Why don't I see more advertising for MXL?

I get feed like the one below daily for different Diablo mods... Daily....

https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-gam ... s-content/

And yet I have never once seen an ad or write up for MXL, not on any site anywhere. Most of the new player base comes here form word of mouth alone. As a development team, the MXL team might want to invest some hours into snazzy OP ed articles and interviews with YT influences to increase MXLs popularity. Like in said, and it's worth repeating, I get feeds on my phone daily for the diablo 2 modding community, yet have never seen one for MXL. That says something, and what it says is not good...

I think the general feeling is that these hours are better invested on actually building content and development than to create publicity. It's better to stay low profile until your foundation is rock solid otherwise you end up like pd2 and get a whole lot of hype with very little to show. People go away as fast as they came in these cases.

While I agree that mxl could definitely benefit from more visibility, I'd bet it's definitely not what's at the top of the list.

There is its just once every 10 patches but nothing really else inbetween the 10.

Sigma 1.0 generated a lot of hype (new engine and whatnot). There was also a trailer and word by mouth was spread quite a bit, especially in the Diablo community for that announcement. The only problem was this mod still didn't appeal to more people with a big audience like a streamer for example with tens of thousands of concurrent viewers/followers. MrLLama is one of the influential personas that did end up playing it, making videos/streaming pretty much a good portion of the game content but outside of the D2 community there wasn't much going for MXL. Moonmoon (big streamer) actually played Median XL on stream at some point but it was only for a few hours so it never really lead to anything major in terms of exposure. It's the same for WitWix (ex-streamer) but he didn't stream the game, only played it off stream.

2.0 is going to be even bigger and should generate more hype. There is already a confirmed trailer for 2.0 and next step is inevitably to spread the word after the trailer is released along with what specific updates will make 2.0 appealing because the only information we have so far is that it's "big". But like I said above, for more for this mod to gain more traction than it ever has before someone highly influential will not only need to play a good portion of this game, but also has to like it for them to recommend others to play it (quin69 for example avid arpg streamer/influencer). Even with this kind of exposure, it's not guaranteed that people will continue to play but at the very least people will know of the existence of this mod which is something.

this is my opinion on how the mod might gain more permanent players who come back every now and then for new season/patches rather than temporary players who play once or twice and quit forever.

When I look at gaming in general, the biggest problem is player retention. Almost all of the Median veteran players still play because Diablo II is what they grew up with. So for us senile boomers, we don't really need incentives, we will always come back or at the very least keep an eye out on Median updates.

But if you want a community to grow, you need design tricks. For instance, it isn't enough to have hard and rewarding content (that's mostly what us old players want). Bigger gaming companies gravitate more toward easier and fluid progression content because it is what makes new players stick around. And eventhough Median has seen a significant difficulty decrease and major QoL improvments over the years, overall it is still qualified as a very hard-to-get-into game.

There are possible solutions to alleviate this situation, like early free respecs, more/easier mid-game ubers for a more fluid progression between lvl 115-125 ubers, easier way to get power like a higher sigs droprate. But it really is all a very complex thing to tackle.

because advertising costs money and that would cut into marco's vacation time

► Show Spoiler

As you might have noticed, there is wave of new players at the game and forums, most of have come from this rather dissapointing "pd2" project. Ppl ask around obviously. And this MXL project suits wery well to older rigs, not everyone could afford to up to date graphic cards for newest games.