How did you find planeshift?

[zorbels]

Word of mouth is how I heard of planeshift. My husband introduced me to the game. He played it a month before I did. He kept saying " you should really come and try this game, there isn't alot to it but it is fun none the less." I tried it and became glued to the computer for a length of time.

My sister Dylia also heard about it from word of mouth. <----- She won't be posting so I will speak for her.

[Kieve]

After my White Senches 1.3 release over on the Morrowind mod forums, a friend and fan pointed me towards the race-info page for the enkidukai. To be honest, I wasn't terribly impressed, shrugged, and cast the whole thing aside.

...'bout a month later, I got curious and looked up the PS site again. I was starting to grow weary of the Morrowind CS and needed a change. Took one look at the enkis in-game, thought "Hey, there aren't any tigers. There should be tigers" - as it turned out, according to Settings there actually WERE tigers and after applying to the dev team, Karyuu put me on that as my first task.

That was back somewhere around March/May of this year.
I stay because... well, there's a heck of a lot that needs doing.

As for attracting new players, I've talked to a few of my friends about it - most of them have at least a passing interest in game design, so I give them a poke, and even if they're not interested in signing on for work, they might find a hook in-game.
Hopefully the tactic will be a bit more successful now that there's a tutorial section at chargen and the learning curve is lessened.

[Under the moon]

Interesting story.

Once upon a time, I was designing a tower for one corner of our house (real life house). I found a nice little program called SoftCad Lite, which was easy to use, given my knowledge of drafting and basic CAD. The design came out quite well, as you can see:


But the evil Silicon Gods deemed my old PC not worthy of continued life (windows ME *shudders*) after a year. Before it completely died, I was able to save those pictures to disk... but not the install file of SoftCad. The PC was wiped, and the little program was forgotten for a few years. But, some things are not meant to be forgotten. One day I found myself wanting to design another structure, and tried my best to get the copied files to work...but to no avail. My install-fu was unworthy. So, I once again took to the net, searching for this lost install file.

To my dismay, SC Lite was no longer available, and in fact seemed to have vanished into the ether of the interwebz. Only a higher cost version was for sale, and I had no wish to pay out for a single project that I could draw by hand with little more effort. I offered words to the Google gods, asking that they show me another path. Appeased by my offering, they replied in 0.07 seconds. Thus, a paths was found, though I did not yet know were it would take me...

This site caught my attention: http://www.bakhter.com/html/freeware/game_software.html yes... it seemed like it might have what I was looking for. I looked down the selections...

3D Software ... Hmm. Interesting stuff there, but not what I was looking for. Blender looks promising.
Rendering tools ... No, not it.
CAD Software ... AH HA! There is my Softcad... Oh no... link is dead. I'll look at some of these other programs later. Lotsa other cool stuff here.
Image Editors .... Cool things in here. Will look later.
Paint Software ... Eh. I am not an artist.
Draw Software ... Whatever.
Ink & Paint tools ... Still not sure what these do.

... etc, etc...

Sound Software ... mixing sounds is interesting. Might have to poke a few of these.
Game Software ... Games? Hmmm... I wonder.... CrystalSpace. Looks complex. *click*

Well, back then, the link took you to a little site with a few (maybe four) projects based on CS. The only one that seemed worth looking at was a little game called PlaneShift, which was going to release the new Crystal Blue client 'Soon' (TM). I found the idea intriguing. I signed up for the forums, but could not play the game on my old, vile-betrayer PC (still w-me).

A few months in, I started writing, and crafted my first story. And here we are.

Odd thing... in the three years since then, I never did finish looking for a 3D architect program to design that building.

Edit: Yes, that means if my old PC had never crashed, it is very unlikly that I would have ever started writing. PS and the community here brought that side of me back to life.

[Earl_Listbard]

I found it when searching for a new game after leaving Dransik (now known as Ashen Empires) which was my first MMORPG. Google = <3

And I actually agree... Capes/cloaks would attract people. Might even bring me back from WoW >.> Even though I am actually finding very good RP there

*Listbard adds Farren to his 'hate' list along with Raa*

I am never speaking to you.... NEVER AGAIN!

[Farren Kutter]

What did I do o.o

[Raa]

What did I do?

[Pandar]

I found the game on Yahoo. I was looking for a free game.

