Free trials & other goodness!

[Dor of Sonoma]

So...I was noodling around the discussion thread last night (that followed isildur's new Devlog on 'night flips'), and stumbled across some gold...

Flying Lab Software's CEO Russell 'Rusty' Williams dropped some tantalizing Hints of Things to Come here and here. I particularly like the notion of inviting former players back, but it all sounds pretty nifty to me, really.

Herewith, his reposted thoughts:

Oh, and someone mentioned population as well. We've mentioned this a couple of times, but it's always been in the future. I have a dev log about this coming out, but we've been waiting on 1.7 to start up all the marketing. We're going to do the following things:

1) Advertising - Gasp! Yes, you heard right, we're going to start doing constant advertising for the game. By "constant" I mean that we're not going to do one blitz for a few weeks, we're going to be advertising each and every month forever.
2) Free Trials - As part of the advertising, you'll be able to click on ads and get into a free 14 day trial.
3) New web site - the web site has been under redesign for quite some time, and is being split into a marketing site and a player site. We're going to do a much better job for both sides than in the past.
3) Buddy keys, which worked pretty well for us in the past.

We've been waiting on 1.7 because of a lot of things, but primarily for the new tutorials because all of this has been focused on new users.

So, when does all this start? 3.5 weeks.

and

Originally Posted by el diablo eu
also instead of all this free trial crap you plan, do something like eve did, send emails to all the ex-players that have since left offer them a free month to come and try all the great changes you have made and im sure alot will stay. This worked for me and i gave eve another look for a few months. Going purely for new players is not a great plan, retain players and attract old ones.

We are doing that, starting at the same time. I forgot to mention it here, but it's in my devlog, it's called the comeback program. We give old players a couple of weeks to try the game and see what's improved.

But I could have sworn I've seen an Eve free trial ad or two.

So hey, what do you think?