An incentive to attract new players.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Winterweaver, May 29, 2020.

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  1. Terrence Phillip

    Terrence Phillip Avatar

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    A system can be complete but still evolve and get polished. Take player owned dungeons. Cool concept, half finished idea, no reasons to visit player dungeons. Journal non functional. Crafting recipe book non functional. The list can go on. We are more than 2 years following release and the game still feels like an alpha. I agree with others who say development is too slow. I know it s not an easy situation for the devs that do what they can, but they need more manpower.
     
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  2. Violet Ronso

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    I think there are many ways to look at this, our biggest problem right now is player RETENTION, we don't really have problems with players coming in, but players leave as fast as they come in, and that is where the issue lies, now lets look at the possible outcomes :

    1. New player comes in, realizes his performance is crap, leaves... This is the biggest one IMO, I mean I just upgraded my PC and I still get unity crashes every so often, and guess what, when they happen to me, I honestly don't feel like opening up the game again, yet I am a veteran who generally enjoys the game, how do you want a new player to stick around if I have issues sticking as well?

    2. New player enjoys the game, starts wondering what to do next, but nothing is clear enough to understand what they got themselves into, this game is halfway towards a normal MMO with quests and stuff, but also halfway towards minecraft where nothing is told and you do what you want. Players seeing elements of both games wonder if they are truly understanding what is going on, they get overwhelmed, and quit. This is more the crowd that has not played old school mmos, but there are tons out there.

    3. New player starts to enjoy the different systems out there, really starts to enjoy housing, opens the crown shop, ready to spend maybe 20$, realizes that his 20$ will buy him a whole kitchen set, but clearly not enough chairs, but if he wants more chairs he will need to put in another 20$ because he can only buy the set not the chairs. He will eventually end up quitting by disgust of having to spend hundreds only to get basic decoing going with nice stuff.

    The 1st and 2nd players, honestly, I think is where the most effort needs to be done, but if we look at player 3, a simple fix to his solution would be to sell individual items... I am not talking about reducing prices, most prices have been reduced to a reasonable number, but I still think that being forced to buy kits instead of units means I have less worth for more money, so I am losing out. Making items be sold in units means a lot more money could be spent by low budget players, all while maintaining the prices you feel are required to keep the game alive. I think this could be a good compromise that doesn't take away from anyone but allow the game to make more money and keep a little bit more players than before. No it is not the solution we have all been awaiting for to solve player retention, but it is a step in the right direction, on I believe would have the same impact as the food rework, a good one.
     
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  3. Time Lord

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    Unless there's another 2-4 million dollars placed into immediate development, that wishful thinking will never be granted (preying to the EA Gaming gods may help, but that's being overly hopeful). SOTA is similar to an investment fund which keeps our current level of forward progress going, "which has been shear genius in our current corporate gaming business investment climate". The raining gaming investment money season is over and SOTA is choosing to survive on a slim cloud seeding budget (aka our current COTO Shop) to weather the world wide gaming money investment drought. Since the end of our own SOTA website pledge and bundle offers, there's been a never ending wave of critics predicting SOTA's financial demise yet it's still here and still developing despite calls for our developers to "blow their wad'$" gambling that just one more big push would somehow propel our game into the gaming annals of hall of fame stardom. That sort of wishing on a star for $ is another mythical fantasy in hopes that only appear in player's dreams. The gaming investment world is currently a harsh empty bank account, where unless a gaming business team planned ahead to weather such times, "they died on the vine" having used up all their operating capital.

    The big money is still on the sidelines awaiting the next sota rocket to take a ride on, which is the only way now to get it ;)~TL~
     
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  4. Scanphor

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    Performance is the #1 issue putting new players off imho - whilst I acknowledge the issue with POTs and player deco etc even in other areas and with a high end PC performance is just poor.
     
  5. Time Lord

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    I've been running into this, but only recently for some unknown reason :(~TL~
     
  6. Sentinel2

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    Same. There is so much potential here. I just wish they were able to work on finishing some of these systems. Maybe picking one a month to progress a bit.

    That's one of the things I've learned about in my new job and career. I love the value of making every day better than yesterday. Pick something and just improve upon it. Even if just a little :D

    Anyway, been here since kickstarter. I'm not going anywhere. And it's refreshing to see new players joining SOTA!
     
