The Decline of SS and TW is real

[9th!]

9^th,
Wow. How old are you? Given the thought (or lack thereof) of your posts I am guessing that you are very young and simply do not know better or have any experience. So according to your logic, no bad news should ever be communicated? A serial killer is loose in your town but since it may impact tourism you would keep any news of it hidden? Sorry, that’s not how life works.

Yes that is exactly what I was saying.

a serial killer will deter tourists.

:\

[Shadowmere]

yeah. i think stat leaderboards with pubbux prizes for the squad with most kills, most points, etc. and top pilot awards per month would give pubbers incentive to pursue this

http://trenchwars.org/index.php?v=pubstats

Add players' ratings that are squadjoined to the same squad together and make the statistics / winners more public.
I'm trying to get BWJS statistics more out there in a similar way as elim has that popup when you enter the arena, because the statistics are there.

Just not too many players will take the time and effort to go to tw.org and look for them.

[Pressure]

you guys claim the community is this games best selling point, yet, in pub, the community is practically non-existent. someone else mentioned it earlier, as have i long ago.

pub needs pubsquads

yeah. i think stat leaderboards with pubbux prizes for the squad with most kills, most points, etc. and top pilot awards per month would give pubbers incentive to pursue this

[Jones]

you guys claim the community is this games best selling point, yet, in pub, the community is practically non-existent. someone else mentioned it earlier, as have i long ago.

pub needs pubsquads

[Shadowmere]

[SIZE=4]OK we all agree pub needs changes instead of sitting here fighting about it. How about you staffers work on finding someone with the skills and know-how to do so. Let them understand and say what is possible and isn't possible. That would be your next step.

If u want changes make it happen worry about the important things, treat it as a Professional, like you would at work , get the job done.
/SIZE]

Thank you for failing your size. First post from you that I actually got the patience to read.

If you read what turban said, you'd know it is not up to "staff" but the few key people in the spots that make the decisions.
We know (some of) the issues and what needs to be done both in whole zone and pub, but we either don't have the know-how or key support for the changes.

[Turban]

we need to make some changes and they need to be done in the right order for us to get the most benefit out of them.

first of all, we need to scrap the way public is currently being ran by the bots and take into consideration which features need to be removed as soon as possible, and which ones should remain to not hurt the zone health.

- do not allow any purchases to be made that give any advantage to the players, such as bursts, portals, full charges, shields, super and so forth. the ability to grief other players need to be removed as well, thus features like epidemic have to go. this ruins the gameplay of the public arena and gives a huge advantage to the experienced players.

- it is fine, and actually necessary, to keep the public cash system. it is too late to remove it by now, but we can further improve it to give nice benefits such as custom icons, bombs and fireworks. we can keep the gambling, and dueling, as those two seem to be decent by design and aren't actually harmful unless abused in which case zone rules come to place.

- keep the base game timers, rounds and its rewards and awards. it is important for the players to have an objective, and this could be further improved with the addition of achievements in public to give players a goal to work towards.

- improve the tutorial to be something similar to the one in DSB, however make it way simpler as that one took forever to complete. a short crash course of some sorts to teach the basics, but nothing else.


once these have been done, we need to focus on other areas such as marketing the game and improving the overall quality of staff members and events that are being hosted. it is all about prioritizing things in the right order. however, the sad fact is that we are lacking in the development department, mostly due to burnouts.

[olde]

[SIZE=4]OK we all agree pub needs changes instead of sitting here fighting about it. How about you staffers work on finding someone with the skills and know-how to do so. Let them understand and say what is possible and isn't possible. That would be your next step.

If u want changes make it happen worry about the important things, treat it as a Professional, like you would at work , get the job done.
/SIZE]

[Turban]

i think it is pointless to talk in past tense, such as what we should have done years ago to prevent this situation from happening in the first place. what is important is to focus on what we can do NOW to at least attempt to salvage the situation we are in.

[Turban]

a lot of good points, and i have said for years that we have to simplify the public playing experience, but every person in charge of that area wants it to be something exciting, something out of the ordinary. they seem think that adding more content is like watching the Nile flood eery year and nourish the dry land, when it is the complete opposite of truth.

i was talking about what should be done after this, as it should be obvious by now. however, i partly disagree with the events, they are an excellent way to retain the population and get growth going if done right, although if people only host one event then you can't expect any benefits.

[Ephemeral]

There is no incentive for staff to help new players. There used to be some stupid system in which staff were required to host X number of events; how incredibly stupid that was. But it added incentive to make staff do something other than sit on their hands.

You could change this to require staffers to help new players each month. But helping a new player doesn’t help much for several reason stated above (i.e. getting owned hard in Pub).

