Suggestions on what to do next?

if he didn't charge something for this top of the line risk site, how would he pay for advertising, so we would have more opponents? come on man, the man really deserves to turn a profit he has put alot of time and energy into this site ad coming from someone that plays on every risk site there is, you will not find a better one out there. Live games, bright graphics, and the future is even brighter than the graphics!!! he has alot of nice features coming up, and he is continueing daily to put his heart and soul into this site, not too mention alot of his own money, atleast we can try and help and put in a meazly twenty-five dollars in the pot. honestly i felt a little guilty playing here for free, because of the nice work he has done, on most of the other sights i feel like they should be paying me to play there. $25.00 for a years enjoyment hell i spend $25.00 at the movies and get what maybe two hours of enjoyment. not trying to sound like an ass mibi, but there's too many people in the world for it to be all about you we as a society have to think about the others involved bro. this site deserves mine yours and every other risk players twenty-five dollars. i say whatever you feel is going to make this risk site flourish then i'm with you, this is your baby., but if you give them a couple of months free, you may just be spoiling them, as soon as there two months is up they may still run, if they are serious about playing and have faith in their world domination skills then i personally feel a week to see what premium can get them should be sufficent. i played two months with climbing the ladders before i bought my premium, the way you have it set up now will make a serious risk gamer want more.

Yeah, I wasn't planning on giving away any free premium, only making it so people got all the maps and gametypes... that's just until we have more players, this way they can see all the games.

Thanks for the support 1771.

You tell 'em 1771.............this is by a long shot the best site, in comparison to the other 4 out there they look like welfare compared to D.T, I would have paid 50 for the year.

I really wasn't speaking to who deserves what. Just business strategy. It's pretty standard for new ventures to give the service away for free at first then implement a paywall when you have a decent memberbase.

Another strategy is to give the user 100% free access then after 1 month, bump them back down to freemium. They can pay $25 to get back up to freemium. This is known as the free trial.

So a hybrid might work best here, free trial then into freemium.

It's worth a shot, and remember, if something isn't working, then pivot.

I think you have a good idea mibi with the free trial. Not the first month, but maybe a couple days, that gives the user a chance to test out premimum before he/she buys it. But the site also needs more people buying premimum, so thats why one full month free wouldnt really work. Some people have already bought premimum(which i plan to do soon, once my cc premimum runs out).

 I don't know about the free trial. As a premium member on our site the benefits are unlimited games and being able to choose a pattern instead of only the solid colors for your troop circles. (not yet implemented)
So if we did the free trial it would have to be after the troop circles. I think many users might not even get into taking advantage of playing unlimited games until half way through a month.

The downside is that we rely on premium members as being somewhat trustworthy, staying in games, not missing turns, etc. Whereas with new users it's the exact opposite, we expect them to deadbeat out of every game they join. So if we give them all premium for a month or a week, now they can join/deadbeat a lot more games.

Besides most new users want live games. Live games have been slower lately, from my perspective, I don't know what it's like for those in American time zone. After I finish the new game page and the new rank points I will do a blast of advertising which should kick that back up.

Then the plan is when I have the vote to turn live games into regular games function, that's going to start adding up regular games. Most people only play live games, so they never run into the 4 game limit. When I do that though, their live games will now start stacking up as regular games causing them to run into that limit and want more.

As well the new circles hopefully will attract some attention. New users will be like "whoa how do I play as the American flag!?" And then they get that little push towards premium, maybe not enough to make them buy, but certainly enough to make them consider.

My goal though is to build an awesome site. I'll do it for myself and the other members of the site, I don't plan to get rich off of this site, just make enough to support the site, which isn't a lot, it's just more than I have now. This goal should be easy to reach, just might take a few months of advertising and people telling their friends, while I continue working to program the awesomeness that is DXII.

I appreciate the advice mibi. However free trial for a new untrustworthy player might be be painful for our trustworthy members who have to play games with those deadbeats.

How about making players skill points public? It could be in the member page or their profile.

Also the option of team games.

team games is in the next update. Yeah, I think after this next game page update I'm going to have to update the user profile page and add all these stats and stuff.

it tough getting people to do RT games. a bit of a chicken and egg problem.

Yes, that's true. However that's what everyone wants.

its what they think they want because its all they know. 24H turns are unheard of to noobs of online risk. education is key.

However when you tell them about 24 hour turns, they push it away, playing a game over a series of days doesn't sound fun, they have a craving for Risk and they want it filled right that second, not in a couple of hours, not just a little bit, they want it all right then.

If they play then most likely they will get into it, even 24hr turns, but just explaining it to them sounds awful.

There have been alot of live games latly, almost ever time i logged in this weekend there was 1 or 2 games waiting.

I too have seen games being played every now and then, with new players to the site.