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  7. Vladamir Begemot

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    They probably shouldn't have spent 8 months of developer time building systems designed specifically to punch us whales in the whale chonies.

    Begging for scraps now, and you can't say we didn't warn em.

    So since that's the case, bargain basement prices are perhaps called for. "Spare a coin, sir?"
     
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  8. Vladamir Begemot

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    Oh, and here's some salt;

    Imagine if they'd spent that 8 months working on the performance, or quest system, or UI instead?
     
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  9. Saevio Vehemens

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    It's not just new players, the game slows down a lot on newer systems and higher resolutions...
    As people upgrade their systems, especially people move to Nvidia RTX cards, the game simply becomes unplayable.
    They tried for a while to get to newer unity versions but in the end it has been marked by devs as impossible, so the game will continue to lose ground until the RTX issues are met.
    I guarantee..... fix the perf issues, the game roars back.
     
  10. oplek

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    Or they need fewer things to work on. In the past week they were fixing leaderboard issues... time that could have been spent on other things, if there wasn't a leaderboard. If there's a word to describe the development, it's "unfocused".

    That's what I mean when people tell me they're a "small team". Then they should set goals, expectations and scope of a small team.
     
  11. kaeshiva

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    The bottom line is there's a lot of reasons why there is a low, and dwindling playerbase.
    There are loads of issues that have nothing to do with the monetization -

    Performance:
    I'm sorry, but its just bad, and has gotten worse as time has gone on. Longer load times, hitching, lagging, crashing.
    Three years ago I could run two sota clients AND a bunch of other stuff with no problems.
    Now I'm terrified to even have a web browser open alongside sota because it will lag/crash/freeze up my pc
    Nothing has changed on my end hardware/software wise, and no other games are affected. Its Sota.
    Ive run the gamut of technical support, replacing this and that and updating this and that ...and guess what, its Sota.
    And because Sota has a lot of ....repetitive, boring stuff (like watching progress bars, watching load screens, waiting for respawns...) its just untenable to sit there and play it without playing something else at same time. Now that performance has dropped below a threshold where this can be done, I rarely play.

    Lack of identity/focus/direction
    What kind of game is this ? Who is the target audience? Is it a social game, an economic game, a crafting game, a pvp game, a pve fighting/questing game, a sandbox/building game? Sota tries to do it all, and as a result, has a large number of half-implemented, half-finished mediocre systems. We want a player run economy without the insight/balance (consumption, supply, demand) to make that workable, and without the tools to actually help buyers and sellers connect. We want a deep crafting system but everything is RNG-plagued and so wasteful that players have learned to accept "good enough" and move on. We want a pvp game in a game with significant combat imbalance, gear bloat, not to mention exploitability and in which PvP has no purpose beyond gank-gratification, the lowest form of pvp. We want a pve fighting game with no meaningful loot, forgettable quests with no meaningful rewards, and with progression rates effectively hitting the softcap in a matter of days. We want a sandbox where players can create content, but with almost no tools to do so beyond some generic dungeon prefabs and a humanoid-signpost-npc with no quest features. Sota needs to stop being a jack of all trades master of none, and pick a direction and polish the hell out of it, not slap a few things in it and move on to the next thing.

    Progression rate
    The saving grace was that it used to take a long, long time to explore everything and consume all available content. With the progression rate cranked to 4x the original plan, most of the available content can be done inside a month, or even a weekend if you have some guidance. That's it, you've killed the biggest stuff the game has to offer, you've gotten your 50g worth of loot from it. Game over, you won Sota! Now what? There was a time when quests were given unique itemization rewards (deco,clothes, etc.) which at least encouraged completionism, but these are fairly limited and most of them are one-offs. I'm sure a lot of you old-timers remember when getting adventure level 100 was a big deal, it was months of effort - and now it can be done in a couple hours or less. Producer levels are even worse now - you can get a higher producer level just doing the main story quest than I achieved in a year of gathering and grinding it - without crafting a single item. And the problem is that because progression curve gets so steep, at some point its just not worth it to grind 300 hours to get 1 more point of attunement or another 0.1% success chance. So you're done. You won. Now what?

