My thoughts on getting players to return

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Dominor666, Dec 10, 2018.

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  1. Mishikal

    Mishikal Avatar

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    The recent changes are what drove me away from the game. ;)
     
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  2. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    Main reason is this is not the type of thing we would normally give away. We think R61 is going to be awesome enough that we're FINALLY going to do some re-acquisition work and try to bring older users back to the game for a second try. This feels like a really good lure to get them to come back and I think the sense of urgency is important.

    In R62 we may leave it, we might turn the remaining books into a large deco book that can be traded, or something else TBD. Then move the respec book to the COTO store for 10 or 15 COTOs. Also, confirming that it will give you the option to unlearn an entire School OR all Adventure OR all Crafting.

    @Paulie Walnuts And @Humbert_Humbert This is specifically to get more people into the game. We've actually been trending up for 4 weeks running if you look at actual numbers playing. We're not where we want to be but we're at least headed in the right direction. As for polish and bug fixing, that is our primary focus but we're not going to have coders work on quest polish or build scenes. Enough with you guys trying to hijack the thread with negativity. We're working on the right stuff and working as fast as we can.

    Our focus is bugs, performance, and quality of life improvements. We've made huge strides on all 3 recently and we're going to take a stab recapturing some users to get that concurrency up to guys like Humbert worry less.
     
  3. Paulie Walnuts

    Paulie Walnuts Avatar

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    I wasn't trying to be negative. Sorry if it came off that way.
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2018
  4. Barugon

    Barugon Avatar

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    Alright then.
     
  5. Eric White

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    Thank you for further explanation @Chris . You guys are doing awesome work and I appreciate how devoted you all are.
     
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  6. Elwyn

    Elwyn Avatar

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    Or make it an annual thing, it could be the New Year's Respec for those who really care. I've heard of other games that had annual respecs.
     
  7. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    Definite possibility that it could become a holiday bonus.
     
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  8. Alleine Dragonfyre

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    I've been closely watching the population stats available to me and, yes, we are trending up. It is both encouraging and scary as this coincides with going Free 2 Play. That was a pretty valuable bit of exposure to give the game and there are only so many of those opportunities for that kind of bump. I would be cautious in having any expectations of that trend continuing without major fixes. My hope is that the quest system and maps and existing combat issues are fixed asap because of this.

    Edit to add: let people respec. make it an insane amount of gold and start low based on number of respecs.
     
    Last edited: Dec 11, 2018
  9. Chris

    Chris Tech Lord Moderator Ambassador SOTA Developer

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    Anyone who has been to our office recently knows I keep a TV scrolling between lots of different metrics for the game. I wish we were growing faster BUT I'll be happy with us just going in the right direction. :)
     
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  10. Tila Tenderfoot

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    Great news, thanks for keeping us updated, Chris. Glad to see some of the most annoying/persistent bugs are getting fixed and the new releases bring enough new content for people to get busy. I am certainly excited for R61 and beyond. Also, having factions would be nice. :)
     
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  11. Rook Strife

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    Lose people because of combat issues. Entice people back with combat issues.

    How about take a month or two and rework the whole thing so we have a new system that actually works. Then announce you've redone the combat and make a push to bring back old players.


    Paulie's post also has a lot of good points in the long-term for acquiring and keeping players
     
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  12. Cirsee

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    You guys have made great strides in improving stuff, but something in those changes has upset older players. I don’t think a combat respects is enough to draw them back. As much as I personally dislike PvP, I think this is one area that you could work on to help draw back older players. Create a consequence system, reduce the resource count for crafting to make it easier and cheaper on the crafter for frequent PvPers to replace armor, have an open world PvP day after all that (just announce it well in advance). If you take out extreme differences and punishments to pvers, you can get them to pvp for the fun adrenaline side. I like the idea of throwing factions into it. Heavy player killing should be treated as a negative virtue, guards should hate you.

    Also avoid big combat changes without a couple release notification and some general forum feedback first. Nothing kills a new player than to have what was fun nerfed to heck right out from under them. You also need to work on stability, and I know you have a lot, but my hubby crashes three times a night playing with me still. I know another player who that just drives insane. These guys don’t post, so you don’t know about it. On the plus side, you have faster loads than ESO!

    You have a few odd hanging quest prices in outskirts that could be confusing to new players, cleaning that up before the quest overhaul would help. The journal is really terrible, it is very cumbersome to find where you are in a task. Could quests be tracked in mail instead? You could trash the letter when you are done? Just a short term fix. It could happen where the novel causes an entry to the journal that will instead created a mailed letter with a fuller description. This letter could continu to be updated as new steps unlock. It won’t be easy to sort, but it would improve tracking one set of quests and destroying things when you are done. Heck you can save the pag s and build your own story book with them after completion.

    I have actually grown to really like the deck system. It will be nice to see new additions to it.

    At any rate, I don’t know all the answers, but I am trying to encourage others who have played to come back.
     
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  13. Turk Key

    Turk Key Avatar

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    For myself (adv lvl 110) I don't think the respec will be much use to me. I like my main combat skill. Almost everything else I have learned is to increase my resistance by learning skills I will never use. If the resistance system is changed then the respec will be a wonderful thing. Without a change in the resistance system, then really I have no use for unlearning anything. Now I can see some small use for low level players, but let's be real.... It does not take much to raise most skills through 60 to 80.
     
