It's okay design-wise if the aim is new players.
The layout gets messed up when I shrink the font in Firefox though.

I'm not for or against the new site. I don't really like the current mentality of IRE - who I assume is making the decisions here - in that they are sort of catering to the lowest common denominator.

When I see things like:

"Join Free Online Text Adventures in the World of LUSTERNIA."

"Create a Character in LUSTERNIA"

"I can't wait to play LUSTERNIA"

"Play Now"

All crammed onto one page, I can't help but think of a dollar store... "Save BIG MONEY on your purchase of TOOTHPASTE" "Buy some TOOTHPASTE now!".

The goal of the old page - as I see it - was to get people interested in Lusternia; the goal of the new page seems to be to get people to log in to Lusternia. Sure, you might get more people to log in but they have no introduction, no real catalyst or acclimating element that puts their logging in into any sort of meaningful context.

So what you end up with is more people logging in but less people sticking around. Why? Because the people who are going to stick around are the people who become interested in what Lusternia is and a website has far more potential to communicate this information to a player in a short time than them logging in does.

If you don't hook and sell a player in the first 15 seconds, you really don't have a very good chance of keeping them as a customer. What do you think does a better job - in 15 seconds - of showing what the game is about: a website that focuses on communicating the game's features or the first 8 lines from the newbie tutorial?

The line "100% free to play. Forever" is going to make the game site mocked on every corner of the interwebs. Not only because right now the front side reminds me of Evony, but, like Evony, the slogans are trite. You've heard them a hundred times before, and ultimately they don't tell you much. It is free to play, just like Evony is. It has tons of quests, but how is that showing that some quests are actually more than handing in 10 wolf pelts to the wolf hunter? There are "thousands of skills", but that is a result of the (IMO loathesome but it attracts people) intricate combat system, which people still are caught completely unaware about.

The site has a lot of... words. But the words don't tell me a thing about what Lusternia is. If I saw it, I'd assume it to be just another Evony or Maple Story clone.

Except if you look through the archives, there are some specific IRE stuff at the beginning, then the strategy changed. As the articles get more generic note that nobody's commenting on them anymore. And it's not like there's not any news--just take a look at the Facebook/Twitter feeds and the Newsletters. I don't think the news section is just a default Drupal setting.



I can see competing with the loads of Free-to-Play browser games that seem to be taking off--I think it's a good idea to try to get the MUDs into Facebook, for instance, and I have no problem with the things like the contests or the special days, as I think MUDs are equal hack & slash and RP. But I think you're right. MUDs have their own strengths, and you can't convert them into a game they are not.

Personally, I think there are a lot of ways to better target the marketing. But that's a longer discussion not really relevant to the web site.

what happened to the Players Online page? that's really the only thing I want out of the website

EDIT: Oh, and I hate the redesign

This, exactly.

From the old site:

Followed by a list of the game's features. Like this one:


This tells me about the game world itself rather than telling me it will cost me nothing to play this game that has not told me what separates it from other games.

Compare to the new site, whose front page offers this as the most detailed description of what it is:


That's great, but that is also - essentially - World of Warcraft, Lineage, Evony, Aion, Runequest, City of Heroes, Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars, MapleStory, Ultima Online, EverQuest and hundreds of other games.

What makes Lusternia different? Why should anyone choose it over the above mentioned games?

This, this, and this. Unfortunately, it seems to be a corporate decision that all of the games are being forced into. The depth of the games is being lost in the effort to SELL SELL SELL THAT QUOTA as the head of my high school calendar drive used to say. This, plus the obscene number of blatantly OOC and marketing schemes that IRE is running in their games (multiple rewards per week/month for OOC stuff? Waaaaay too much) I think the design is fine for the IRE site, as it's focus isn't specifically on the games themselves. But for the game websites, information about the game needs to be front and center.

As soon as I'm more coherent and not busy (it is Valentine's Day) I'll see what suggestions I can come up with.

Actually it is. I work with Drupal design as one of my many side jobs.