There is no ‘improving the ?buy system’ unless you can automatically place a large amount of pub bucks in new player hands and have them use it right away. The very logic of it is badly broken. New players need to have an advantage when first starting, not a disadvantage. As the player becomes more skilled the game level should become more difficult, not made easier to own lesser experienced players. Remove this dumbass ?buy system and new player will stay longer. Keep pub buck for betting purposes and maybe to buy silly thing like fireworks but remove anything that allows a player to increase their “skill”.

And look at the things working against helping a new player. The stupid new player call doesn’t even tell you where the new player in located. You can spend 5 minutes trying to help to someone when they don’t even speak the same language as you.

And while you are trying to just get them to understand the a basics of the game, you have them simply getting owned in the spawn area. Anyone who has tried to help new players knows this.

So let’s say you are successful in getting a new player to stay longer than 3 minutes. A competitive basing game is going on and you have shown the new player how to attach and participate in taking the flag room. Wait… some dumbass staffer announces some lame event which immediately empties Pub, reducing the number of active Pub players from 14 to 7. (Killing Pub AND runs a poorly attended event; instead of spending so much time teaching staff HOW to run an event teach them WHEN to run an event.)

Why even bother helping new players in this environment? It is like everything is stacked against not a new player sticking around but also even helping a new player get involved in the game.

And I concur with Turb on the toxic players. Allowing jerks like Tower endlessly cut and paste inane crap, while avoiding the ?ignore command, is lame and contributes nothing to the zone. Ditto for allowing back in every banned player that has ever broken any rules. We seem to love to expend 90% of our resources on 1% of the pain-in-the-ass players but then say we don’t have resources to fix the broken shit. If we had walked away from some of these dumbasses we could have used the time and effort to fix the broken crap. Plus perhaps we might have avoided burning out so many good people who now don’t bother to even consider contributing given the state of the zone.

Throw a rock and hit it will hit something that is badly broken in Pub. It is virtually the complete opposite from what it should be, perverted into a dumping ground for any/every “good” idea that someone had while drunk or stoned. Yes, some “vets” will bitch and moan and talk about leaving if you dump the current ?buy system. It is empty threats; hardcore players will play no matter what happens in Pub. Do what is right for sustaining the game, not what a handful of vocal, selfish players say to do.
Eph

[Turban]

there are a few points that could be improved without the need of any developers, and that is the retraining of several staff members in the events department, as an example, as some have the wrong mindset when it comes to hosting in general. hosting does not mean start a bot and have the players play the automated event. you have to be involved in the event, to leave an impression and the players satisfied and entertained. you can easily make yourself known as a quality host, and the players will look forward to your events, making it easier to build a crowd. this is one of the ways to keep players logging in regularly, especially if combined with a schedule.

you have to enjoy what you do, and if entertaining the players is not a priority and you merely see it as a boring duty that you have to complete, then event referee position might not be for you.

the quality of events has dropped hard, due to the lack of host interaction. you are entertainers, not robots without a soul. i will try to be involved in this part, but it will be hard to balance life, work and this game at the moment. prioritizing is important.

end of phone rant.

[Shadowmere]

9^th,
Wow. How old are you? Given the thought (or lack thereof) of your posts I am guessing that you are very young and simply do not know better or have any experience. So according to your logic, no bad news should ever be communicated? A serial killer is loose in your town but since it may impact tourism you would keep any news of it hidden? Sorry, that’s not how life works.

And of course these forums are never even seen by the majority of new player who leave quickly. If you handled a few ?new player calls and put your brain in gear before your mouth you would know that the new players we are talking about don’t stay in the game for longer than 5 minutes; they don’t even know about these forums.

On the other hand, Jerome is asking the correct question. Although polling them might glean some info this isn’t that hard; simply take some new player calls. Make helping new players a priority instead of holding dumbass, poorly attended events. Get rid of the dumbass ?buy system which heavily favors experienced players. Put a tutorial in place that not only teaches new players but gets them invested. In other words, make Pub more new player friendly. Anyone who tries to argue that Pub is new player friendly is either a moron or completely out of touch with what is happening. Driving marketing for new players is a total waste of time when Pub is like this.

Alternatively we can just write new players off (which is actually what we have done). Instead we can only market towards trying to bring back existing players who have quit. This has been knocked around for a few years and I think several attempts have been made (i.e. via email blasts). In this case then holding events on demand even when it crushes Pub is fine. Making Pub heavily geared that favorers experienced players is fine. But of this is the case then post that is what we want to do and let’s quit talking about even trying to get new players.

