Losing players?

[Vankseal Serozan]

Hello fellow players. I was just talking a guild mate last night and I was told that the devs are concerned about the steady decline of players. She also said they were looking for ideas to attract the old players back and/or keep new players from leaving. I would appreciate it if a dev/gm could confirm or deny this. If the dev team is interested I have some ideas that I would be more than willing to share that might help. I know I have complained a lot about some developments in the game but I really would hate to see it go, it shows so much potential and I have had many good laughs with friends that I would really miss if the game were to close. If wanted I will be more than happy to post any ideas I have.

Vaneal Serozen.

[MishkaL1138]

Just send an email to the players who haven't logged in the last 2 years, telling them how cool we arenow, with quotes of current players and all.

[LigH]

It is indeed true that we have a much smaller reliable player base now than compared to the times of version 0.3.x; but it is also true that a few people from those times, who once disappeared, reappear now (see the post by Stronith).

Reasons seem to be quite diverse (less unemployment; more hardware demands; lack of patience; vicious circle of disappointment = "small playerbase due to small playerbase"; specific disappointing reasons). Those who stay found their personal reason to do so.

[Aramara Meibi]

the best way, I think, to keep numbers up is retention of new players. The best way to do that? Engage your fellow player. The player community is the strongest aspect of the game, and the devs have nothing to do with it.

[Illysia]

I would say the problem is not what to do but actually having the resources to do it. However, in the event that there is actually uncertainty on what to do, here are my suggestions:
______________________


I would suggest put a freeze on new features for awhile and work on old ones. If nothing else, stop adding things that can potentially make new bugs, more game play difficulties, etc... It doesn't matter if new features directly affect the old ones, more working parts will create new problems.

Work on establishing NPC back ups for traveling NPCs so that new players don't have to waste time tracking down the NPCs while learning the city.

Also, change it so that you can train and purchase more in hydlaa so that players aren't forced to be dispersed. The only way to compensate for dispersing players would be to create more NPCs to fill the areas where players are lacking so it doesn't feel empty. That presents other issues, so it is better to provide incentives for player to condense in an area. Players nowadays don't want to come into a ghost town, MMOs aren't novel anymore and a virtual city alone won't cut it. It needs to look less desolate.

Work on driving down resource usage or lag. PS takes up more resources than games that have much more content. Players now aren't likely to be tolerant of struggling to get something to work only to find there is less content than another game they could play.

At this point, PS needs ease of playing to keep it competitive. A lot of players have most things done for them in other games and new content and events constantly coming as a matter of course. PS can't provide that but it can put more emphasis on community that would still make it stand out and could provide enough fun to retain people.

[Ebonwumon]

You're all speculating, but none of you are really hitting the nail on the head. PS doesn't know its place. It used to have a niche, but now it doesn't. If this game is a WoW clone, level up and kill things game, then it's a really, really bad one and there are plenty of other free options that are a million times better, so that's why you're not getting new players. If this game is a roleplay game, then it needs to start facilitating roleplay. That means having a heavy focus on GMs encouraging roleplay, discussions with players and clearly revealing all secrets regarding settings (because the 'spoilers' concept is absolute bull'), and making it easier to roleplay who you want to roleplay. If I want to roleplay someone who can run a lot, but I need to spend upwards of 20 hours grinding to get the stamina to run accross hydlaa, you're forcing mechanics onto someone in a roleplay game. And that's alienating and driving away players.

Also the system requirements are too damn high.

[Gilrond]

I'd say the game also lacks artistic input which could attract some players. My bet is, this happens because of the restrictive ABC license, even though Weltall strongly disagrees, but concrete evidence only proves my point. (And Weltall - don't censor out this post just because you don't like this idea. It will only show that the argument is true and someone just doesn't want to admit it).

[Talad]

I would appreciate it if a dev/gm could confirm or deny this.

Surely we are willing to increase the player base, the whole theme of 0.6 is about the 'fun' factor in the game, we stopped extending the game and decided instead to make the existing areas/features more interesting. This resulted in the past releases in graphical upgrade of most areas with more realistic textures, upgrade of hydlaa geometry, addition of more meaningful quest chains, addition of new crafting, magic resistance, a quite deep background of all races and much more. The items we have in our roadmap are all focused on better playability and more options for the players to interact with the world.

If the dev team is interested I have some ideas that I would be more than willing to share that might help.

There is a whole wish list forum where players collect ideas to improve the game. We go there and pickup the ones we can do at times. In general we have more ideas than resources, as making a mmorpg is an impossible task for a volunteer team. Ways to help are to spread the word about PS and get more developers to join our team, so we can improve the game faster and better.

