zone population

[but...why...per...]

Yes ideas are great Weak, but the first thing that needs sorting is a mission statement or plan on what the zone wants to achieve and what the core focus will be.
Once this is established we will be able to ask ourselves if these ideas match up to that focus, otherwise we will just end up blindly implementing 'good' ideas without understanding their value or be able to assess if they are in the zones best interest.

For example part of the plan/statement may be to retain new players, so we could have various ideas: pub settings, create a tutorial, host events, promote TWL, have a new player squad, relax rule breaking/bans.
Not all of these would necessarily help keep new players, for instance: promoting TWL applies more to seasoned players; hosting events may reduce pub numbers making the game look inactive/dull (to a new player) and having new players join a squad together only to be defeated all time, may not be very effective, which is why we need to weigh up the impact of ideas on the zone before implementing them.

At any rate, once a mission plan is made the current zone should be stripped down of features that do not abide by it and any new features should be vetted against it with due consideration for the impact on the zone and whether it is feasible to implement or cost effective. i.e. Dev spends many hours creating a map or bot that is rarely used. Ideally good notice should be given to Dev and players in the event of major changes. Furthermore any advertising should only take place once the core issues have been resolved.

tl;dr version: Collecting ideas are ok but we need to have a system for choosing ideas and assessing their impact on the zone. Set realistic goals on what we want to achieve and importantly by when. Review implemented ideas -did you achieve what you set out? Could this be improved further? Etc

[Turban]

i don't currently consider myself an active player and because of that i might not be up-to-date with everything. there's a fairly good chance that there will be some mistakes or errors in this post, feel free to correct me if you see any wrong or simply disagree with something. without further ado, brace yourselves for a lengthy post about various different topics.

balance and simplicity is the key to success. the enjoyment of our players should be of utmost importance. ideally speaking public should be a place that appeals both the new and old players. however, currently it fails to please even one of the aforementioned groups and only a handful of players like the changes. in the past couple of years we've actually managed to make things worse with the addition of several useless features and some recent map changes. it's really counterproductive to add things to the game without even considering the consequences. i think this kind of decision making has already been proven to be bad for the zone, time and time again actually, yet we keep making the same mistake. this has to fucking stop. there is absolutely no reason to bite off more than you can chew, we have several players that will help if you actually ask for help. honestly, at the moment we need both the players and staff to cooperate to fix the things that are broken, and trust me shit won't magically get better over night. it's a long process, however with the help of both parties we should be able to prosper. probably. i might just be delusional.

do you know what goes hand in hand with steady population growth? an active public arena with a lot of players, although that alone isn't enough to guarantee the survival of the zone even if it would satisfy a lot of players. fixing our current public arena is simply a small part in the grand scheme of things that is necessary if we want the zone to return to its former glory. there's also no room for tunnel visioning, we have numerous things that require immediate attention from both the staff and the players. while there's no way i could list everything, i'll still try to do my best with the little time i have at the moment.

first of all, we need to create ways to attract old players back into actually playing in the public. while removal of several broken features - such as the new asteroids or !buy-to-win - would be great, that alone wouldn't actually fix anything. in fact, removing those could potentially even harm our current population, even if that chance is slim. what we need to remember is to think before acting, with the right type of leadership and decision making we can succeed. however, if we start making shitty decisions again then everything we have accomplished will go to waste.i'm going to list a couple of things that could appeal the old players and possibly getting them back. do not take these suggestions as a solution for all our problems. they are merely ideas, nothing more and nothing less.

i think we need to add some incentives for our old players to actually participate in the public. while there certainly is several different ways to actually accomplish this, i'd say that showing recognition to the best performing players in public would not only be the safest change, but also the best one. this could easily be done by adding statistics of the latest monthly pub reset, displaying a list of players in different categories either above the base or in top-left corner. it could be a top five list with categories such as highest rated player in every ship, most kills, best K ratio and highest killing spree. we could even take it a step further and display the achievements of a player in their twd profile. it should be a toggleable feature, not everyone wants to showcase their activity in public. these kind of small changes are actually good for the zone, it'll please certain kind of players without breaking the game or affecting the gameplay. we could also look into advertising competitive leagues (elim / twd) in the public, but i think that should be the players responsibility. of course these kind of changes won't please everyone, but at least there's no harm in doing stuff like that compared to the shit we've done in the past.