My feedback on the website:

The colors used are, well, I know they are kinda the same as the old website and there they worked, but in this particular design they feel very ugly. The bottom part of the site especially turns me off color-wise, with the icky yellow/green mixing into the washed out purple. Then again, when I look at the portfolio of the company who did this design, their stuff is mediocre at best. Overall I've seen free website designs that look more appealing. Which surprises me, because the design of the main IRE site is actually quite nice. Although I do not see them credited there. If it was another designer who did that, I honestly would say let them have a shot at making something better, it can't be that hard to surpass this design. Also there is still a drupal favicon visible, that really needs to go, feels amateurish >_<

About the whole black hat SEO thing, while I did score a nice bit of credits for writing testimonials and comments, I must say creating things like http://www.ironrealms.com/seolist is just ridiculous. Like Phred said, that :censor: can get you blacklisted in Google. You get a lot more SEO done by just following the basic white hat SEO tips and tricks such as having good content, good links, make sure you pick good keywords for your pages, interlink to improve usability, have a page that is readable by a text-only browser, use correct title weights for what is more or less important ect. It really makes one seem desperate, and were I not a player already, I'd be turned off instantly because I'd assume this game is on the brink of failure.

The create character form is just sad. Couriers? Something to protect my things? >_< That's so silly my immersion, which I assume this is a humorous attempt at, is in pieces on the floor. It was supposed to be humorous, right?

Why does play now let me play another IRE game from the Lusternia site? That's confusing. I know why it is, the IRE player is recycled, but at least edit it so it shows just one game?

The rest is just recycled info and the same stuff as the IRE site, so that I can't say much more on. Overall though, even if the old site was dated, I'd take it back in a heartbeat. This site just makes me feel ill (the colors T_T) and my inner web developer cringes at it in so many ways. Not to mention all the marketing talk makes it come off as cheap. Lusty deserves so much better!

Eh... Genericsauce. The selling points I'm greeted with don't tell me anything about the game, and even when I scroll down to read more, I'm told:



Compare with:



Granted, the latter text is rather unfortunately positioned around the sweet Portal of Fate art, but it's vastly more descriptive. It actually makes Lusternia sound like a unique, rich world, rather than like some utterly generic free browser game.

I do love the wise aslaran perched there on his rock giving tips about MUDs, though.

I really do want to give some constructive criticism, really I do. However my first thought was "Kill it, Kill it with FIRE".

Horrendous to navigate. /must hate change.

With my distaste for change, I haven't even been able to get myself to navigate to the site yet.

I feel like I am happier this way...

This is the reason why I've not commented on the redesign yet.

About the only thing I could think of was that they used more pretty pictures on the front page.

^

But I do like the pictures, too.

Some constructive criticism and suggestions:

• Solicit 256 character (letters, that is, not player characters) testimonials from your userbase and feature 1 random testimonial on each page load. It is pointless to have a testimonial that is too long to display; nobody will click "Read More".
• Use the artwork to supplement the game's story, not to forcefully imply that the graphics are a part of the game. The game is text, sell text.
• List the game's features, there are so many that make it different from other MUDs and games! Ways to interact with denizens without bashing! Active divine administrators who interact with you one on one! Huge, complicated, arching quests! Aetherspace!
• A news section that details all the fixes, changes and additions to the game; players are attracted to a game that is constantly expanding and most games are only relevant for as long as they have new content.
• Feature the "Lusternia Live" section more prominently; on a side bar or something. Potential players will be more likely to invest their time if they can immediately see that people are doing exciting things. Furthermore, add more things that are displayed on the Live section so that it accurately indicates what is going on: show quest completions, elections, when a librarian submits a book to the great library, when villages revolt and are claimed, when divine become visible... these are all exciting and interesting features that people will see and ask, "What is that about?"

I redesigned the center of the page how I would have done it:

1. Reintroduce some verbage about the coolness of the game setting.
2. Add a short, but interesting, feature list
3. Remove testimonials and add in the game news further up the site, to showoff how active the game is. (dates on this might be nice)
4. Removed the crazy obnoxious login form. You already have two buttons, you don't need the form. If you do want the form, put it in the bottom where the game news used to be. I really think it'd be better if the buttons just launched the game instead of bringing up a form dialogue, though.
5. In addition, the bottom area needs some better borders or separators or something, it just looks like a lot of floating text. It's hard to tell what the Lusternia Live section is actually saying.

Prav, Sham etc have all pretty much nailed it on the head.

I know that this whole commercialism drive is being pushed by the higher ups, but at least sell Lusternia for what it is. Marketing it like some sort of Korean F2P Grinder MMO is ... disappointing and not living up at all to what the game really is and can be.

edit: cut by Deschain awesome

After reading what Prav said I would be for putting the Lusternia Live section where I currently have the news.

Hope you guys are forwarding your ideas to the Webmaster! I have little control over the website design so note that telling your ideas to me won't have any effect.