Difficulty Servers

[Edicho]

I just had some thoughts about the game being too hard on players, and watched as every suggestion for making this game easier would go unimplemented. But Just as we have non RP and RP servers, these may just represent difficulty. Is there be a possibility to create another server instances? e.g:
Easy - all mining spots are marked with signs, skills require less PP/money, monsters are easier to kill it's easier to loot nice items. there are more hints on how things work, just like the tutorials, but covering more topics (picking up some material gives you hints what you can do with it and with which skill ). materials are easier to mine. Yes, just a plain noob server instance
Medium - only basic minerals are marked (lets say coal + iron), skills require a little more PP/money to train, items cost more and there are less hints overall.
Difficult - no mining spots are marked. just a normal game
Hard - (RP one) - RP required, e.g: speaking ooc publicly can make you lose skills.

with each difficulty/server mines can be placed in different locations, monsters can have different strengths, npcs can be located in different places. (but doesn't have to).

Why?
I always found myself enjoy the game, master it more and more and then say: "Hm, I'm doing very good, and this is starting to be too easy to be rewarding... I'll try something more difficult" And that made me stay with the games for longer time than I thought I will.
How is that better from starting from difficult mode ?
For me? there's not much of a problem to start from difficult mode. I'm a patient guy, but not all of gamers are (and i'm pretty sure most of them aren't), and if all they have to do is have a great amount of problems before they even start to enjoy the game, they can as well not launch it anyway.

I'm not saying make this game easier for everyone. After spending a lot of time on developing the game I'm pretty sure you know it in and out. You know where to search for information, and where to find minerals. But not all players do. Let us enjoy the game, and then switch to the point when we want to explore on our own and make things more difficult.

On the other hand, just send your kids for their jobs instead of school, just for the sake of 'easy is lame'... Just kidding

[tman]

An interesting idea, if the game had a few hundred or thousand players.  But as I'm writing this there are 29 players online and that's the highest I've seen in days.  If you split those players between 4 servers the world is going to look even more dead all the time.

[Edicho]

Must I point I see the reason for this player amount is the server difficulty? If you didn't read my previous post that's what I'm saying. Players won't stay because they get frustrated over how hard is the game for the beginners.

[LigH]

How many ex-players did you interview to get a representative poll?

The main problem about leaving players is that they don't tell us why they leave, they are just gone. And if asking other players for help is too hard, someone may not have understood the meaning of MMORPG; no, it's not like WoW or GW.

[novacadian]

Yeah one thing that is good to point out is that to most of the player base it is not about mining. An example....
 
A noob came up to me some time ago when mining with my alt near the river up near Oja. They explained ooc that they were playing a pick pocket. We worked out an arrangement that we would use a 1d6 dice to decide the steps of pickpocketing my character. The noob got great rolls and the pick was a success. My character gave her 15,000 tria ooc to represent the pick pocketing and we both had fun rping it out.
 
It should be mentioned that my suggestion of using a 1d6 to decide some things is not common. Most RPer would just rp it. My love of the dice normally tries to get them in there somehow.
 
However my point is no game mechanics were required and we both had fun with it. If that character should be encoutered again it is a given that they are good at what they do and no dice would be demanded by me.
 
So they get to tap me up anytime we may bump into each other. There is more than enough tria out there to go around.

- Nova

[Rigwyn]

If you could just make Planeshift awesome instantly... say with magic for the sake of argumentation, do you think you would instantly have loads of players? 

Sadly, the answer is no. It takes time for people to discover new things and for word of such things to spread.  Also, If I'm currently enjoying another game, I'm not likely to leave it in favor for some other game which has yet to prove to me that it will be a rewarding experience. People tend to resist change. As an example, look at how long older players stuck around while the game worsened and decayed before they finally left Planeshift. To grow again, it needs to be awesome enough for people to start talking about it with their friends. It will take time.

As pointed out before and many times in the past, diluting the already dwarfed player base is not a good thing unless loneliness is somehow part of the fun. The size of the in-game world is awesome for a larger player base, but a bit too big for 15-30 players ( who don't even play together) , if you ask me.

[Volki]

Everyone would move to the Easy server. No roleplayer would play on the Hard server. Roleplayers prefer easier leveling so they can spend time roleplaying. The people who would prefer a harder game are the people who spend more time focusing on mechanics rather than roleplaying with other players.

[tman]

Also, I'm not sure I agree that the game is too hard.  Up until the nerfing of armor stats and the improved monster AI, the game was entirely too easy (IMHO).  I remember it being confusing as a new player, not knowing who people/NPCs were, where stuff was, etc. but I think the solution to that isn't a separate server, but more resources for new players.  Also, encourage the new players to ask questions.  I'm sure the older players would be happy to show new players around if approached and answer any non-spoiler type questions.

Now what is or isn't considered a spoiler is something that may be up for debate.

EDIT: I do think the cost of training is too high, but that's because there aren't enough other tria sinks so training is the only major way that money leaves the economy.

[Taya]

I don't feel the game is hard. Just that grinding is slow and generally uninteresting and that rewards for things (purely considering mechanics and not RP) are often not in proportion with the amount of effort needed to get them.

So what is 'effort'?

Time mainly, and may mistake time for difficulty. But to train a skill you must use it x amount of times, and most people I know who have reached the higher levels feel that x is too high a number. If they are RPers, they'd rather spend the time RPing anyway. An hour to two hours for one skill level that lets you do one point extra damage per attack vs. an hour RPing. No contest there. An RPer will RP. And someone who is more inclined toward grinding skills will often feel that small damage increase isn't a worthwhile payoff as well, so they start losing interest after a certain point. It's not about difficulty of leveling skills. It's about at what point it gets too boring vs. the payoff of another level.

By the same chain of reasoning, taking skills from people who speak OOC on a 'hard' server doesn't seem too smart to me- those who want grinding to be hard are generally, but not always, those who spend the least time RPing, so it would only make them unhappy, whereas many RPers might prefer an 'easy' server so that they can more easily get characters to the levels they enjoy RPing them at and then get back to the thing they want, RP, more quickly.  So you'd probably see those more inclined to RP gravitate toward the easy server and the 'grinders' toward the harder one... Only then you get the ones who like to level and who like to RP and they'd be left feeling like misfits who might not belong anywhere. So not only would we split an already too small population, we'd probably get a bunch of quitters in the process as well.

Back to looking at difficulty -  you also have the cost of training, which is broken into tria and pp. I've noticed a huge imbalance here; how easy this is seems to depend on what it is you are trying to train. It's really, really easy after a point if you are leveling a high damage skill. These pay for themselves in pp and in tria (via loot) with no worries at all. But some skills (low level ways that don't have attack spells for example) simply are not capable of generating either the pp or tria needed to buy the next level. I fund certain skills using others and I am never ever short of tria. But people shouldn't be forced into leveling the specific skills that do generate profit easily if it's OOC for them or if it's not where their interest is. There's also the initial early levels where tria in general can be hard to get and not everyone will want or be offered handouts, no matter how many kind people we have who donate to new players.

But the early game (with the tutorial) is something that is being looked at. So maybe more of these things will get addressed in time.

[tman]

^ This.

Although I'd point out that the easy repeatable quests (harnquist is hungry, finara lunch sack, paper for charissa, there are dozens of others) are a good way for new players to fund low level training (tria and pp) until their skills are high enough to pay for themselves.

[potare]

not enough players for this idea.