Ambar Community Forums

[Itay Neeman]

Hi,

My online game has an online community as well, which currently is in two places since we are getting ready to move to vBulletin from our own propieriaty software:

Current forums:
http://boards.darklights.com/ambar/get.cgi?S=Test

New vBulletin forums:
http://forums.darklights.com

You don't need to register to post but you to get into the game to understand the forums you do, you just go to:
http://www.darklights.com/ambar/create.html and sign up, I will delete you afterwards if you contact me here or somewhere else.

The community is the online community for the game Ambar, and they are players and sometime just people who like to post their who once played the game or are going to start soon. Our target audience is everyone, but especially 12-24 year olds.

In terms of success, I dont have specific statistics for the forum, but the entire site gets somewhere between 10,000,000 to 15,000,000 pageviews a month and 250,000 to 500,000 unique viewersa month, and I presume at least 33% of that is from the forums or so.

Anything you would like to say is good, I would love to make the community better because that is what the game is built on.

[Hierophant]

The first thing I would try to do is draw the discussion forums into the game.

This would require better integration of the toolbar on the main site. It would also require encouraging people to talk about their characters and empires.

Overall you have a good start. You might think about offering an art gallery for Ambar fan art. Might do the same for fan fiction. This will build history for your game and the community. It will bring the people closer together as well.

Once fan fiction is submitted and you provide a place to archive it, you can incorporate this into the game's storyline. In effect your players would be building your game for you.