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[Meph]

Just a note: An easy way to increasing the amount of players is by increasing the amount of PR. Regardless of what Toady is doing with the game, graphics and UI, you can simply start writing blogs, magazines and podcasts asking them if they wouldnt want to make a piece about DF. Act as a brand ambassador, send them links to relevant topics, screenshots and explain them what it is about, as well as Tarn Adams contacts so that they can ask about a possible interview.

[duleshna]

Just a note: An easy way to increasing the amount of players is by increasing the amount of PR.

Exactly. The game itself is already doing it's job, so now the community should do it's part in return. The reason why I personally fell in love with DF was the stories and experiences other players had put out for people to enjoy. Just reading about how others had horribly creatively exterminated solved disputes with various different races, built useless and dangerous glorious buildings and contraptios, driven raging mad nurtured their dwarves ect. ect. Even if the UI and the Graphics can be a bit scary, the endless possibilities and awesome things you can do with this game are the selling point. Just need to tell people how much stuff you can actually do in this game and how very detailed the results are.

[gimli]

I think everyone here would be happy with more gamers playing dwarf fortress since it increases revenue for the two creators as well as increasing mods for the game. I see many features and game depth which dwarf fortress provides which simply don't exist within other games or is simply done better by dwarf fortress. With such a great game I began checking with other gamers why this game wasn't being played as compared to other games such as minecraft, civilization, etc., etc., .  These other games have a massive following yet weaker game depth.

The vast majority of gamers informed me they simply found the graphics as too weak, even importing the modded graphic packages wasn't enough to keep them playing long enough to discover the beauty inside the game itself. The game doesn't need fancy graphics... basic 2D would work just enough where the visual allows the imagination to understand what's coming upon the first time a gamer sees it.

Dwarf fortress easily has greater game depth than minecraft... I'm just wondering when will dwarf fortress become more visually appealing in order to lure the massive number of gamers in the world, thus doubling or tripling the size of donations to the game each month. The game will also receive more praise and recognition by the gaming community as popularity grows.

I realize updating the graphics inside the game would be a HUGE project, but based on the benefits afterwards it feels like the right path. I like playing dwarf fortress now... just mentioning what I found holding back the game on popularity.

NT - I think I remember your name from Shrapnel's Dom3 forums.

Anyway...since DF was released, it's a know problem [?]. ASCII and the bad interface scares away an "average" gamer. I know, since most of my friends uninstalled the game after mins, according to them. I am sure that I introduced DF to at least 25-30 people in the past years on the net. Maybe 2-3 from those became fans.
I remember what Toady has said many years ago with regard to the "gfx question". [..btw, there were many topics on the forum about this, anyone remembers?]
So he stated, that if he won't get enough money via donations, he will prioritize the PRESENTATION ARC. [http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_single.html]
Obviously, he makes good money via donations in the last years, so everything will stay as it is now...for a long time I guess. [Even tho, he earns less money this way, but it looks like that it's enough for him, so it's all cool I guess.]

*edit*

Hehe, the Eternal Voting site is still up. I haven't visited it since a long time. Full gfx support is #3. now. Interesting.

[Robsoie]

It was after following some links to it on some other board that i discovered a let's play report of Boatmurdered in 2007, it brought me right into registering here and playing Dwarf Fortress, i think Boatmurdered served as one of the best advertisement for DF.

And i guess it would still be and bring into the FUN! more people unaware of DF once they read it.

[gimli]

i think Boatmurdered served as one of the best advertisement for DF.

Absolutely! It was epic. 

PS. IIRC I first heard about DF on the official Doms 3. forum back in 2006.

[dwarf_reform]

I generally only bump into two types of people: DF fanatics (players), or people who know the depth of DF and agonize that they can't get into it

I hang around mostly dwarfly places, though, so its no real surprise Anyway, the real trick will be balancing DF feature additions against the dreaded (and already very real) "FPS death", in the future.. And a nice interface and graphics don't amount to nearly as much when a lot of the content is missing (see Gnomoria, amazing UI/graphics, elementary-school-level depth compared to DF)..

Overall, I don't worry much about DF, the fanbase, or the future of the game.. To be toppled, another developer (or team) would have to work for years just to match DF in content, which would be especially difficult with Toady creating new content all throughout :>

And then DF has so many hooks to snag people (FOR LIFE) with: the detailed/hilarious combat, the worldgen, adv mode, the intense list of creatures, the digging, the hoarding, the modding, the random-gen beasts and artifacts, the storytelling, the science, the interactivity, and twenty more Any one of those features alone is enough to inspire people to overcome the UI (which ends up becoming totally usable eventually) and the ascii (plenty of nice tilesets to choose from).. Honestly, on UI, I'm more comfortable with the DF UI versus Gnomoria Most likely because I spent a couple years getting comfortable with DF, and only spent about two hours with Gnomoria (logging its short-comings when compared to DF)..

