It is well known that playing CoN compromises players' sleep health, for which reason many serious (good) players have stopped playing. I quited CoN more than a year ago, although it is my favorite game up to now. I always miss playing this game and constantly think about coming back, but the fear that it may destroy my sleep keeps daunting me away.
So why is CoN bad for sleep? Simple: your enemies may be active when you are sleeping, and do easy and unfair damage to you, so you are forced to give up sleep sometimes if you care about your country. This is especially true if you play 4x speed mode (I've never tried 4x).
But there is clearly an easy fix to this problem: just provide a new game speed mode--"the 4x1/4 mode", namely, the game runs only 6 hours a day at 4x speed, and the game freezes for the rest of the day. When the game freezes, players can login to see the game state (all data are accessible), but cannot make any actions (and all game dynamics, e.g. troop movements, combat, construction, economy, etc., freeze). This completely solves the sleep problem.
Moreover, you can let different games to run at different times of the day to balance your server workload and also allow people in different time zones to choose when they want to play. It is also reasonable to provide similar game modes like this, e.g. 2X1/2, 3*1/3, 4*1/2..., I suggest doing an online poll to decide which one to provide.
I believe that the implementation of this suggestion will bring back a lot of players, which is potentially more effective/efficient than some of your advertisement efforts.
So why is CoN bad for sleep? Simple: your enemies may be active when you are sleeping, and do easy and unfair damage to you, so you are forced to give up sleep sometimes if you care about your country. This is especially true if you play 4x speed mode (I've never tried 4x).
But there is clearly an easy fix to this problem: just provide a new game speed mode--"the 4x1/4 mode", namely, the game runs only 6 hours a day at 4x speed, and the game freezes for the rest of the day. When the game freezes, players can login to see the game state (all data are accessible), but cannot make any actions (and all game dynamics, e.g. troop movements, combat, construction, economy, etc., freeze). This completely solves the sleep problem.
Moreover, you can let different games to run at different times of the day to balance your server workload and also allow people in different time zones to choose when they want to play. It is also reasonable to provide similar game modes like this, e.g. 2X1/2, 3*1/3, 4*1/2..., I suggest doing an online poll to decide which one to provide.
I believe that the implementation of this suggestion will bring back a lot of players, which is potentially more effective/efficient than some of your advertisement efforts.