Facebook

[Crow_T]

Social media is a ball and chain, I can't blame anyone for not wanting to open that can of worms.

[max_torch]

Wesnoth does need better PR.

After looking again at what I said I thought about it and I guess perhaps it doesn't really "need" better PR, because when I start a game on the server I don't have to wait a long time for someone to join which means there are sufficient amount of players.

This seems to be a niche area of gaming

but of course there's no denying that everyone would enjoy and benefit from Wesnoth having a wider audience and have experiences like meeting someone else who plays it and being able to talk about it outside of the forum.

I think the bottom line is, it doesn't really happen because no one considers it their job to do this kind of stuff. If you want to appoint yourself "wesnoth evangelist" and make an effort to spread the word via facebook, twitter, what have you, I don't think anyone would stop you. And I think you are right, as I argued before I think the project might significantly benefit, broadly speaking and in the long run, from this.

So I guess there are two ways of looking at it, as whether it is just a want or a need.
This is just my 2cents and my opinion is very open to change.

[Konrad2]

Wesnoth does need better PR.

After looking again at what I said I thought about it and I guess perhaps it doesn't really "need" better PR, because when I start a game on the server I don't have to wait a long time for someone to join which means there are sufficient amount of players.

you should try to open a conquest game...

[taptap]

I could be wrong, but I think there are very few games out there that are free with no commercial strings attached yet offer the same level of strategic depth in such an easily accessible way. This seems to be a niche area of gaming, for two reasons:

1.) Discerning gamers who care about strategic depth tend to be either a) willing to spend money on the latest highly-publicized commercial offerings, or b) similar to A but willing to abuse pirate / warez, etc. to get their fix

There are surely highly publicized commercial offerings, but aren't most of them complicated instead of deep with a tendency to be horribly broken with regards to gameplay? Be it civilization type games, total war games, high strategy games ... (I am not really up to date, but you get the idea.)

@getting hooked:

Personally, I got hooked because of the difficulty of Siege of Elensefar. Losing that scenario a few times made me appreciate the game as a strategy game (and not just a method to waste time and feel epic).

@popularity:

The one thing the Wesnoth community could do for higher popularity (or only player retention) is better support / organisation for multi player (events). If you join casual MP games, it is really easy to get annoyed after you waited for players and then you are stuck with it halfway because your opponents left, and this happens regularly. Competitive play may have some nasty side effects, but it seems definitely easier to get a nice game you can play to the end in the ladder than just by the mp lobby.