I would suggest put a freeze on new features for awhile and work on old ones. If nothing else, stop adding things that can potentially make new bugs, more game play difficulties, etc... It doesn't matter if new features directly affect the old ones, more working parts will create new problems.

We are doing this since some time already, but we try to have some new content anyway as it's needed to complete the setting and make some quest chains actually meaningful and enyoable. As stated above we are in refinement mode since quite some time now.

Work on driving down resource usage or lag. PS takes up more resources than games that have much more content. Players now aren't likely to be tolerant of struggling to get something to work only to find there is less content than another game they could play.

This is unfortunately not something easy to resolve as we are dependent on the Crystal Space engine, which we like, but surely it's not the fastest in the world. We are collaborating strictly with Crystal Space and trying to improve/speed up the engine as much as we can. Many of the CS developers are former or actual PS developers. Commercial engines are surely faster and more polished as they have dozens of paid developers. What we can leverage is the community, by attracting more developers which can work on the engine as well, but it's surely a slow process. We recently did some updates to hydlaa which may make it faster, to be testesd in the next release.

PS doesn't know its place. It used to have a niche, but now it doesn't. If this game is a WoW clone, level up and kill things game, then it's a really, really bad one and there are plenty of other free options that are a million times better, so that's why you're not getting new players. If this game is a roleplay game, then it needs to start facilitating roleplay.

This is a very old and beaten point. Many say the game was richer when it was just a chat, so players coudn't level up, and they would just roleplay. That's surely possible, but it's not our objective to make a chat, and I think players can balance leveling and roleplay if they are mature enough in their gameplay. Roleplay is made by players, not by devs. So if someone has to "facilitate" roleplay that are the players.

I'd say the game also lacks artistic input which could attract some players. My bet is, this happens because of the restrictive ABC license.

This is a very old point as well, but the reality is that we have more art than any other open source project, and we have lived more than any other similar project, which is proving the point our license is the best way to go. Also in my experience artists are very willing to donate art to a project knowing how this will be used. The people who are still complaining about the license after 10 years of us providing a free game to everyone I think have not understood what Atomic Blue is and what is our mission and phylosophy. Probably poor messaging on our side, but all people who understood it are amazed by it and our results.

Still on art, I think have some unique and wonderful assets, just to mention one the very inspiring skecthes about the race structures you can see on the race pages. Surely it's not as much as a commercial mmorpg, but we are back to the initial point of resources and time.

How can you help?

• Find more developers who are interested in working on a real game, learn and contribute. Through your school, friends, buddies
• Create more ingame roleplay events
• Found new guilds a recruit other players. Create better and more interactive guild sites
• Be friendly with new players
• Post about PlaneShift in other forums and websites, vote PS up in sites you see, create your own fan sites
• Create videos, screenshots collections, streams or anything else you think may advertize the game and post it on the net
• Learn and understand who is making PlaneShift and how, why we are different and what a volunteer non profit org is
• Continue to play the game and give constructive feedback like the one in this post, we usually read many of the posts

[Vankseal Serozan]

Thanks for the reply Talad. I can't do much but will try to help.

[Rigwyn]

I don't mean any disrespect here, but I get the impression that the dev team is more interested in maintaining a very small player base ( 30-50 players ) for the sake of testing, rather than having to manage a large player base of say 100-200 players. Is this the case? My rationale for thinking this is that you don't need 200+ players to test the game, likewise, a large player base would be more taxing on resources - both human and computer/network.

[Candy]

...the past releases in graphical upgrade of most areas with more realistic textures, upgrade of hydlaa geometry, addition of more meaningful quest chains, addition of new crafting, magic resistance, a quite deep background of all races and much more. The items we have in our roadmap are all focused on better playability and more options for the players to interact with the world.

From a recent session (within the past week) while guiding a new player around:
"(01:06:09) [Tell] Name withheld tells you: Going from NWN2 and skyrim to this...I don't know if I can tolerate it tbh. I could overlook the appaling 1990 graphics if maybe there was dungeons and a large player base... but a few dozen people and a clunky engine like this? don't know if I can take it"


This is an attitude I see a lot of from critics of PlaneShift and I can't blame them - if it wasn't for the great players and the roleplay here I'd have left years ago, myself.

So if someone has to "facilitate" roleplay that are the players.

