Lost Boys Reconsidered

I have been running through a large number of team member profiles the past few days, and have found evidence that I was wrong about many of them. While I had thought them to be merely less frequent players, it appears after that scan of profiles, that many - maybe most - of those in question are total non-players. The ones I have looked at have been unchanged during a span of perhaps a week - and look to be very minimalist at best. If no coins accrue during a week, and there never were any significant coins, then even if the week is a vacation, or an illness, the player with no visible history is not likely suddenly to become a powerful contributor to the team.

I have come to believe that some of those "lost" players have indeed lost - their password, or their internet access. They remain on the rolls until IWON decides to purge them, but are essentially already gone. Others may represent either players who discovered that they didn't really enjoy online games, and may at best become very infrequent players, or players who have attempted a second identity, and found that to be too much trouble. (I gave some thought to a second identity, before the maxes were raised. I never started one, but came close.) Both of those categories are devoid of profit for us, but may sometimes kick in a very few coins.

Perhaps the best treatment for those unreachables is for us to stop trying to reach them, and ignore them until they do something to once again attract attention, or vanish completely from IWON.

Meantime, we apply that effort instead to go after new players more intensely. In line with that conclusion, we should soon begin a more comprehensive recruitment effort than the few of us currently engaged, can provide. EVERY member should begin by recruiting IWON friends. There is already a relationship, so recruitment starts off a lot more smoothly than would a "cold call" from some wordy blowhard such as I. I suggest viewing the profile of the friend - just hover over the avatar on your profile page, and a mini-screen pops up, with links to "view profile" and "recruit". HOLD THE SHIFT KEY, and click "view profile". If there is no charity team listed there, this is a prospect. (I do this to people whose profile is near mine in the IWON coin rankings, so I have little chance of catching another "lost" player - and you can do that, too!) When viewing your friend's profile, do look at coin rank - as a means to find those who, first day on IWON, six weeks ago, and the only day ever on the site - invited or accepted a "friend". If the friend is active, with a coin rank that does not use six digits, go for it! Whatever your message of recruitment, it is effective to follow up a week later, just as a reminder. More on copy-and-paste for those messages, in another article. Marie is checking on the other link I mentioned, "recruit", to see if that works, or ever did work, and what it should do when it works.