Well, I do use Swath, and think its a great program once you start understanding its pros and cons, but as you said SG, I'd absolutely LOVE to see an "updated" TWTerm type program, written by Will Boyett.. love to hear if he is at all interested, so Will, speak up!

First I want to say to SG, no prob.. you were doing what you are supposed to do in the game.. my style of play is different but we all can't play the same, especially if you have been tricked by someone claiming they were a beginner before when they weren't (as someone posted on here).

As I mentind before I was upset because it took 5 hours to move 5 sectors and then I got blown up shortly thereafter.

As for TWTERM, I would consider it. I believe at it's peak I was selling around 2,000 copies a year of it (this is not counting the copies of the sounds that were sold and other things). So folks liked it and I was able to pay my living expenses so I could devote my time to developing it.

However the time involved to develop it and keep it up to date with all the requests from users was VERY time consuming for a one man show, and at $18, there wasn't enough money to hire an outside programmer for help.

I am very surprised to see that folks are still playing it. Not that it's not a great game, but what with all the games the Internet offers and online playstation and Xbox games.. I thought for sure TW would have died off. But you guys are all really hard core players I guess.

So my question would be.. it looks like Swath now has the market share. Is there enough TW players in general to support two programs on the market to compensate for all the time and effort involved (although from my brief time in the game I was in, it looks like the prompts haven't changed much)?

If Swath is good but just needs a few more things.. have players contacted the author and asked for those features? That would probably be the best way to get the stuff one wants.

OK one more thing I wanted to say about me coding TWTERM again.

Over at http://www.stardock.com someone made a post showing a chart from Google Insights that shows trends. They used the term Trade wars to show how the interest in Trade wars has been waning over the last four years.

I never knew of this Google service. Since leaving Trade wars I joined the Internet revolution and I now have several websites promoting all kinds of things. One of my websites is http://www.pokertools.com.

On this website I sell programs that help you play poker online (much like I did for TW). Now this is not an advertisement but a reply to if I would consider coding TWTERM.

So I put the term "Poker Tools" into this Google service and compared it to Tradewars. The chart I got showed Tradewars going down and poker tools going up. So it does seem to make more sense to work on this project than on a Trade wars one.

But you never know.. maybe I could get into a game of TW and last more than a day and begin to like the game again and do it for the passion and not the money, but as it is.. i don't have much free time for playing around.

I have used your TWTERM a while back, it was a good helper. I think that there is always room in the market for your helper. Look at the computer industry. There are a lot of us that are programmers, and we can create software, whether games or apps/utils, that some will find useful and some won't. Ultimately it is up to the author whether or not they want to continue with it. You may find a specific area the other helpers have not and work with that.

In any event, glad to see you are still around.

Nod, Google trends is a rockin service. Not only do we need to promote the main key phrases more, but we need better SEO. As it is now the sites that rank well for "Tradewars 2002" are seriously out-of-date or... just out of touch. Makes it hard to even capitalize on the traffic we have.

Nod, Google trends is a rockin service. Not only do we need to promote the main key phrases more, but we need better SEO. As it is now the sites that rank well for "Tradewars 2002" are seriously out-of-date or... just out of touch. Makes it hard to even capitalize on the traffic we have.[/quote]

One of the main reasons for that is that Google LOVES older websites. They figure if they have been around that long they must be relavent and they give them a better ranking.

Maybe someone should just d/l the current high ranking webpage and modify it with links to the latest and greatest webpages and then contact the owners of these high ranking websites and see if they woul replace their old main page with the new main page you made for them.

In this manner the owner of the old website only has to spend a few seconds u/l it and it would be the same page they have now, just a few new links PROMINETLY added. As long as there is no work for the owner of the popular webpage (except for the few seconds to u/l) they may go for it.

Nod, but you can overcome that if you manage the tree depth, tweak the per-page SEO and site structure. At that point you have a lot of context-relevant pages with a tightly grouped keyword set, Google is now smart enough to rank that well for it's KW group.

We're helped by the simple fact that "Tradewars 2002" and related phrases are not high traffic phrases, which means there's practically no optimization for any of that. The only thing we'd have to overcome is wikipedia's site bias, but that shouldn't be difficult.



I don't think half of them are managed, and one of them atleast is wikipedia... so...

Most ppl are not apt to just pass links to you, but we could do a link building strategy if we wanted. Personally I don't think it'd be necessary. There's a handful of recip link tricks that work, plus promote a static page on digg... would be very easy to get this page to the top of it's KW cluster.



That's assuming those old websites have any real link value and are managed by someone. We don't really need to rely on that. In the top 10 you've got a geocities and a tripod acct, both of which pass practically no link juice these days (like what happened w/ squidoo last year, laff).