What is it like for new retros these days and how easy it it to become populated, and why?
What is it like for new retros?
What is it like for new retros these days and how easy it it to become populated, and why?
Building up a new retro is sometimes easy and sometimes hard, it really does depend on who you know and being unique. When i say depending on who you know, starting a retro by yourself is really hard, it's very very hard to get users to stay because there isn't any community & even if you had somebody hosting events then there wouldn't be many playing so it puts users off a lot when it comes to joining smaller communities. Most people are scared to even join smaller retros due to owners just paying for 1 months server cost and closing up - then all their rooms they have built, and put time and effort into are gone, so people stick to bigger retros because *most* don't reset.
Being unique is a key factor to running a retro, nobody will want to join a small retro that's exactly the same as a huge retro because they can just go to the huge one to get the same features. However you do get some staff-thirsty teens that will stick around, but that wont be many... maybe 2 or 3. If you do things correctly and create your own features then people see you put in work and decide to stick around.
Having professional staff members is also another key factor. Users hate hotel alerts, so if you have a staff member that is constantly abusing hotel alert, you will not have people stick around long. Also I've seen on smaller hotels, where a staff member would post a users IP address in chat for the whole room to see, it scares users away completely.
Hope this helps you & future people reading.
I cannot say it better!Originally Posted by asesinato
And a good shop ingame is always good!
My understanding is that for these days the main methods of advertising have shifted from advertisement threads on forums and top sites alone... that used to be enough back in 2010.
Now it seems the methods are a bit more ruthless with having to go on other big hotels to get their users and Facebook communities some times. (It's actually fair game to take users from other retros.. since they're taking users from Habbo)
Good question lol
Personally i think it would be a horrible grueling process to try and make a populated hotel at this day in age, especially with so many new hotels coming around that are the exact same!!
95% of new retros are failures now. They expect to dominate the user counts but in theory they won't, they're run out of money from the allowance their parents will give them and within a month they'll be gone. This is ultimately due to everybody expecting to be spoon fed in this section, they'll download the first emulator they see, post in all the help threads with literally EVERY single error they'll get, 99% of the time, the error is within the logs and is an easy fix with common knowledge.
If all the new owners weren't 14 year olds with no common sense or any idea of how to run a hotel this section would be such a nicer place.
You should make a retro that is different than all the others.
I have seen a lot of retros with regular revcms, phoenix emulator and a outdated catalog.
These hotels are mostly down in a week.
But being creatif is not the only item for a good retro.
I had a hotel for a year and I never reached more than 15+ online. I made my own cms, emulator (a part of the emulator), and a catalog.
I never understood why I only reached 15+
Different how? It will still have all the features all the other hotels have, just looking differently. The only possible way I could see someone having a unique hotel would be to overhaul the Habbo.swf UI which is ridiculously time consuming.
Another way is to use Jabbo and beef it up a bit :P
Or you can just create your own custom furniture but make sure it's up to standard not blurry and ugly, add fun commands, constant weekly events - like ROTW and stuff (come up with new original ones), add features to the website; e.g a Rare Vault, homes with stickers and such. Think outside the box, there is a lot of stuff that hasn't been done yet & can/will attract more users to your site.
Don't be boring and follow big hotels footsteps. Another thing, users love credits and duckets. Give em' a couple thousand upon register. I've noticed when I myself made it 5,000 credits on register, users would build half a room and run out of credits and just quit.
Be welcoming, advise your staff members to welcome new users to the hotel & fulfill their requests, for example - give them the badges they love. Don't be a scrooge and be like 'no that badge is suber rare u canot have xD'
Remember, it is possible to grow your hotel, but you just need patience. A lot of these money hungry kids think they can get 100 users in a few days & when that miracle doesn't happen they throw a tantrum & just close or open up a new hotel.
Keys to a successful Retro.
