people.
  • No spamming! If someones posted a thread on a forum do not post another one!
  • You can not just ask people to click your referral link as a favor to you. You have to actually be selling the game!
  • The final say in how many referrals gained by any particular person is Google Analytics! If the website tells you you have a million clicks and Analytics only shows 500 then we are going with 500. I will be publishing unedited PDFs straight from analytics to make sure everyone is on the same page. (For some reason with google adwords they charge you for clicks of your ad that do not show up as hits to us. I had 400 clicks on my google ad and only 230 actually went through to our site. Beware this sort of thing!)

The Lotteries:
There will be TWO lotteries. One will take every one of your "entries" into account while one will be a pure single entry for everyone who participates. By participate I mean even TRY to make a post somewhere! Even a comment on a youtube video! Anything! Just post it in this thread if you get below 50 pageviews and I will manually add your name to the participation lotto.

I am hoping that this lets people without much time throw in 10 bucks or post something quickly on a webside without being completely out of the running.

The prizes for the "every entry counts" lottery are:
Race Change (1)
500 Fame (1)
250 Fame (3)
50,000 Platinum (1)
5,000 Platinum (5)
Box of Angry Halflings (3)
Melwin's Idol of Joy (3)
Digested Hexdoll

The Prize for the "one entry per participant" is:
Custom Player Title
Lucky Charm of Power (1)



Both lotteries will be done the day the account drive ends. I expect to close it around 4pm PST and do the lottery around 6pm PST. You will not have to be online to win!!!

Bonus Experience:

I was considering capping the bonus experience at 100% but have decided against it. Instead, at 100% bonus all percentage gains listed above will be halved. At 200% they will be quartered. Even with this, I could very well see us having 9 days of ~210% bonus exp. This is pretty unheard of as far as account drive awards go.


So lets get the server back loaded up with new faces! I have already spent a bunch of personal money this month for Facebook, Google and Something Awful advertisements and have seen good returns in new accounts. I am hoping this will give things a further shot in the arm to carry us through until next year.

Update October 1: These rules are now set! I might add more prizes or up the reward numbers (and apply it retroactively to everyone) but everything else is staying the same. Game on!



Participants So Far (IE Heroes):
Code: 
Temellin
Daffie
Atrum
Calinon
Enzoh
Vargun
Barbii
Scarloc
Rience
Eamonn 
Utelri
Teiko
Volkier
Susvain
Buzil
Xaltec
Wywy
Gegen
Garrek
Asaga
Pkunk
Zarkoric
 
Any chance of a summary of recent changes for returning players? Perhaps an update of the SA post with a "Hey, haven't played in a few months/years? Here are some of the fabulous improvements we have made!" I've tossed around the idea of playing again but I feel like I'm out of the loop on changes and such, perhaps something like this would encourage old players to return (or at least give it another shot) who are in the same boat?
 
Some fairly recent and cool additions:

-New Racials
-Bounty System
-Global Drops
-Expable Items
-Hardcore Character Option
-Blessed Zones
 
Are there any pre-existing banner adds the SoD has? While I may be interested in putting out some advertising, I'm in no way an artist and wouldn't know where to begin making banner adds.
 
what lead me to sod

what about like setting up a game hostbot on warcraft 3 battlenet
that hosts everquest rpg maps, but in the channel b4 game starts it
advertises shards of dalaya for more eq action kind thing
prob not very trackable but that something that would be legit?
 
If we donate money for advertisement, is there any way to designate it for two people? Say I contribute 40, can I say 20 is for myself, and 20 for my husband, or do I have to purchase separately for each of us?
 
Absolutely. Just tell me in the note who you want to get credit and I will make it happen!
 
Anti Eh said:
what about like setting up a game hostbot on warcraft 3 battlenet
that hosts everquest rpg maps, but in the channel b4 game starts it
advertises shards of dalaya for more eq action kind thing
prob not very trackable but that something that would be legit?
Click to expand...

Hrm. This would be hardish to track but if you told them to use you as a referral name in the account creation form I would totally give you credit and then some (since accounts are harder to get than views).
 
I'll do a bit of advertising in a couple places, but I'll have you know I'm naming an instrumental piano piece on my new spoken word EP "Dalaya's Shards".

No that doesn't make much of a difference, but it's a thought, since I don't have shit to donate.
 
So this idea is a bit crazy but I think it would be good. To celebrate our new players I think you should ban ALL accounts for the duration of the New player drive.

This is a F'n retarded idea, however I think it would really help the new player base if they had experienced sod players to play and level with. Its a bit forced, but the benefits would be well worth it. If temp ban for accounts is a bit to extreme how about letting Old players level up new toons and rewarding them with a % of exp from that new toon leveled up based on how the account drive goes.

I really think getting people to ALT some how would help the server a lot. If I started playing a game and for the first 65 levels I had to solo I probably would stop too before getting to 65. Its not a matter of bonus exp or levels its that fact that you would be alone ALL the time it gets boring.

I will be spending the majority of October on my level 15 warrior and 15 cleric and will be doing Adepts all the way up.
 
Titanas said:
So this idea is a bit crazy but I think it would be good. To celebrate our new players I think you should ban ALL accounts for the duration of the New player drive.

This is a F'n retarded idea, however I think it would really help the new player base if they had experienced sod players to play and level with. Its a bit forced, but the benefits would be well worth it. If temp ban for accounts is a bit to extreme how about letting Old players level up new toons and rewarding them with a % of exp from that new toon leveled up based on how the account drive goes.

I really think getting people to ALT some how would help the server a lot. If I started playing a game and for the first 65 levels I had to solo I probably would stop too before getting to 65. Its not a matter of bonus exp or levels its that fact that you would be alone ALL the time it gets boring.

I will be spending the majority of October on my level 15 warrior and 15 cleric and will be doing Adepts all the way up.
Click to expand...

Getting more established people playing the low/mid levels to provide a better experience for new players is a good goal but this would be a horrendous way of working towards that.
 
That would flood the bottom levels with all the competition-driven jerk-offs that whine at the high tiers (or they'd just play something else until the ban was lifted then maybe go back to SoD.)

I made an alt once to level up and enjoy all of the adepts but then I went to join a Flitterwing raid that wasn't full and was told I wasn't allowed to kill the flitter-dragon by a group of elitist jerk-off adept-munchers.

And they were sitting right in front of it so me engaging it and solo-ing it with my warrior wasn't gonna happen =(
 
yeah its cool to do but an incentive/reason I think would help the process.

Solution 1 reduce the re-spawn on adepts for a large reroll base

Dimmi there are so many low level areas to exp in its crazy they are all empty
 
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I don't know when the last time you were low level was, but about a year back a halved the respawn timer for adepts under level 50. Those things are up all the dang time!
 
yeah they are on like a 24 hour respawn but I mean if a lot of people went to reroll would give them something to do exciting. I'm talking like 2 hours or something crazy like that
 
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