Somebody in an earlier post said that the downloads of the game are actually a lot higher than those going online. Showing that not many people who download it manage to get online.
My interpretation of this is that the majority of people are interested in downloading WC2 for the campaign only, not that they're unable to figure out how to join the server. Once the client is dled and installed there are no further barriers to connecting, it's a totally intuitive process. A good illustration of this is when the site was featured on Reddit for a couple days, there was a huge spike in the number of downloads, but hardly any of that carried over to players on the server.
This is where tk's idea about incentivizing online play factors in, like if you gave away $100 every month to whoever played the most games or something, I think you'd get a lot more takers.
A help desk (live chat) on the home page would help a lot and a mentioned it before in my list of ways to help .
That's a good idea, I'd had the same thought, but then of course you need someone who can staff it regularly, and who's that gonna be? (Hey, Ryu, wanna make yourself useful?) I mean, do
you have time to be answering people's questions about wc2 all day? Do you have the money to pay someone to do it? No? Well, neither does anyone else. The doesn't mean we're making the server die, it just means we all have a point at which real life has to take precedence over a 15 year old hobby.