Player matching via 3rd party websites?

Micah

Micah

We would like to implement a player matching service to help campaigns with open slots find players in their area. This has always been the sort of Holy Grail for a tabletop RPG website. If you can help people find games to play in, then your site rocks.

There are several sites that already do this, just look at these:
http://nearbygamers.com
http://www.penandpapergames.com
http://spielerz.com

We don't really want to be a "me too" site that causes this to splinter even further. Why sign up across several different sites that all offer basically the same thing? We here at OP want to focus on the story aspects like the blogs, wikis, and characters.

So, one thought we had is to provide player matching using one (or more) of these other sites. You provide an address for your campaign, then you mark it as "looking for players" We take this information and make it available to the player matching websites, which they can then display to their users looking for games. Personally, I think this would be _very_ useful. After all, which is better: finding a single gamer in your area, or finding a campaign already in full swing looking for another player?

What I would like to know from the community is this: *Would you find this sort of service useful?* Further, are you comfortable with this, or do you feel it would be a privacy violation to give out this information to other websites? Keep in mind the following plans:
* No personal info is shared (no e-mails, no real names, nothing like that)
* Anyone can choose to opt-out at any time and keep their information from being published directly to 3rd parties
* Prior to starting this up we will finalize and publish our privacy policy explicitly stating what is shared.

What do you think? Worth working on?

Taurren

There are so many similar services already in place that I wonder about the real value of doing that.

As an alternative, maybe we could get a central location that links to all of them. That way you don't have to do all the work, its already been done for you. A clearing house for "Gamers looking for Gamers".

Other places to find similar information can be found on MeetUp, EN World, FindPlay, WotC, Privateer Press, SJG, Hero etc etc. There are literally dozens of functioning sites. I question the use of adding yet another site to the mix.

Just my $0.02

Micah

Maybe I wasn't clear. We're not really offering that same service, or in the same way. We're talking about making the game matching data available for other sites, such as the ones mentioned in the original post.

When someone leaves your campaign, or you don't have enough people and want more, you just edit your campaign and set it as "looking for players" The other websites automatically receive this information and it's displayed to people searching for campaigns. In effect, by changing that single setting, you are registering as looking for players on multiple sites.

Personally, I think it's a great idea. The main issue that we're grappling with is privacy. We want to make sure that people understand what we're talking about so they're not surprised when they see their campaign listed on some other site's map with a note "looking for players"

Taurren

My bad, sorry about that. And yes, that is a neat feature.