Rewards for bringing players into the game

[Molten Heart]

And give their characters super powers.

I'm sort of in favor of this, in the form of slight preferential treatment for special applications.  I'm talking about acting as a tie-breaker, or for when some special apps are close calls.  For instance, if our beloved new friend Piotrhabera wants to play a mutant which had some slight coded advantage, and under normal circumstances is something staff tend to deny, why not let him try it once if he happened to be a star recruiter for the game and otherwise exhibited reasonably good play?

Recruiting people is hard.  I've played for ten years, and haven't managed to get anyone I know to play.  If there's someone out there whose the pied piper of RPI MUDs, I have absolutely no problem giving them a little something extra for taking the effort to bring more people on board to betray, murder and corrupt.

This part was -mostly- a joke, but if my character can get laser-beam eyes, I'm going to be recruiting a few new players.

[Norcal]

If voting is a way of bringing people into the game, then rewarding those who get new players in would somehow have to include this method. That would reward people who vote a lot. That seems to have a lot of ramifications which might not be good.

I imagine a small thing on the GDB avatar/handle would be alright, at the very most, but giving any kind of IC advantage to players would be wrong, and people would end up recruiting for the wrong reasons.

Also what about other players who prefer anonymity but who still add to the game in many ways?  Also what about the players that make ARM so much fun that new players decide to stick around?  Retention is at least as important as recruiting.  

The best options for increasing the player base, outside of outright publicity, are voting, playing well and showing your appreciation for other players who do these things.

[Marauder Moe]

So you could bring in new players... but you choose not to.

[RogueGunslinger]

Dear Armageddon Mud Storytellers! I have 10 players in my presence willing to play at my sayso. I will release them to you at a location of my specification and a time of my choosing. There you will exchange to me the rare and fabled 9th karma(full sorcerer). You have exactly one hour to reply before I start directing them to Aardwarf one at a time. And storytellers? No funny business. I get the faintest wiff of Administration and they'll all be lost to you.

59 minutes and counting...

[whitt]

Shoot the Hostage.

[Zoan]

We don't negotiate with terrrorists.