However, I am not certain that you are asking the correct question. I believe that it is more of an issue with retaining new players, rather than attacting more people who will quit soon after they start. The keys to retaining new players are veterans being helpful and lowering the learning curve. By almost any standard, the game is very difficult for new people to get acclimated to.

[Lyoven]

Did an extensive tryout of (all) linux games for the nth-time to see if there was anything remotely useful and entertaining. Despite PS's size and difficult (buggy) install on gentoo (nevertheless cool that its version in portage is being maintained by one amongst us), I tried it and stuck to it. Must have tried it at least one time before but did not get it to work then.

Moral of the story: People that are suited for this kind of game will find it eventually, just make sure it works the first time they try it. This is not the case at the moment, I think chances might even be as high as 30% that it wont work the first time (videocard problems, download and updater issues, install bugs, server offline!).I understand this, PS being alpha and all, but alpha and a large public don't go together. If the server would have been offline that day I most certainly wouldn't have been here.

[Rayken]

Sourceforge.

I'd never tried an MMORPG and was curious to see what it was like, but didn't really want to pay for it.  I figured anything listed on SF would be free.  First hit on the SF search.

[zarre]

An online friend from the Philippines, who was unable to play PS due to his internet connection, recommended PlaneShift to me.

[hulla]

Me to i found this game whit

http://sourceforge.net/

ful of interseting software


and in my country exept somme small web page about "linux free game" nobody talk about "planetshift"

(but what is the country who talk about ps ? only 150 or 200 player online ! it is a "discret multimedia role playing game")

[Xolani]

I was looking for a mac mmorpg's to play and as the list wasn't very long I soon came apon Planeshift. What I found under the multimedia tab on the main page impressed me. (the game idea, races ect.)  I soon found myself downloading the game and playing the game.

[Tuxide]

I found this game through SourceForge back in Fall 2002 while searching for graphical mud engines.  During this time I was writing a 2D graphical mud, and I got curious to see the then-current state of 3D graphical muds.  It was through this that I discovered PlaneShift and the Treecastle sub-project, so I decided to try out PlaneShift Molecular Blue.  Since then, I decided that PlaneShift-the-engine was the most mature libre 3D graphical mud engine out there, and I decided in the future I would figure out how to use this engine to produce another virtual world for the sake of knowing how to.

I believe the best way to increase the player base in PlaneShift-the-game is to encourage corporate and outside interest in PlaneShift-the-engine.  Realistically, PlaneShift is a damn good engine, and it only has one competitor here which is Second Life.  It annoys me to see so much interest going into Second Life when it should go into using PlaneShift-the-engine:

In an interview, Chuck Hamilton, Learning Solutions Leader of IBM's Center for Advanced Learning, says IBM's challenges in each geographic area are different. India has Big Blue's second-largest workforce and hiring is rapid and distributed. IBM needs to socialize them into one culture while onboarding them.  So a program called IBM@Play was created, originally on another virtual world called PlaneShift, but since moved to Second Life.

Of course I'm not saying corporations such as IBM should be conducting their real-life business on Laanx.  What I am saying is that encouraging interest in such groups will increase public awareness of this project.  I want to see PlaneShift instead of Second Life on the front of major newspapers, and people aren't going to come here if they've never heard of it.

[Natrina]

Hmm, I think it was google as well. My reasons were that is was a free 3D RPG game, with excellent promises content-wise (namely, crafting and economy) and it worked in Linux (or was going to... I can't remember if I ran Debian already by the time I played in MB, but I remember that just getting PS to work was a great joyful experience, so I was probably in Linux by then ).

I think PS has a lot of potential to attract people: it's a cross-platform, free-forever (no catches, thank God), MMORPG in a pretty good 3D graphics, that plays in most PCs. As many people have stated, it'd be good if we'd be able to put PS in some MMORPG lists, with a realistic description of it. Maybe we could compile a list of websites where PS is listed (gamelists) so that players can go there to vote, and therefore increase it's fame, or comment (as, for example, has happened in happypenguin.org where Zanzibar has been "protecting" PS). Just a sticky somewhere (Hydlaa Plaza maybe) would probably be enough for the regular player to help out.

[citizen]

Hm, i found it a few years ago maybe on freshmeat or so, downloaded it, but was unable to make it run
After a few years i read about it again and gave it another try