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  14. Merlota

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    Suggestion. Complete refund of every skill that is set to unlearn. Some skills are extremely expensive to skill in terms of reagents and/or time. Players may want to keep the Chaos tree for example or not refund the Taming skill with the 15 minute colldown. Allow the players to choose what gets reset.
     
  15. bloodydragon

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    This kind of attitude isn't going to entice people back. It is driving people away. These guys are both supporters and give good advice in a civil manner and they are being chastised for it. Paulie's post was especially helpful. Lots of us will never come back until quests and NPC interactions feel better, the map is fixed and loot is improved. The UI needs a ton of work before new players will stay, too. A respec isn't a big deal; lots of games have mechanics for that. A place to respec for COTOs could be a good way to bring money in. If the question is how to get people to come back, Paulie's ideas are as good as any others. I certainly didn't think they were negative as I agree 100% with them all.

    This guy had some great ideas that would help the game feel better for newer players: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/qol-improvement-possibility.147497/

    I reinstalled this game a week or so ago and didn't get far. It was the UI, the movement and the fact I had to click on a banker six times before my bank would come up. You could call me a "new user" because I only have a dozen hours in compared to other games. And I couldn't get far. With going free to play, first impressions should be the most important, not throwing little bones out to people who already have many hours in. That is my opinion, and I am guessing some of the thousands of others of us who own but are not playing this game would agree.
     
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  16. Barugon

    Barugon Avatar

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    What would be really awesome is if the experience pool was shared between avatars on the same account (like virtues and the bank are). It would help persuade people to purchase extra character slots rather than just creating another account.
     
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  17. Pawz

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    I love this idea! I would love to unlearn every skill in the game and have it all go into my exp pool, I could build my char so much better now.
     
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  18. marthos

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    Everyone is different, a respec doesn't really do it for me. I'm with the posters who said that the game needs soul. That's a tough term, but what I want is to log into a living, breathing world that feels different each time I log in. I want to log in, assess the state of the world, and then decide how I want to change it during my play session. Other players can change it in the direction I want, or change it in an opposite direction, that will create cooperation and conflict (non-pvp).

    For example:

    1) Control Points: They block travel again unless you pay a small sum of gold based on level (this is paid on the overworld map to avoid loading screen). However, if players kill a boss in the CP, a global message announces which player (or all players if in a party) killed the boss and for the next hour all passage through the CP is free. Bonus option - let the players charge the fee instead and take a hit to their virtue. This will allow players to get some fame or notoriety, and it can be a bit of a gold sink.

    2) Regional Economy: If control points are owned by the monster faction, prices are jacked up in the region to represent decreased trade between cities. The longer a region has no access to other regions, worse things happen...vendors run out of stock, etc. During these times, spawn quests from vendor NPCs to have players deliver cargo back and forth to renew stock.

    3) Introduce a political system. Add LB, DS, or create new rulers. Each ruler will grant a global bonus to a few schools, so different player types will naturally gravitate towards a ruler. These bonuses will improve the rate the skills increase as well as add a small power boost. Create a few different systems to put these rulers into power, thus increasing the bonuses. For example, allow flags to be planted in scenes. Players can yank down flags and put up their own. In PvP zones, players defend the flag. In non-PvP zones, there's a boss that you have to kill to switch the flags around (this makes all scenes relevant). Create artifacts of great power that the rulers want with the catch that they randomly teleport away from their owner. Players get hints where artifacts are, and have to kill random monsters in the zone until it drops. Then they return it to their ruler who gets a power boost.

    4) Treasure maps!

    5) Create merchant guilds that compete with each other for power that players can join. The guilds will provide bonuses to a set of crafting skills, and similar to the political system, compete with each other for power. If you put the mining guild in power, it's members get bonus ore from harvesting. The guild gets into power by completing various quests for the guildmasters that randomly spawn or spawn after events (like capturing control points). As the guild gets more powerful, the quests become more anti-virtuous. A guild may start out asking you to deliver cargo that a competing guild inevitably ambushes. As the guild gets more powerful, it may ask you to ambush enemy caravans and be the bad guys. There can be options here for PvP quests, one side escorts cargo, the other side tries to destroy it.

    Rather than think in terms of single-player quests and a storyline that everyone repeats, add some content that pits us against each other in other ways besides PvP. And when we do PvP, make it meaningful. Make it alter the world in a little way for everyone. Let us actually shape the world. Each time I log in, the world is exactly the same as when I left it. Remove that feeling and I'd come back to the game in a heartbeat. THAT is the game that I've been looking to play for years. I think Shroud is so very close to creating this, but I'm concerned that it's not the vision.
     
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  19. majoria70

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    Also control points don't block you anymore. You don't even have to go in them. Thanks for your feedback and good ideas. I really agree about the soul and creating a world that is in some way reactive to our choices. Creating system after system is great but where is the choices, consequences, and achievement tracking with rewarding? We need to be interested in the world and it needs to flow together in more ways like I remember you comments from npcs in locations we've impacted. Spawning special incidents or creatures from our choices would be awesome.
     
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  20. the Lacedaemonian

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    @marthos Easily the best suggestion in this thread. Every one of these ideas should be seriously brainstormed.

    Pitting the players against each other in a soft-PVP format, where the losses are intangible, versus directly tangible, is brilliant.
     
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