Brainstorm: Ideas to attract new players

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  • Brainstorm: Ideas to attract new players

    With TOW looming, i thought it would be a good idea to brainstorm some ideas to add people to the hobby. Here are some we have used at our club succesfully as well as some that I took from when I first started playing.
    1) our clubs has a lot of 3d printers and we all share armies so that if anybody wants to try anything new, they can. It also means you aren't playing the same thing every week. I know this isn't feasible for everyone, but I know many libraries and other places that have 3d printers available where you could go to print new miniatures. We also allow all the proxies for the same reason.
    2) If people want help, we collectively do our best to do it. This means for rules, making sure that people in practice games can redo certain things, and even have some players watch games and observe to point out certain 'mistakes' or at the very least an alternative view on what you could do in the moment. We also have helped each other with notes for certain matches going in to tournaments so we succeed more as a club and create more of a bond.
    3) I think small scale (~1000 point) megabattles could be a really good way of adding interested parties, as you need a smaller threshold of models and its way more accessible to people interested in the hobby. I was introduced this way in 6th edition and it sparked my passion for the game as a dingdong 11 year old with a starter set of orcs. I also think it would be particularly effective at hobby stores on a consistent basis. We would need a rulesset to compensate for the smaller battles, but I definitely think it's achievable and would add heaps of community and visibility
    4) bring back escalation leagues and map based campaigns similar to the generals compendium. It's more a compromise for the fluff players and the WAAC ones where anyone can find something they like and focus on their experience. This is the hardest one for me to actually figure out how to make it work but again I think would be helpful overall.

    Would live to hear other ideas and strategies people have used to try and achieve this.

  • Expand support for homebrew.

    Seriously, why isn't T9A pushing the fans to make their own rules and armybooks for this community driven project? Some system of getting official playtesting and gradually progressing into an officially approved armybook would be great. Why even have the T9A staff make armybooks when the fans could make them and staff could just be there to ensure balance.

    GW can't do that, they're too concerned about protecting their IP to allow fans to have fan content. We could do that. It's something we can uniquely do as a free, model agnostic game.

  • I started playing this game recently, so in my post I will describe what I would like to see and I think this game lacks. For now I play online only, so several ideas reflect that.

    1. Interactive Online Wiki with full up-to-date game rules, army books and lexicon.
    2. Wiki with units build and tactics description, how to use them, their synergy with other units.
    3. Videos with basic rules explanation. Need to update them frequently, if rules are changed drastically (plus recent videos create the illusion that the community is healthy and makes content for the game)
    4. Cleaning and reorganizing For the beginners subforum. Several pinned themes contain videos that are not available. And in my opinion, we need a clearer guide that describes how the army is played, its strengths and weaknesses (plus the whole Forum cleaning because there are dead links).
    5. Making a PDF campaign where beginners can see core game tactics. For example:
    * How to decide how many rank and files should have an unit.
    * When and how to use chaff
    * How to compare and decide if unit is effective against other unit.
    * How to counter units.
    * Process of thinking about the tactic for start, middle and late game, and how to correct it fast, if it does not work
    6. Videos about the same concepts.
    7. League for beginners. Every beginner gets a more experienced player. They help beginners to make roster, develope tactics, and answer other questions.
    8. Creating Beginner Rosters for each army, with in depth analysis of units and general tactics and using magic. What units in rosters are for.
    9. Creating battle reports aimed for beginners. When The author not just describes what happened, but explains why he did that move and not otherwise. Using video recordings of whole or edited TTS game is more preferable than photos.
    10. Make contact with multi game battle report creators for ads battle report. I saw old (around 6-7 years old) battle reports of relativly popular youtuber and they have 6-17 thousands of views.
    11. What I really like in TCG are Puzzles. I think it is a fun way to learn spells, units interaction and helps develop way of tactic thinking. Of course we have randomness with dices, but can assume they roll average.
    Creating a program of Content Creators / Trainers could help too.


    P.S. Yes, I understand that implementation of all these ideas requires a lot of time and money resources, but I think this will help to grow the community.
    I am not sure, that it is allowed to make links to other game systems to show examples how it's implemented.
    :DL:

    The post was edited 2 times, last by Brisaite ().

  • Brisaite wrote:

    ...
    5. Making a PDF campaign where beginners can see core game tactics. For example:
    * How to decide how many rank and files should have an unit.
    * When and how to use chaff
    * How to compare and decide if unit is effective against other unit.
    * How to counter units.
    * Process of thinking about the tactic for start, middle and late game, and how to correct it fast, if it does not work
    ...
    see here: No 'tactics for beginners' thread?

    There is nothing like such a carefully formulated thing as you are asking for, and it is not so nicely presented, and it isn't "official project stuff", but there is advice on many of these topics, including tactics articles on chaff and formations.
    List repository and links HERE
    Basic beginners tactics HERE
    Empire of Dannstahl HERE
    Adjustments to 2.0 HERE

  • One year ago we looked at starting up our club again after all the lockdowns. During that time, players had lost interest and others had moved to different cities.

    We started with like 3-4 T9A players and that was it. Currently we have 6-7 T9A players and about as many 40K players. They key is simple: visibility, visibility, visibility. If nobody knows you exist, nobody will ask to join.

    We're a student organisation, so that's a big plus in that we were able to be included in official listings of student organisations that gets handed out to new students. If you're at a hobby store, posters and cards will do wonders. If possible, having a simple website or discord or facebook group helps a lot, preferably linked to via QR code on the posters and cards.

    For us, the biggest thing I think we did was the hobby introduction event last fall. We also had a small table at a minor "activities for new students" recently. Nothing big, just a table showing some minis where we could talk about the games we were playing:




    If you play 40K or AoS in addition to T9A, that makes it a lot easier because GW is marketing those games and awareness in nerd circles is high. Introducing T9A as something in the same vein as what those interested already know about makes things a lot easier. The way we did it here was having one half of the table represent our go-to Sci-Fi game (40K) and one half represent our go-to Fantasy game (T9A), so if someone was familiar with wargaming at all we'd ask "are you into sci-fi or fantasty?" and then take it from here. This did not require a lot of effort at all, whereas the hobby introduction was a lot more demanding since we dealt with more people and let people sit down and paint. The bigger the event the harder it gets, obviously.