Salem

League of Legends, now known as one of the largest games there are, implemented a recruit-a-friend early in post-launch development. They had small rewards and absurd rewards and something in-between. Here's the thing: They grew from ~100k players to ~1.5m players in the cycle of 5-6 months. (February -> june-ish, can't find any information of when the RaF-system was put in place)

An example of one of their most absurd rewards was 10 000 referrals. If you managed to get 10k to play LoL, you'd get an all-expenses paid trip to Riot Games HQ to chill out with the devs and create your own champion with their help. A smaller reward, 25 referrals, gave you a "recruiter" forum title. Also, the recruits had to reach level 5 with their "summoner", an avatar that represents the player who is controlling the champions on the battlefield. How could this system be implemented into Salem? Well, why I am by no means a game dev, and some of these suggestions may be complete *****, I have some suggestions:

First of all, you will only get an additional tick on your counter of recruits when they reach a point of some form of character development. In League, reaching level 5 could take around 4-7 hours, as each game is usually around 40 minutes and you level up slightly slower than a level per game early on.

My suggestion is that the recruit has to attain 20-25 biles in all and learn one intermediate skill (not all, there will be a list of what kind of skill is required, , such as backalley pugilism, field dressing, prospecting etc.

For each recruit reaching this goal, you gain 100 silver.

For a total of 5 recruits, you get a mystery hat box.

10 recruits, weapon box.

25 recruits, store pack of your choice.



2500 recruits, highest reward, design a skill or combat move or something of the like with MM.

There are just examples to get a feel of what they could be. I, by no means, claim they are the right number or right rewards.

The reason LoL is so famous is because it's marketed to hell, i remember before lol was big that they would have banners all over major gaming websites, also it's known as a knock off of the already world wide famous dota, so all that hate helped spread it around, i could pull up numbers, but your refer a friend policy is, but a small fraction of how they became so big.

This mostly pans out to Marketing transferring over into Automation. The idea is MM needs to know how many X hours accrue before a player on average makes a purchase in the store. And then out of how many come through, how many bounce, where a bounce is, player came, installed the client, played 10 or less hours, and never returned nor did they make a purchase. In our title we already have this in place but this is simply to generate exposure, and nothing else.

The issue here is that while in League of Legends the rewards were IP, and exp (i believe?) there was no benefit to spamming smurf accounts as there is no permadeath, so therefore no incentive to abuse the recruit a friend system.

In salem however, the silver you suggest be gained is tradeable between characters and the method can be used to automate a money-generation scheme bigger than silver minting, and while there could be limitations put in place to somewhat reduce the spam, the model Salem employs couldn't really withstand that sort of marketing strategy I think.

At best you could make it similar to the marriage system proposed elsewhere on ideas and innovations : Friends starting out the game together get small benefits to their character-unique stats while playing together. Higher inspiration regen perhaps, up to a quarter/halfway towards the cap. That way they have to be actively playing and studying and engaging in Salem's progression mechanics rather than just afk-ing together up to the cap.

lachlaan wrote:The issue here is that while in League of Legends the rewards were IP, and exp (i believe?) there was no benefit to spamming smurf accounts as there is no permadeath, so therefore no incentive to abuse the recruit a friend system.

In salem however, the silver you suggest be gained is tradeable between characters and the method can be used to automate a money-generation scheme bigger than silver minting, and while there could be limitations put in place to somewhat reduce the spam, the model Salem employs couldn't really withstand that sort of marketing strategy I think.

At best you could make it similar to the marriage system proposed elsewhere on ideas and innovations : Friends starting out the game together get small benefits to their character-unique stats while playing together. Higher inspiration regen perhaps, up to a quarter/halfway towards the cap. That way they have to be actively playing and studying and engaging in Salem's progression mechanics rather than just afk-ing together up to the cap.

Make it so a recruit is only successful when it has the murder skill, or any other skill above 375, which makes abusing the system not worth it.

The marriage system you explain is way more abuseable imo.

I dont think it would work with this game.

Your best reward for recruiting a friend is the slave friend to play with. It's hard to find people to play with in Salem, without getting backstabbed.

Till this point free to play is a doomhole to many games I play.
It's appealing to people, but it also have so many trouble that you just wish you didn't.

Procne wrote:Your best reward for recruiting a friend is the slave friend to play with. It's hard to find people to play with in Salem, without getting backstabbed.

Don't tell that to my friends, whom I'm trying to slave ahem, recruit.

lachlaan wrote:The issue here is that while in League of Legends the rewards were IP, and exp (i believe?) there was no benefit to spamming smurf accounts as there is no permadeath, so therefore no incentive to abuse the recruit a friend system.

In salem however, the silver you suggest be gained is tradeable between characters and the method can be used to automate a money-generation scheme bigger than silver minting, and while there could be limitations put in place to somewhat reduce the spam, the model Salem employs couldn't really withstand that sort of marketing strategy I think.

At best you could make it similar to the marriage system proposed elsewhere on ideas and innovations : Friends starting out the game together get small benefits to their character-unique stats while playing together. Higher inspiration regen perhaps, up to a quarter/halfway towards the cap. That way they have to be actively playing and studying and engaging in Salem's progression mechanics rather than just afk-ing together up to the cap.

Yes, you are absolutely correct. Worth thinking about though.

Also, at least a handful of players managed to recruit 1k people to LoL, one of them being TotalBiscuit! I'm sure that, if it was possible, it could help increase the population of Salem at least a little.