Ask YC: Your favorite startups

It may be a nice satirical tagline, but it's by no means a good tagline according to Steven Krug (http://www.sensible.com/). I'm by no means a Steven Krug fanboy, but if you've read "Don't Make Me Think" you'll kringe at "Humanity's Only Hope." It doesn't tell you anything about what the site is or does.

Mine is to fix some crappy MMORPG from the outside, by making a fansite. This post is structured thus: Description of the game, description of the problem, description of the solution (= my startup).

The Game The game is french only. It's a freemium model: the game is free, but you can subscribe for 10$ a year for a couple additional services, and you can also pay 10$ each time you want to relocate your kingdom on the map (normally you can only do that by paying a fair amount of resources in-game). There are 4 "primary" races (mystics, elves, dwarves, humans) and 12 units per race, which you can unlock by building the tech tree. Each unit is of a certain type (melee or ranged or air) and may have some special abilities (ex: +33% power while defending). You can attack or defend people to gain population (and fight armies), which gives you more production power. There are 4 basic types of resources (mana, wood, ore). You choose your race when you register for a "round" (length: 6 months). There's a tick every hour where for example, fights and the moving of armies are calculated. People can group in alliances of up to 30. You have some amount of population that you can assign tasks to (gather each type of resource or build buildings).

The Problem 1. The game shows all kinds of information in one and only one way, and sometimes you even have to cross-reference with the manual of the game that's in a separate section (and the manual sucks, too). You even have to make some quite tedious and boring work to know how much your army is worth. Overall, there's not enough flexibility of information display. You often find yourself "between" two pages, for example if you want to know what your stuff is worth in resources (buildings + army), and many, many other "cross-page-concerns". The game, overall, only presents a page for resource management, one for building management, one for army management, etc. That's just not enough.

People are so desperate to have the slightest idea of the situation in the game that they rely on fucking crappy and boring Excel sheets to make some calculations. Data entry is painful and it doesn't give much information and it displays it in a crude way.

2. That game is pretty stagnating, there hasn't been much development in the last 5 years, and it shows because the number of players has declined to record lows, and the situation is getting worse, overall. I think the makers of the game are to blame. They're just incredibly lazy, they won't fix their stuff, their code is obviously a big unmaintanable PHP mess (they won't refactor), for example at some point I discovered that 2 different pages with some information that should have been exactly the same, and hence should have been managed by the same module in the code, displayed the information differently (so they were coded separately after all). Also they use 1998-style HTML, not only do they not use CSS correctly and they use table-style layout, but their HTML is not semantic at all. It even has lots of font tags...

They won't honor the most reasonable and easiest of feature requests/bug fixes. For example, right now when you send a message to someone via the internal messaging system, you don't get a copy of what you sent. It's been this way for YEARS, even if there has been REPETITIVE requests by MULTIPLE people to fix this fatal flaw. Their response to that kind of justified whining is that there's always a workaround. For example, you could use some exterior means (ex: Word) to save your outgoing messages before you save them. And if the proposal is to put a new link to go directly to a related page in 1 click instead of navigating through 2 other pages first, then their "solution" is to... make those extra clicks!

3. They have some messed up mentality, they won't automate anything because they want their players to be forced to play the game longer unnecessarily. There's also an elitist attitude, it's so hard to follow the game that those who dedicate massive amounts of time to it feel really special about it. Unfortunately it prevents people who have lives from playing the game, so it caters more to 13-20 year-olds. Also they have a demonstrably lax attitude about cheating, at some point lots of people openly admitted they shared their password (which is illegal), but they did nothing at all. They don't seem to realize that they're alienating the more desirable players by doing this. I think they're trying to save what little clientele they have, but they should clean up the mess instead.

Description of the Solution

So, I want to make a fansite to fix that. Since I used to play that game, I know fairly well what's missing and what I can do about it. First, I'll have people synchronize their information manually between the game and my site (automatic access to the site is prohibited and I want to do something 100% legal and ethical). Then, I'll let them have the superior information display capabilities I was alluding to earlier. And I'll give them a lot of powerful data sharing capabilities to let them communicate easier. Right now, most of them use MSN for communication, because the internal messaging system is so basic. Infortunately, MSN is, like Excel, not adapted at all for that. I mean it "gets the job done", but it's boring and not integrated at all. I want to offer much nicer features, for example you could send army and techtree description "in attachment" to your messages, and you'd have a summary displayed within the message itself and then you could click somewhere to get the full description. I'd also have much better access control, I want to have very granular access privileges, for example within an alliance of 30 people there's usually an elite, a group of let's say 6 people that are much more active and take the big decisions, if they have some secret plan it's normal that they'd want to share it only between themselves at first and not to the greater alliance (in case of spies).

So, I want a win-win-win situation: The players will win because they will have much more fun with the game with the aid of my site; I will win because I'll make some money selling extended services even if my basic service, which will offer quite a lot and fix most of the flaws of the game, will be free; and the makers will win because their game will be much more attractive, AND they won't even have had to work to make it happen! In fact I suspect they might get jealous and finally get off their butts to fix their crap.

The players will finally know exactly what's happening, so turnaround time for attacking and defending will be faster, so the game will be more dynamic. Maybe I can even fight the cheater problem. I want to apply a "ban early, forgive often" policy. Instead of tolerating abuses excessively until I finally put a permanent ban on an account, which is an ineffective strategy, I'd try to detect early when someone cheats and suspend their account for say, 3 days, telling them exactly why they were suspended and telling them to check the rules and obey them next time, but if they don't take the warnings seriously only then do they get banned. I feel a lot of players cheat only because everyone else is doing it and they get away with it, and it wouldn't take much to set them on the right path.

Also, since the tedious and boring calculation works will be done automatically, people will have to differentiate by concentrating on more desirable levels like roleplay. It won't be just a game where the one that wastes his time slugging through piles of raw data by primitive means does better anymore. I want to develop a strong community with the game as a platform.