The Wulven Apprentice

After the second firing last week, we switched two members from each team, and then set them on their third task, to come up with a complete marketing and player retention plan for Shadow Era!




Task 3 Details

Task: Devise a Player Retention and Marketing Masterplan for Shadow Era, which addresses both digital and physical formats. The deliverable is a pitch of your masterplan. Aim to come up with something that's actually implementable without costing the earth and taking too long to set up!

Format: The format of how you present your masterplan/research/ideas is entirely up to you - could be a webpage, forum post, blog post, pdf document, powerpoint presentation, youtube video, etc. OR combination thereof.

Winner: Determined 50% by Wulven, 50% by public poll

The submissions this week came in a variety of formats: website, Powerpoint presentation, PDF and some JPG posters. I'll link them all below, and hopefully you are able to view them all on your platform.


The Submissions

Nocturnal Advantage
Stefano (Project Manager),
Caleb, Daryl, Tomm
Submission as Website
Submission as PDF

Random Heroes
Samuel (Project Manager),
Sean, Shawn, Steven
Advertisement Plan as PPSX
Advertisement Plan as PDF
Marketing Plan as PDF
Posters: Jericho, Kairos, Majiya, Paladin


The Results

In the public poll, Random Heroes won with a slight margin, and the Wulven judges agreed. This team will have immunity to elimination this week, while the losing team must face Kyle in the Wulven Lair. As the project manager of the losing team, Stefano chose to take Caleb and Tomm with him into the Lair, where they were given a final chance to beg for their lives!





Stefano

1. How do you think your team did on the task?
Actually quite good; we should have improved our presentation, but I think the content of our project was fine. I admit we probably came up also with a phew stupid ideas, but most of our points were useful and realistic.

Unfortunately we cannot control other's team work, and they did well too but with a greater cure on presentation details. That obviously lead them to the victory.

2. How do you think you personally did on the task?
I tried to come up with as many good ideas as possible, and I don't have many regrets; it was my turn as Project Manager so I put as much effort as I could.

Looking back I may have guided the team efforts better, by moderating some topic more, even if working with four heads requires a fine balancing, half of the team was unknown to me.

And the choice of developing a website was not good for this task, my bad; anyway since I was Project Manager for this week, if we had to die we had to die my way.

3. Why do you think your team lost?
The task details were quite vague this week; we didn't have enough skill and enough luck to get the spirit of the task, or at least not as much as Random Heroes, and as a result we got less votes.

Our opponents hit more or less the same points of ours in a different way but cured more the presentation aspect.

Not that we didn't care at all for it... If we knew that at the end of the week our website would have been digested into a PDF, we could have saved a lot of time. No more cross-browser testing, but conventional slides/PDF instead. Lesson learned, I wish we had a marketing expert under camouflage in our team, haha

4. Who do you think should be fired?
When a team loses it's everybody's fault, it's not easy to find a sacrificial lamb. I arrived on the team just this week, so I don't know how much work Thom and Caleb did during previous rounds. In a scenario where I survive this Lair and I will have to get the s**t out of next task, I may want to team up with Thom rather than Caleb, just because he seems to have more experience of Shadow Era and card games in general.

So nothing personal, but if I had to fire one I would choose Caleb.

5. Why do you think you shouldn't be fired?
Pretty much the same above; I have played SE for less than a year, but I'm quite into the game mechanics and community as well. If I will have the chance to "play" another task I feel I can still bring something good for the team that other participants may miss.

The fact that I lead my team into a loss this week seems to prove I'm a bad horse instead; but I think that every member of the design team have failed at least once during his life, so also an apprentice should deserve a second chance and learn from his mistakes.

6. Any other comments to Kyle?
This task was not trivial, so I hope you will try to implement some of the features suggested by both teams as soon as possible. Some of them are not hard to realize and they are probably as important as a new expansion set. As the only non-English native speaker in the Apprentice I'm really keen about translations of course, I know a lot of people that will never try Shadow Era just because it's English only, and that makes me a little bit sad.