But to say that we are running new players off due to negative posts in a seldom used, loosely associated forum is just wrong on several levels. We all acknowledge that the game has little of offer in terms of graphics and cannot compete with others in the marketplace. That train left the station about 15 years ago. We all can agree that the community is indeed a ‘selling’ point in that teamwork and the online chats are an asset. But what fucking good are these assets when a new player doesn’t ever experience them because they got owned so badly in the first 3 minutes? TW has nothing to offer, no incentive, for a player to stick around after the first 3 minutes of being owned. They don’t see the teamwork, they don’t form friendships in 3 minutes. A game is like a website, you have only a minute to get the person involved enough to stick around. Pub is like a really shitty opening page of a website. There might be some good stuff in the website but we lose the vast majority of viewers in the opening page. And some Einstein’s want to throw more money/time on trying to bring in new players when Pub is like this? Some want to insist that negative posts in a forum buried deep in the website are the real reason we can’t keep new players? Really? please get with the program and think this shit through before making more dumbass posts.
Eph

Just responding to a few:

Staff/Dev were working on a new tutorial since a few months (or longer) now. Of what I heard some other things got pushed in front of this project delaying it. I don't know the current situation. We're seriously lacking dev to begin with.

Agreed the ?buy system could be made better. There's an issue with buying things for yourself after which you're on a buying cooldown, but others can buy you stuff (like a second super) right away.
Qan has been the main man working on pub-system, but is quite inactive. Once again, lack of devs.
The good thing with pub-system is the automatic resizing of the base. In my opinion it's worked very well, and some great pub matches have been witnessed once players actually get into the game.
We do acknowledge the issues.

Staff is constantly trying to emphasize taking new player calls, familiarizing them with the game and mechanics. It'd be great if I could see server logs to see how all staffers do it, or if they don't.
There is no guarantee that everyone does their best. Especially when a new player doesn't respond to private messages or any chatter at all. That's where it gets difficult.
Personally in cases like those I just try to give as much valid information as I can for them to get more to the game: Changing ships, frequencies, chatting in different chats, pub objective and changing arenas and whatnot.
Once we've made a connection with new players we've also tried asking where they're coming from etc. to get a clue where to put more effort to in terms of marketing and exposure.
It's not easy, but we try. It's also not something that the general public see staff do, so you'll just have to take my word on it.

We're remaking/-writing staff guides and manuals so we get more professionalism to how we handle any and all subjects. ZH work, ER hosting, Mod actions and so on.
This to help prioritize the important things in all situations.

Forum most likely doesn't scare new players off.
We've got about 40 to 50 registered members using the forums a day whilst another 100 as "guests".
The few that actually come here should be able to discuss matters freely without worrying some scaredy cat will run off at the sight of a big bad word or a tl;dr.
We've got a lot of legit threads on the forums ranging from forum games to general discussion and in-game improvements/problems. One thread about issues is not a big deal.

[Turban]

twbot knows when new players enter tw, just get the bot to send a pm asking maybe to leave a comment on where/how they heard about and downloaded subspace (edit: maybe a pm at 5 hours ?usage asking what could be done better / if they feel overwhelmed / something)

though that being said im 99% sure there is already some sort of survey bot that asks u to leave a !comment about something or another and i have done nothing but abuse it with dick jokes while shitfaced

a survey would be nice, however it would be very hard to get true information from the new players. it could be done if someone introduces a new player to the game, and interviews them after that, but .. yeah, probably not happening.

[Turban]

i think our goal should be to get both new players to stay in the game and try to get older players to return to the game. there was a total of 352 new players logging in to this game last month alone, although a decent portion of them were either aliases or players using a new computer. we need to find a way to retain these players, though, and that's one issue that the public is kind of .. preventing from happening with all these trolls.

both of these approaches are vastly different from one another, and extremely hard to accomplish with the activity of staff and the helpfulness of players at the moment.

[Turban]

it looks like my point was missed and moot to some degree, although it can be blamed on the poor wording and slightly biased opinion as it was from the perspective of an older player. however, i have played numerous online games throughout my life, and only one game has managed to rival this one in terms of communities and chat options, and it was extremely popular at time, although it died due to the company in charge bankrupting.

we should try to improve the community aspects of this game as much as we can, as it is in my opinion our strongest selling point and the best option to get players hooked to the game. there simply isn't as many games with a well designed global chatting system, and combine that with events where you can easily communicate with other players, and coordinated team games such as TWD among with many other options related to this subject. we have an unpolished diamond at our disposal. it does not help to have several known trolls frequenting the public arena, spamming it with their nonsense and in general being toxic, however if we can find a way for the players to see beyond that there is a good chance that they will stay in the game.

i would like to think that players want to feel involved in the community, and actually need a reason to log in to the game, and what better way is there than playing with your new friends, and meeting other people? that was our slogan back in the day, and it remains to be true. we are social beings by nature.

there are a few ways to approach this situation, with the first option being the purge of toxic players, although i would strongly advice against it. second option would be a safer, but much harder to properly accomplish, and that would be having scheduled events throughout the week (for starters), more community-related content, and ways for the public players to experience other parts of the zone to its full extent.

there is a basic tutorial already, but i don't think tutorials are necessary and should remain optional, and it could of course be improved.