Bein' a game designer ain't easy

Over ten years ago, I connected to this program called The Palace, which is this spiffy visual chat program that lets you change your appearance, move around the (graphical) room, and talk in text bubbles that come up next to your name. Thought hey, this is way better than text chat; and being a Final Fantasy fan, and with FF8 coming out at the time, I started my own free Palace server called Balamb Garden, for RPG fans.
I started off making rooms based on the areas of Balamb Garden in FF8. You could (and can still) pretty much go around and explore all of Balamb Garden and some of its outer areas, talking to NPCs, going to the classroom upstairs for information and avatars, etc. I noticed a fellow who had made some simple tic-tac-toe style games for another Palace server, and had him work with me to make Triple Triad on Palace's oh-so-insanely-complex coding language. (Eventually I would learn the language myself; and worked on 6 more card games before that's there now, called "The Card Game", which is more like a tactical RPG and bears no similarity to Triple Triad.)
The server had a population of up to 100 in those days, and I went on to create more advanced quests, one as an epilogue to Chrono Trigger wherein Crono fights to recover the Time Crystal from Magus, who summoned Lavos only to gain it. On the way he would fight Serge/Lynx, and be helped by his friends; I remember a line up 14 people waiting to play it at a time, since only three could be in that quest at one time. It was by far the most advanced thing anyone had seen on Palace at that time. (Even still, it's massively outdated and is replaced by a much more professional, full-sized, original RPG, which I had much fun making & designing, and finally completed recently.)
But when making said quest, I realized-- if I can make a fully-functional battle system on Palace, why not make an arena where players can each play their own character, and fight up to 5v5? I started off with Cecil, Terra, and other RPG characters and it was a hit, and made 81 characters playable for everyone. One member said, "if I send you a certain amount of money, will you make me a character?" I said "sure", and thus I made two more sets of 81 characters, this time specifically on member requests, even doing it for a living for a while (as opposed to simply paying to run the server, which I used to do and do now). As a result, the Colosseum now has nearly 250 playable characters; factor in all the abilities and status effects, and it's debatably the battle system with the most to it of any battle system in the world.
So now, I run Balamb Garden, this amazing server with three main features, and a lot of great operators; though over the years, a lot of the population has dropped off and we're lucky to ever get one full 5v5 these days. So with The Card Game, The RPG, and The Colosseum done, my focus shifted to bringing in new folks.
Like a good sprite comic, there is some borrowing of material (how else could you get Cloud and Snake in the same game?), and like a good game, there is a learning curve (though it's faster to learn than even set up most major games for PC these days); and it's free, and what I personally believe to be the best hangout I've ever seen or could imagine. But spreading the word is the hard part. Whether it's forum-goers, popular youtube gamers, game news writers, or even people viewing ads I've attempted to run for it, I have little trouble getting people to see the introduction video ( http://www.youtube.com/watc... ), but a lot of trouble getting people in. People are missing out, and we at Balamb Garden want them to join us as well. Breaking the shells of skeptics and getting them actually into what we believe is the world's best hangout is the hard part, but I've tried a little of everything. I'm continuing to try, though; and every Saturday night at 7:00pm CST, we're going to have n00bfests (group training for any new folks willing to come in); Britt from The Speed Gamers being at one. I've also let people know they can tell me their AIM on that Youtube account (JoCr2) and I'm happy to contact them personally to show them around any time I'm available, though I am at the n00bfests as well. A long-running avatar-only palace has the kind of population we're looking for-- up to 200-- and they don't have games at all; so we know it's possible. Besides having n00bfests, there are two incentives for us to get to 200 simultaneous users: A promotion that lets you earn $1 for each person you brought in; and when we do reach our goal, a random person will also get to make a free character.
Server site: http://psycrow.chatserve.co...