I honestly think Toady has made himself a pretty good tombstone here IF we get off this planet before it gets vaporized, I doubt they'll take Tarn's corpse/tombstone/ashes with them, but I imagine DF will leave with us, if it ever happens :> I see DF still being played a couple hundred years from now, unless something superior shows up between now and then (and the overall capitalist-based approach to game development nearly guarantees that it'll remain unique..)

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I honestly think Toady has made himself a pretty good tombstone here IF we get off this planet before it gets vaporized, I doubt they'll take Tarn's corpse/tombstone/ashes with them, but I imagine DF will leave with us, if it ever happens :> I see DF still being played a couple hundred years from now, unless something superior shows up between now and then (and the overall capitalist-based approach to game development nearly guarantees that it'll remain unique..) when through widespread use of the source code to turn it to a multi-threaded game and people put in a variety of graphics and additional gaming modes, that cause it to become the only game played.

You're saying its hundreds of years in the future.  Think big.

[ragincajun]

I consider myself a relative newcomer to DF.  I've been in and out since I started playing around 34.

When I first heard about the game from a friend I was enthusiastic.  Then I got the game and couldn't figure out how to dig a hole.  If I couldn't figure that out I assumed the rest of the game must be critically difficult and bailed early.

My friend prodded me back and I started asking for help on the forums (Yes..by far one of the nicest and most accommodating communities out there!)

So I came back, started with the Capt Duck Tutorials and learned the basics.

Still my problem is learning new things to expand my knowledge.

Today for example I finally decided to try and build a screw pump and water wheel.  Not many good videos on YouTube for those and the wiki was confusing as well.  Two attempts and I've abandoned both fortresses and started again.  (Yes...no patience.)

I think, for me, the graphics could be nicer but that's a bell and whistle...just bling.  What I need is to be able to quickly grasp how something works and be able to implement it in game.  That's where I reach frustration because I can never fully immerse into a fortress beyond a certain point because I try something new and it doesn't work and ruins an area of my fortress (driving me to restart..lol).  There's so much I haven't been able to delve into because I am still only comfortable with what basic tutorials and videos were able to walk me through.

So in a nutshell, the game is not very intuitive and as noted in other replys, the learning curve is immense and it doesn't seem to get any better or easier the further along you go.

[Dirst]

One problem is that when DF players reproduce, it takes 12 years for the offspring to become a functioning member of the fortressgaming community...

More seriously, the main stumbling block appears to be the UI, and the graphics are only a minor parts of that.  Gradually shifting workshop stuff into rooms and zones is a step in the right direction, but the UI needs a consistent and teachable concept of how the player interacts with the world, using as few interface metaphors as possible.

The community can help with the learning materials, but the UI unification is way beyond what moodders can do with keymapping... It needs to come from Toady.  And for that to happen he needs to have a consistent concept of how the player interacts with the world, and the impetus to drag the interface into that concept space.

[Inarius]

I think that these things could help :

- Better UI, like in quest management (for now, it's nearly broken or at least not efficient, when you want to report something out of 1000000 events, including the death of a penguin 30000 weeks ago), inventory management (military UI in both adv or fortress mode, simple things like image a body with slots), simplier dialogue, and, of course simplier menu in fortress mode (reorganizing keyboard shortcuts ?)

- Full translation (or modding possibility to help modders to do it) . For someone who do not speak english, some words are very uncommon or even rare. Who knows out of native people what a "loom" or "Damselfly" is, or the XXX birds or small rodents, mineral, lands, trees ? Even people who know well a language won't know this vocabulary.  The game is not graphical at all (which is not a problem for me) so you cannot guess if you don't know, and if you don't fully understand what the beast you kill is, you loose a lot of the fun. And I don't speak of myself, I have spoken around me of DF, but many people wouldn't even try because of language issue.

- In-game tutorial. But I think that scripted game will be a reality in a few years with starting scenario.

That's all, in my opinion. Any other thing could/would change the purpose of the game itself.
Considering the community, even if it is true that donations are on the rise, there are less and less new members (2011/2012 : 28k new members, 2013 : 12k, 2014 : 7k, 2015 is 40% lower of 2014...), and new members are the investment on future. So beware of what will happen in 2 or 3 years, you can't know.

[Sanctume]

Gamers are gamers, and DF will attract those gamers interested in what DF can offer. 

Even with aspiring games inspired by DF, example RimWorld, has a nicer UI, the depth of the game does not come close to that of DF. 

Sure, there are mod utility, and plenty of modders come up with good ones for Rim Worldk; likewise, DF has modders too.

But me, as a game consumer, also tend not to get every available mod out there without some "decent summary presented in a not-so-long manner."
There's time required of my play times to invest and learn those about mods and their use and function for my gaming experience. 
And sometimes, those times are wasted. 

So as a game consumer," I tend to rely on the community opinion to filter out those mods worth investing my time in.

In short, if the product is great, gamers will have interests.
The prolonged interests for that game comes from the community and continues support of that community. 

I'm just think of all those "great" MMOs of the past that I've spent (investing) time playing on--at the end of x years, it is all for naught, as my uber characters are useless since I completely stopped playing, online friends stopped playing.  It's just all gone.