- Make it v26
But seriously, it's hard to get a Retro out there now compared to the older times where you could post it on TopHabbo and other Ranking websites (Do these still exist?) Back in the day, programmable features used to play a huge role on users, for example remember custom commands which the higher-tier Retro's had? Another feature that was noted above this post, is custom furniture, this stuff played a huge factor, personally I used to love using Tsuka's Car Models, it was just so unique that it made the game itself fun!
I think there's a user market that everyone is missing. In my experience with any website where you're trying to compete with others, the main obvious goal is to be different. Well.. when that comes to retros people all say "Different how?!"
Maartvn stated himself earlier that he had an all unique hotel and he has no idea why it didn't generate users? This is the same question from so many web masters "My website's looking awesome and has cool features but nobody wants to stay!?!"
There's one key thing here that's most important which everyone has missed so far: User experience.
The main reason why V26 hotels prospered so well was because the hotels were all actually run with the same modest goal: Providing the user with the best experience possible.
These days even the best coder will pump their hotel with features, new furniture etc, but if the experience is boring for the user they will always leave.
Hotel owners these days don't have the expertise or personality usually to run a huge hotel or even a decent 50+ community. They open it, add furniture, edit a few CMS images but they totally forget to run constant events, competitions, and make it all fun, coirky and unique! The events should be silly, unique, etc just like Habbo was when it was most successful. Create games and a score system to make the users have fun competing against eachother, that is something largely missed since V26 had battleball, snowstorm, etc.
Have great fun, unique, silly but appropriate staff and try to create that magic that retros used to have back in the V26 days, and truly engage your audience rather than just entertain them.
Overall though... retros were most successful before every single teenager had cell phones. Habbo was a unique way for teens to go online and talk with anyone in the world, it was the first social media for teens really. This gave Habbo a sense of astonishment and amazement that we could talk with users across the world, dance with them, etc. That magic and astonishment is gone... retros are full of profanity and rude people.... and retro players are damn hard to even entertain or have a full 1 minute conversation with these days.
My old era of the Habbo user generation is gone, and it's a new one these days. I don't like it at all, which is why I'm migrating away from Habbo and making my own game to recreate the old experience I used to have, and share it with whatever users want to play :P
From my experience of running a private Habbo server, the beginning was hard. It starts off being a bit difficult because not many people will join - but even if they do, they won't stick around much. They will either sign up for a day and never come back on or apply for staff positions, essentially you'll have a server where all your users are staff.
Like everyone said above, you need to offer something which other servers don't offer. Give people reasons to why they should join. After you figure that out, it will become easier but then again it could become hard to maintain a server with several users, especially if they're all online at once. You'll need to look for honest moderators to keep your server running smoothly.
The way to success is good reputation and keeping it professional. Everytime i get on new retros there's:
a) staffs fooling around with commands i.e. makesay, control, hotelalert etc.
b) staffs giving away free stuff to friends, banning people they don't like.
c) staff having bad language, or just being disrespectful to regular users.
Good owner keeps everyone equal, friends have same rules as everyone else. You can talk to friends but don't ignore players around you, and don't do the mistake i do fairly often; afk in rooms. There will just be "omg shit staff ignoring me!!! never answers my help requests!!!"
When i created my first retro i had pretty decent reputation in our community, i got 50 users on the day of opening without advertising myself at all. We were keeping it professional, staff were just like in real habbo, except they really played the hotel and knew what was going on. I used to accept all friend requests, and answered all chatmessages except the ones that were "plz free st00f". It was pain in the ass with 6000 friends on my list, it started to get so laggy that i couldn't get inside the client anymore :D It took so long to load all friends that server disconnected me before i got on.
I say remove the Help section, or limit it so only users who have XXX amount of posts and have been a member for XXX amount of months. I'm sick and tired of seeing skids come into the Help section only to ask for help on something as simple as forgetting to enable the port through firewall. I don't mind helping people and all, but like you said everyone's expecting to be spoon-fed. It's ridiculous.
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