Caleb

Thanks for having me so far! I hope to stay on and continue participating. It's a relief to hear that the Lair is just a metaphor also, it helps dispel the images of standing surrounded by a throng of bloodstained Wulven chanting "Two humans enter, one human leaves," as Kyle steps into the circle wielding a massive serrated metal edge bent into a ceremonial twist of sharp points, and I look around me, finding no weapon of my own.

So, about those questions.

1. How do you think your team did on the task?
Overall I feel our team did well, but there were areas which could have used improvement. We began the process with a flurry of ideas, but it seemed that our team went through a slight lull of activity a couple days into this particular task. We had been posting our ideas for the project to a private forum, but the ideas were presented as rough ideas, and worded in language appropriate to a forum post, but not to a business proposal. Also, there was not a lot of coordination in the way that we would all vet one another's ideas for approval, and there was not a very clear division of labor, other than that Stefano would manage the team and handle putting together the visual design for our presentation. It was a problem that our team had no clearly defined responsibilities, so I chose to approach this by finding a niche within the project that I would be well suited to.

It seemed that we were lacking the gently guiding shove to continue refining our ideas in an organized way. I do think many of our ideas were strong, although I also see how implementing some aspects of Random Heroes' proposal would require less time and money. I wish we had worked together in a more organized fashion so that our submission could have been structured in a clearer and more engaging way, but I'm proud of our work this week overall.

2. How do you think you personally did on the task?
I think I did well on this task, but I wish had been provided with a clearer sense of what my specific team duties were. I ended up generally multitasking within the team. For the first half of the week or so, I kept my focus on generating new ideas for us and trying to come up with practical refinements for all of our ideas. Some ideas which I personally generated for our team were integrating Shadow Era more closely with social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, creating a sanctioned league to govern tournament play and track player ratings, the idea for a third type of in-game currency to encourage Meltdown and tournament play which came to be known as Shadow Tickets, and to simply increase Shadow Era's advertising presence through outlets such as online CCG distributors and "integrated marketing communications" methods.

With about one day remaining until our deadline, I also tried to edit as much of the text on our private Nocturnal Advantage forum as I could, refining the informally-worded forum posts serving as the working version for our presentation at that time into clean, presentable copy. This was not a responsibility which was clearly delegated to me, but once I saw our work in progress, I felt it needed to be done and I couldn't find any of my teammates online at the time to help, so I just tried to do my best with it. My proofreading felt a bit rushed, due to the volume of material I had to edit and the lack of time. (I feel that I should also add that not everything that went into our final submission underwent my revision. I did my proofreading and editing on Saturday evening and submitted it to my teammates for approval late that night, but several passages were subsequently added or revised by other members of the team on Sunday morning before the deadline that afternoon.) However, I feel that without this, our presentation would have been significantly less polished and organized than it was, and this could have cost us more votes than I believe it already did.

3. Why do you think your team lost?
I think our team lost for a few reasons, although on the whole the quality of our work and ideas was comparable to that of Team Random Heroes. I think the thing that was most damaging to our process was the lack of structured communication and clearly delegated responsibilities within the team. We were all doing good work essentially, but there seemed to be somewhat of a lack of coordination. I think this led to the two biggest problems with our presentation. These were that our ideas could have been evaluated more closely in terms of the time and money that Wulven would have to invest to implement some of them, and that our presentation was less well-structured and visually appealing than Team Random Heroes' was.

4. Who do you think should be fired?
I really don't enjoy having to offer up this opinion for public consumption, because I feel like the question is mildly soliciting negative feedback for the people I just worked with. But I feel that Stefano is the member of our team who should be fired this week, out of the three of us up for evaluation. I think he did some very good work on the task this week, but that he could have handled his job of delegating responsibilities and facilitating regular and productive communication among our team a bit better. Stefano seemed somewhat of the opinion that most of our team's difficult work was already accomplished after our initial brainstorming session, and because of this I think he felt like most of what remained to be done was for him to format and organize the information in an accessible, appealing way. However, I think that the team could have been working on fine-tuning our ideas and the way in which we would present them in a much more organized, ongoing fashion-- which would have benefited our final product. I tried to do this as much as possible, and I think everyone on the team was fairly productive, but I'm not entirely sure that we had a clear unified vision of the presentation we were aiming for. It seemed to me that Team Random Heroes all shared a clear vision of the presentation style that they wanted, and were able to achieve what they wanted better than we were.