DF would be the similar.  It's me who is the game will have cycles of increasing and waning interests in the game.  I've played it for a good 6 months, mainly due to lack of other interesting games.  Then I shelf DF when XCom came for instance.  After I consumed XCom, the lack of other interesting games lead me back to DF with renewed interests.

I think that "renewed" interests in DF is huge simply because of the depth it produces.  And again, my interests wanes in DF with Xcom upgrade, as well as Xcom Long War mod.  But Xcom too becomes stale after a while, so my game time focuses on looking at other games. 

But still, DF is there and available when some crazy idea comes to mind, and it's possible to do it in DF.

Now as far as finding other gamers to try DF.  My successful attempt was just telling my in-game stories to fellow gamers.  I'm not selling the idea to them, I am just sharing what "fun" I've had during my play times.

[Richards]

It's all about brand awareness. BRUHS. Get da word out, old sckool.

If Tarn. Who I met in person. Would get his head out of the sand and actually actively develop a neat and accessible GUI system for dwarf fortress, fix certain bugs relating to the military (because most people like war games), and bugs that cause inconvenience (because they frustrate new players who are otherwise unwilling to devote time to read wiki articles for work-arounds). He'd probably see a massive influx of players and publicity. Of course even though I haven't posted on this forum for years, but have been travelling the world and whatnot; I still believe that most of this forum members are happy with how the game is as it stands, and that's good that you can enjoy it as it is. It can be a good simulation and create an interesting dynamic in story and function but a lot of people find it obtuse and refuse to bother with though they like to hear the stories people come up with.

This is an unpopular belief and it has been stated before but it makes sense and I think deep down a lot of DF players are aware of that.

Tarn of course I know is someone who has now basically devoted his life to make this video game a reality. That's cool. Not all of his life, mind you, he has other hobbies. It is one of his pet projects and he has decided to put a lot of work into it. A lot of work. I think it's sad that he's stubborn when it comes to making an interesting GUI for it. Third party GUI's are alright but an integrated clean-looking mouse clickable GUI with a dashboard would blow the internet out of the water. Lol.

[Dyret]

This is an unpopular belief and it has been stated before but it makes sense and I think deep down a lot of DF players are aware of that.

Such edge.

Really though, I don't see an interface fix as a magic bullet, there's plenty of things keeping people out, like the pacing, the learning curve, the graphics style, the format, and even the genre. I doubt many people who aren't determined enough to learn the interace would be determined enough to stick with the game past their third fortress falling to some obscure threat or another, if that long. Most people aren't playing Crusader Kings for many of the same reasons, and that one has a fairly slick interface. Some games just aren't for certain people, and that's fine. Would a cleaned up game draw a bunch of new players? Probably. Would enough of them stick around for it to matter? Probably not.

[gimli]

Most people aren't playing Crusader Kings for many of the same reasons

Wait...what? What do you mean on "most people"? Huh? Hardcore FPS gamers will obviously prefer Call of Duty 189 [Really, how many CoD games have been released so far?...lol, I've only played 1 + 2..] over CK 2. Everyone, who I know and loves the strategy genre have bought CK 2. It is one of the best strategy games on the market. DF is a unique gem, you can't compare it to anything else, except to a few games like Rimworld or games like those...maybe..

While we are at it, Rimworld sold extremely well so far, and the gfx is pretty basic in that game, but the UI is much better compared to DF. Now imagine if Rimworld would be ASCII with a bad UI/Interface....so some basic crappy gfx + a working UI means lot of costumers. DF is more complex, but still, we all know this since DF was released.

Anyway, some numbers with regard to CK2. for example:
2014 - Vanilla game sales:
http://www.pcgamer.com/crusader-kings-2-has-sold-one-million-copies/

2015 - Vanilla + DLCs + Expansion Packs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusader_Kings_II

As of February 13, 2015, the base game has sold over 1.1 million copies, with the expansion packs sales totaling over 2.5 million units sold and the cosmetic DLCs 5.5 million. According to Paradox Interactive, the game is played by an average of 12,500 players every day, 104,000 per month, with an average playtime of 99 hours per player.

This is pretty decent for a strategy game.

[4maskwolf]

Frankly, I'd much prefer for Tarn to continue work on new features and expanding the simulation to going into seclusion for a year just to revamp the UI.  The current UI is difficult to learn but works just fine for me, and graphics are not some silver bullet that will draw more players, particularly since getting the graphics anywhere near most of the other games on the market would take far too long for my tastes before getting back to new features.  Part of the reason I think many of us stuck with Toady during his long development cycles is that we knew that the eventual outcome would be something awesome when he finally released, but I know that I personally would get incredibly bored with the game if Toady went into one of his strange moods for a year or more to add graphics to the game without adding new features that the game needs.  Yes, more players is always good, particularly if these players donate to Tarn, but I don't think that the vision of the game should be compromised in order to bring in new players.

Additionally, let's stop talking about things we can't control and start talking about things we can.  Yes, dwarf fortress only appeals to a very specific subset of gamers, but what can we do to ease the entry process?  I think that the idea of tutorials is a good one.