we also recently tried out a new public map design in the temporary server. while most of the comments about the map seemed to be positive, there remained to be several issues that need to be addressed and tested again. only once everything has been nearly perfected, that's when you can actually consider making it a permanent addition to the public arena. i can't stress this fact enough: think before you act. while it could be a good thing for the zone to get a small facelift that still won't do anything to fix our current problems. we still don't have a decent training area in the public map with simple introduction to the game and if we are going to have a new map then the training area should also match the style of public. great, more work for us. ah well, time to move on to a different topic.

most of the new players actually enjoy their time on a squad, i've seen it at first hand when managing newbie squads. it's a fun experience to see the competitive parts of the zone, playing together as a team and getting to know each other. however, we're currently in a bad situation: our competitive scene isn't newbie friendly at all. we simply don't have enough squads or players participating in a "newbie project" for it to actually succeed, but i'm hopeful that the off season will change that. if we can actually get a lot of new players involved in twd with several new squads, then there will be some kind of "natural rivarly" between the squads and the players will strive to get better. however, if you now create a squad your players will just get massacred by some egoistical players who only care about winning and boosting their scores, rather than trying to make the games more exciting. it's not really the ideal training grounds for the new players, but you can't really blame our players for wanting to win games.

we actually need rely on the players to solve this one. we have a great amount of people who want this game to survive yet most of them never lift a finger to help. if you want to help the zone, please do your part. there are new players out there, train them, recruit them, keep them entertained. it most certainly isn't an easy job, but it can be extremely rewarding. i encourage you to start or help new squads when they start to appear during the off season. scout people from the public arena, events and elimination. give them play time in javduel/wbduel.

we should also dedicate an entire staff department that would focus on making the new players happy. have a set of scheduled events that you will host, even during the off hours. events that everyone can enjoy and make sure that they are of highest quality. if it happens to be a success, and you continue to host quality events with some personality, then players will have something to look forward to and will continue to log in to the zone. horray, another way to steadily increase the population growth.

that's all for now, my post keeps getting worse and worse. i'll probably add something tomorrow or later today, though no promises.

ciao.

[Turban]

holy mother of jesus what is wrong with me.

[Turban]

The most important development in my opinion is TWD.

while further development and improvement of TWD is certainly important, it still shouldn't be the primary focus of the zone. with simple changes, such as removing twd roster limits, we would be in a fairly good place. not sure if trench wars needs the development team in other projects, though i guess there's a chance that i misunderstood your post. getting drowsy.

[Ephemeral]

One of the reasons that pub has evolved into being less 'new player' friendly is because of the way we go about doing this; we never hear from those new players who download the game and leave without playing very much. Instead we get ideas and feature requests from players who no longer have a new player perspective. (Sure, we all like to think that since we were once a new player that we can think for them, but the truth is that everything changes over time. Saying, 'well, when I was a new player...' doesn't mean shit if you were a new player longer than a year ago.)

We all have floated various reasons that we think that new player retention is so low; older graphics not competitive with other games, pub gotten too complex for beginners, etc. etc. But what are the actual reasons they leave? More importantly, how can we improve at getting input from new players? Obviously a short survey could be implemented. Perhaps if a new player logs in for the first time and then doesn't log back in for XX days an email is sent with a link to an online survey?

I am sure there are other ways or more ideas on how best to capture a new players reasons for leaving. But it is crazy to sit around speculating on the reason WE think they leave; it is even crazier to exclusively keep seeking pub 'ideas' from only players who have considerable experience and game time.
eph

[Turban]

admittedly i never really touched the new player issue even though it does go hand in hand with old players playing in public.

a couple of years ago (2010) i had the chance to interact with several new players or even with players that used to excusively play public and events. there was a damn good share of them that actually kept on playing because they were making friends and they felt more involved. this games saving grace has never been the graphics or arguably even the gameplay, but rather the community aspect of the game. we used to be good at that; new players didn't feel like complete outsiders. right now, though, there seems to be this huge invisible wall between us and the new players. if we aren't getting to know the new players and actually providing them some sorts of entertainment, then it's no wonder they are going to stop playing.

this game sucks if you are playing alone and that will continue to be true until the end of times. this game simply isn't exciting enough to keep the new players playing by itself. while there is certainly a great amount of gamers out there that aren't into the whole "social parts" of gaming and would rather do their "own" thing, there's also a damn huge pool of people who want to feel involved. that's at least what i think.

this is why getting them involved in squads is actually beneficial. this is why having quality events where hosts interact with the players and actually remember those who attend their events is important. if we can't keep them entertained, they will quit. we can't please every type of gamer, but we can keep a good amount of the new players if we do the right thing.

it's as simple as that. that two hour nap doing its wonders.