    Yes yes, I know, negative nancy. The truth of the matter is, the game has a lot of systems. It has a lot of potential. And potential will keep people around for a long time ,it will keep people spending for a long time, but here we are, 4 years and change past "persistence" and while we can acknowledge the game has come a long way in terms of "stuff it has" we're still waiting for core features to be fixed. Recipe books. Quest journals. Vendor system. Maps and mini-maps. Stuff that most games have finished at working at launch, or hell, even in alpha. And all the while we're trying to finance development by offering up more and more fluff for folks to buy. People used to buy based on investment, and potential - not just talking about reselling here, but I'm much more likely to drop a few hundred dollars on a house if I see myself playing the game for a long, long time. Not so much if I'm going to be done all available content in a week.

    This brings me 'round to why the pricing needs to be addressed. If you get someone playing for a couple weeks, its better to get $20 off of them than nothing at all. Someone who plays a short time is not going to spend big. You also want something you can actually market - and trying to advertise by saying "Come play Sota, you can decorate your virtual house for just $999! - is not going to get new folks in. Alternatively, there need to be more ways to earn premium currency by playing the game to offset what folks actually have to spend. Many games do this with much success, if something costs 10,000 but I can earn 8000 of it through playing for a couple weeks, I'm much more likely to pay the difference in cash to have it NOW.

    If I had to pick one thing that's keeping me away from this game right now, its performance - but not performance in a vacuum - its performance combined with the fact that a lot of the systems are slow and stodgy and simply not fun to do without multitasking . Its that combo that's keeping me away. If I could run Sota in background to do my refining and chat with folks, I'd probably keep it open every day and remain more engaged. In fact, I used to do precisely this - do my refining while I'm working, and go adventuring with folks as a result of the chitchat later in the day. That's the hard line that keeps me from even logging on most days. The second thing is lack of anything meaningful to do or progress to make in a play session. Experience is no longer meaningful, grinding gold is no longer meaningful - if we had the tools for player made quests or non-generic player dungeons that allowed for some creativity, that's thousands of hours of potential playtime. If we had achievements. If we had factions to make friends with and unlock things. If we had a daily quest with a reward worth bothering with, (bearing in mind that experience and gold are no longer meaningful), I'd log in every day and do it.

    It took me years to get to the point where there's nothing more to do. But with progression cranked up now and the implementation of a variety of things (new zones, new gear, new skills, whatever) that make maxing your character out significantly faster than ever, people get there a lot faster, now. And if you want someone to drop a lot of money, they have to think they're going to be around long enough to enjoy whatever it is they're buyin'. I think that's where the pricing comes into play. Now, you can disagree with any or all of the above, but I think most will assent that people really only spend money if they think they are getting their money's worth. There's simply no reason to buy furniture and outfits in a game that I'm not playing due to performance reasons or lack of further goals.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2020
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  12. Cora Cuz'avich

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    Yeah... I keep thinking about buying a PoT.... I can probably afford it, except it'll cost me three times as much to deco it. And I might even do that, if I didn't always feel like the game might not be around in another year or so.

    I "play" about once a month. Truthfully, I'm mostly just keeping things up to date until episode 2 stuff is "finished." I'm avoiding it for now. So I log in Saturday mornings, restock my vendors, think about what else to do... then log out and do housework. Because honestly, clean toilets are more rewarding.
     
  13. Wilfred

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    I wish I could like this a thousand times. :)
     
  14. Time Lord

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    Yes, Redfish is still here ;)~TL~
     
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  15. redfish

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    [​IMG]
     
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  16. Saevio Vehemens

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    I packed up my stuff today. If they ever get the perf issues sorted and to a supported version of Unity that Unity support will actually help them with, let me know.
    Until then, there's plenty of games my rig will run without issues...

    User Specs:
    OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
    CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10980XE CPU @ 3.00GHz (36) System RAM: 261818
    GPU: NVIDIA TITAN RTX GPU RAM: 24152
    SotA.Win.64.1295.Date.10.02.20
     
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  17. Aldornia

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    This is probably the best post of the month (or year). I've played SotA for about 2 years, but I haven't logged on for over a week. The game runs so crappy, lag and log times, etc. that it is very irritating. Besides that, when I do log on, I'm not sure what to do. There seems to be no direction unless I spend the first half hour or so, reading the forums or watching the last post of Chris. I want to log on, go to an NPC get my quests and play. I don't want to have to study, learn LUA (or whatever) etc. Just my opinion and why I've stopped playing.
     
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