5. Why do you think you shouldn't be fired?
I think I shouldn't be fired, essentially, because I did good work on this project. I came up with ideas for our team that seemed to be received successfully, and tried to remain active in the discussion with my teammates in order to look for areas we could improve. Also, I did the bulk of the proofing and revisions work on our project, which was an instrumental part of getting the submission ready. I don't have much background in marketing, but I feel like I learned a lot from this assignment and it served as a great refresher on the importance of working together as a group to achieve goals too large for anyone to implement on their own. This competition is a lot of work and sometimes it can be stressful, but I find the entire process to be very enjoyable when considered from a larger perspective. Losing the challenge this week has made me hungrier to achieve success in the future. Although I know that if I get to come back next week I will be on a team of three people versus a team of four, I will still be ready to put in some great work.

6. Any other comments to Kyle?
I'm glad to be here (well, ok, maybe not in the Lair, but "here" in a larger sense). Thanks for having me!




Tomm

1. How do you think your team did on the task?
I feel that the wording and overall presentation of our submission is what killed us. The original idea was for us to do a business proposal with bullet points, which I wish in the end we would have done.

2. How do you think you personally did on the task?
I feel like I came up with some good ideas but obviously should have done more because I don't like to lose.

3. Why do you think your team lost?
I think we lost due to some of the wording of our submission and also the visual presentation of our submission. Neither of these IMO were up to the level of standards they need to be for this competition.

4. Who do you think should be fired?
This is a tough question to answer. After getting to know almost everyone in the competition I feel almost like I'm betraying a friend by voting here. Having said that I would place my vote for Caleb. I feel that his overall knowledge about the game is still not at the level of other competitors. While he has some very good ideas, he tends to a lot of the time over think a good idea and turn it into a bad one. I'm not saying Caleb is a bad player or apprentice just feel out of everyone left on our team he is our weakest person left.

5. Why do you think you shouldn't be fired?
I don't think I should be fired because I have the passion, love for this game, and the drive to win this and help Wulven and the Shadow Era community expand this amazing game to its full growth potential. I feel like I am just now starting to learn about some of the things I didn't know when we started this competition, such as graphic design among other things.

6. Any other comments to Kyle?
I love this game so much and ever since I was a kid I have dreamed of working for a gaming company. I thank you so much for this opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream and meet a lot of amazing people while doing it. So either way thanks for the opportunity, but I feel I have a lot more to give to this competition.

The week of this challenge was also the 3 yr anniversary of the passing of my son. The fact that I was able to stay focused on the task and not on my personal feelings I think shows my passion for this game and my drive to succeed and also my drive to never let any issue or obstacle stand in the way of my dream.


Kyle's Decision

This week both teams produced some good results, but Random Heroes got the win not only because theirs was presented better but because their ideas were more practical and their analysis was solid.

Each week it's getting harder and harder to pick someone who should be eaten. Usually it's those who fall behind from their pack, or are intentionally sacrificed by their team members. But along the way, the Wulven judges have also been carefully tracking and rating each contestant, and at times like these when it becomes to difficult to pick who must go, we rely on their past performance ratings. Things like teamwork, communication, effort, initiative, creativity and availability are all important factors when it comes to picking who should be the final apprentice left standing.

This week, Stefano was the PM. And while I don't normally think that the PM should automatically take the blame for a loss, there were some concerns over organization and initiative this week. Stefano was also slightly trailing in the cumulative scores from the judges. Although the choice was difficult, a choice still had to be made.

Stefano, now you're mine!