I actually kind of agree here. Kind of. This is being done by players, but only a few of us. I'll admit I'm not starting up any plots or organizations myself (I noticed "start a new guild" on the list of ways to help - we'd end up with the problem of more guilds than players. What we really need at present is more unity, not more separation), although I'm happy to jump into the current ones. What we need is a way to make it obvious to new players that may not read the forum threads that yes, there is roleplay going on here despite all the things that make most people leave the game right away, seeing as it's pretty much PS's one selling point to the player. And the more players we get, the more likely we are to have someone willing to volunteer for the team.

I'd say the game also lacks artistic input which could attract some players. My bet is, this happens because of the restrictive ABC license.

The people who are still complaining about the license after 10 years of us providing a free game to everyone I think have not understood what Atomic Blue is and what is our mission and phylosophy. Probably poor messaging on our side, but all people who understood it are amazed by it and our results.

Still on art, I think have some unique and wonderful assets, just to mention one the very inspiring skecthes about the race structures you can see on the race pages. Surely it's not as much as a commercial mmorpg, but we are back to the initial point of resources and time.

So perhaps a clear, concise explanation is in order?

[SAristo]

What we need is a way to make it obvious to new players that may not read the forum threads that yes, there is roleplay going on here despite all the things that make most people leave the game right away, seeing as it's pretty much PS's one selling point to the player.

I second Candy's post. Can't expect a new player to ask for RP in Gossip or in random /tells, like some of us have had to do. Really, we can do more in game to facilitate RP, players and devs both. MyPlane has greater potential than it's currently serving (and by the way, is it me or the link above to MyPlane hasn't been working since, my guess is, the server change - planeshift.subhosting.net/myplane).

[tman]

I'm just happy to see such an in depth response from Talad.

I think the main problem right now is that PlaneShift is really two distinct games: the fight-train-quest "typical" MMO, and the text-based roleplay.  The problem is that currently these two "games" don't fit together in any way.  At any given time you can do one or the other, but never both.  Ideally the game mechanics should lead players to situations where they can/should roleplay, and roleplay should be influenced/improved by the game mechanics.

[ether]

As much as I might hate to say it, if you want to attract and keep roleplayers, this game has to, HAS TO acquire a hardcore graphical update.  And I'm not talking building geometry or the textures on the roads.

PC animations neeeeeed a near-complete overhaul.
We need OPTIONS for armor and clothing for the PCs' appearances.

I don't mean to sound pretentious but I've been RPing since I was 12 - I'm coming up on 11 years here.  I've done MMORPGs, D&D and other tabletops, forums, MUDs, notebooks passed between friends in high school hallways, you name it.  A person's vehicle into the world they're RPing in is their character, and even when you eliminate the visual (3D graphical element) of an MMORPG and leave us with just text, people still put a lot of weight on the visual descriptions of their characters.

Yeah - personally, I would rather see game mechanics improve, see more of that 'fun element' Talad keeps talking about being implemented.  However, I'm almost 100% sure that the best way to attract new players would be seeing more diversity and possibility in PC appearance.

Keeping them here?  Well, that's not a simple thing...  That's where all the other elements come into play.  Playability, RP, and as the dev team is already well aware: 100 million other little things.

[derula]

PS doesn't know its place. It used to have a niche, but now it doesn't. If this game is a WoW clone, level up and kill things game, then it's a really, really bad one and there are plenty of other free options that are a million times better, so that's why you're not getting new players. If this game is a roleplay game, then it needs to start facilitating roleplay.

This is a very old and beaten point. Many say the game was richer when it was just a chat, so players coudn't level up, and they would just roleplay. That's surely possible, but it's not our objective to make a chat, and I think players can balance leveling and roleplay if they are mature enough in their gameplay. Roleplay is made by players, not by devs. So if someone has to "facilitate" roleplay that are the players.

I think Ebonwumon nailed it. Of course Talad it requires people's interaction to get roleplay working, but that doesn't mean the devs don't have to do their part to enable people to roleplay correctly. My experience is that it pretty much is impossible for new players to RP "correctly", that is, according to settings, because very little of the settings can be learned about without playing the game for a long time. There has been / is a trend of people's back stories saying they came here with memory loss, and that has a reason. Because nobody knows anything about the world when they start playing, while their characters have lived there for a long time and should know lots of stuff, basically ruling out any explanation except memory loss.

I will give credit that you have improved the details page about races. That's definitely a start. However, there needs to be done more to enable newcomers to actually make up a character that fits in the settings. I don't say there should be no spoilers at all. But there has to be a reason why characters don't know about the spoilers, and there has to be a set of other things that aren't immediate part of the game that people should know about beforehand. Many of the "spoilers" should be information publicly available before even joining the game. That includes common knowledge, as well as things characters should not know about, or should fear.

Blabla I should stop talking because Talad probably won't read this anyway