[rAiNbOw SeEkEr]

admittedly i never really touched the new player issue even though it does go hand in hand with old players playing in public.

a couple of years ago (2010) i had the chance to interact with several new players or even with players that used to excusively play public and events. there was a damn good share of them that actually kept on playing because they were making friends and they felt more involved. this games saving grace has never been the graphics or arguably even the gameplay, but rather the community aspect of the game. we used to be good at that; new players didn't feel like complete outsiders. right now, though, there seems to be this huge invisible wall between us and the new players. if we aren't getting to know the new players and actually providing them some sorts of entertainment, then it's no wonder they are going to stop playing.

this game sucks if you are playing alone and that will continue to be true until the end of times. this game simply isn't exciting enough to keep the new players playing by itself. while there is certainly a great amount of gamers out there that aren't into the whole "social parts" of gaming and would rather do their "own" thing, there's also a damn huge pool of people who want to feel involved. that's at least what i think.

this is why getting them involved in squads is actually beneficial. this is why having quality events where hosts interact with the players and actually remember those who attend their events is important. if we can't keep them entertained, they will quit. we can't please every type of gamer, but we can keep a good amount of the new players if we do the right thing.

it's as simple as that. that two hour nap doing its wonders.

stfu and go watch ur anime

[KrynetiX]

Sure, we all like to think that since we were once a new player that we can think for them, but the truth is that everything changes over time. Saying, 'well, when I was a new player...' doesn't mean shit if you were a new player longer than a year ago.

When I was a new player there were 10 squads asking me to join, ?go CoolSquadTryouts were everywhere, squad duels were self-hosted in #private arenas, events were hosted manually all day long by popular hosts that interacted with players, there was 101 things going on that don't happen anymore.

I ask myself, if I started playing today -- would I even stay?

[bkgmjo]

Same, also the download didn't report to be a trojan (even though it really was back then heh).

[Dwopple]

Posted this in another thread as well, but here's my 2 cents on this topic.



We've got 80 people in pub right now, and a good 15v15 going as I post this.

The old pub map looks boring and plain compared to the map we tested a few days ago on the ASSS server. If we have any hope left to bring more players (and retain them) to this zone/game, we need to be focusing on the pub experience, not league experience, because it's the first thing new players experience.

When I first started this game I spent ALL of my time in pub, playing leagues destroyed the old pub experience. Fix and update pub first (which I've seen a bunch of vets, like myself, enjoying the past few weeks). Find a reason to keep people online, even if they are afk (like the IdleRPG bot that JoWie has).

Keep the leagues offline for awhile longer and lets bring back the community feeling that pub used to have, the rest will follow.

imo.

[Shaddowknight]

Wormhole Surfer's map looks good indeed, but it needs some work for pub play. It also brings a problem if he ever left and we needed someone else to work on it. We would have to try to make any changes look right and not too out of place. It shouldn't be a problem, but you never know, it could be.

[rAiNbOw SeEkEr]

http://i.gyazo.com/860aeab50c95d5cb88aaf136bfdeba26.png

tw needs to pay me for advertising

[Crescent Seal]

http://i.gyazo.com/860aeab50c95d5cb88aaf136bfdeba26.png

tw needs to pay me for advertising

rainbow legit made 12k ppl see that link for free...while staffs advertising has been nonexistent with that much donation money

[2pac]

These guys gonna waste time and watch another ddos happen then who they gonna run to? staff been fail since ssc got ddosed and they dont even know who did it. I didn't even cheat on backup server what makes em think im gonna cheat on the real server. Staff went full retard and hasn't done anything to retain pop or done anything major to bring back players since ssc was down just a fucking news letter LOL REALLY?

[Shaddowknight]

Should use www.subspace-continuum.com next time!