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Interest is almost extremely low

Discussion in 'Release 34 Feedback Forum' started by Mitara, Oct 16, 2016.

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  1. Mitara

    Mitara Avatar

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    As you can see from this chart from Steam, the interest in the game is almost extremely low.
    About 50% or so is using Stema to start the game, so we are talking about 800 players only.
    For all of us that likes this game, that is not good, even for a pre-release game.

    http://steamcharts.com/app/326160

    What can we do to change this. Except for finished what is planned right now, what else could be done to improve the experience new players get when they try out the game?


    I have at least.. one suggestion. Player to player help. A system to help newbie players, a bit like what was in UO, with players that can help with quesitions. I have seen a couple of guilds doing this on their own, just standing in the middle of Soltown and asking out loud if any players needed help. I think that is an awsome effort, but... it would be even better if there was something visible, even on the interface, that could support such an effort.

    Just finishing the game would not be enough.

    What do you think? Any ideas?
     
  2. KuBaTRiZeS

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    It will probably make you happy to know that something along that lines is planned. We'll see how that turns out, but it is planned indeed.

    I personally think that finishing the game may not be enough, but its indeed a start. There's no point in advertising a game that's not still pleasantly playable for the most of its target audience. So let's finish the game first, make it basics robust and coherent and then let's see where it needs more support. Otherwise we're starting the house from the roof.
     
  3. Lord_Darkmoon

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    Change the game back to the original vision. A single player RPG, with the option to add some friends for the occassional cooperative adventure or sometimes go online to meet strangers. Because this was a unique and interesting approach. There are enough (sandbox) MMORPGs out there...
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2016
  4. Gregoire Visaard

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    Not going to even get started on this... P
     
  5. Mitara

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    Okay... what world are you living in. Good MMORPGs out there... where? which ones? :)
     
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  6. Lord_Darkmoon

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    How about those:

    Shards Online
    Das Tal
    Albion Online
    Crowfall
    Gloria Victis
    Perpetuum Online
    Mortal Online
    Wurm Online
    Pantheon
    Project Gorgon
    Camelot Unchained
    The Repopulation
    Entropia Universe
    Xyson
    Osiris: New Dawn
    Project: Genom
     
  7. Roycestein Kaelstrom

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    There are also many more if we include the online survivor games like day Z, ark, and other medieval based online clones as well.

    It is not the quantity of population that we need right now. We need more of those who are willing to play the game in early access stage and fully understand what they are getting themselves into. They gotta be willing to provide constructive feedback and move on to test other features as well knowing that it may take awhile for any issues to be addressed.

    Last thing we want is having more armchair game designers and project managers who turn salty when they don't have their way. That's only giving people hard feeling and slow down the progress even more.

    As far as helping new players learning the rope, there are already hospitaller program, which is an alternative to straight up guild recruitment. There will also be the outlander guild feature will aim to help new players to communicate with one another (people already passionately discussed about pros and cons on the feature in one of threads).

    For me, they need to get all the tech for ep 1 done, then balance the game, then polish the UI, then adding more content (by this point players should have enough tools to build their own content as well). The commercial marketing push should come last or at least until we have all the tech done.
     
  8. Black Tortoise

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    Im all for being patient. The game being persistent, data wise, is OK with me for know. I trust Port's vision, love the games made by the developers in the past, and have extremely positive feelings about where this will end up. The population will come here when it is ready.

    And the game is far from ready :). I actually think the population is quite large relative to the state of the product. Anytime I am in multiplayer, I see many people in every scene I am in, and I play at unpredictable hours of day (and its never consistent).
     
  9. Mitara

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    None of those are interesting, several isnt even finished and some of them are really p2w :)
     
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  10. redfish

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    Yep... but to be honest, I'm not sure what this has to do with player population. I'm sure people who paid for the game and wanted to play at this stage of early access have tried it out, whatever player help that exists non-withstanding. Player help doesn't increase the player population.

    But there's a thread going about this subject, Population concerns.
     
  11. Gideon Thrax

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    "About 50% or so is using Stema to start the game, so we are talking about 800 players only." source?

    Context... context... context... full disclosure... context... Steamcharts is an unofficial 3rd party social experiment and it's only gathering data that Steam allows it to use... that said, it can only chart results from players that launch SotA through Steam... which is obviously a very very very small practically insignificant percentage of players. Even if/when your account is Steam linked... this data is not representative of your playtime because you have to use the Steam launcher if you want your login and playtime captured. So, yeah - this steamcharts business is a massive misrepresentation of what's happening.

    OP, you should change the title of this thread to something a little less dramatic...
     
  12. Lord_Darkmoon

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    SotA isn't finished, too ;)

    Also there are even more MMORPGs out there (WoW, Everquest 1 + 2, Wildstar, Ark, Neverwinter, The Elder Scrolls Online etc.). Regardless of their quality, every game of those does have a high or low number of dedicated players. They are playing "their" game, as SotA players are playing theirs.

    In the MMORPG genre not many play more than one or maybe two MMOs as this genre is too time consuming to play more than one or two games in earnest. Also the fans are defending their game. You can see this very clearly with this community. The hardcore fans defend SotA and consider other games to be bad an not worth playing. So they stick with SotA. The same goes for every other MMO. So why should people leave their game which they are defending?

    We have a fractured market with many MMOs out there which all have their dedicated community. Where should the players come from to play SotA?
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2016
  13. Rabum Alal

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    Why didn't they just make UO2?
     
  14. redfish

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    Yea, and the numbers for all MMOs I looked up on steamcharts were relatively low. Many are a bit higher than SotA, but they're also commercially released, widely advertised, high name recognition, etc. Even then, they're way low compared to the total gaming population.
     
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  15. Lord_Darkmoon

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    My opinion: Portalarium saw that on Kickstarter mostly single player RPGs very immensely successful and got much more money than they originally planned for. Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Shadowrun... Whereas MMORPGs on Kickstarter mostly failed or struggeled to even reach the minimum goal.
    Portalarium realized that there was a high demand for single player RPGs and thus they announced SotA as a hybrid between a single player RPG and a MMORPG. But now it seems that it gets harder and harder to create this concept as both aspects of the game, single player and MMORPG, suffer from this...
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2016
  16. Mitara

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    Seriously Lard_Darkmoon, Im glad SotA is NOT a singleplayer game. If SotA is supposed to compete with games lke Witcher 3, this game will never ever ever be successful. It is so low in quality in comparison that that cannot have been the goal.
     
  17. Lord_Darkmoon

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    I - sadly - agree with you.
    But I also believe that the single player mode of SotA will be compared to other single player RPGs at release... As the MMO part will be compared to other MMOs...
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2016
  18. Mitara

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    True, no doubt it will. But then... thats also why I created this post, to see if we could pinpoint, what could actually sell this game to new players, or what would be beneficial to add to the current planned design, to make it work for new players.
     
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  19. Mr. Hatter

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    I think a very robust starting scene and toutorial. Several friends of mine and my wife gave up on the game by the time they made it to Soultown.

    The work they did to starting scenes was a good start, but they still need a lot of work... let's face it all we did by making this game persistent is show our ass. (I say ours, because we the community paid for this game to be made, we are the investors/stake holders)

    The story at this point fails to grab most people from the start, which will cause a lot of people to move on to something else very early on because they don't have the patience to deal with the poor combat mechanics and zero direction when there is a complete lack of Amazement from the start.

    Move forward to us that are middle to end game, poor group mechanics, no loot, crafting is just a grind fest everyone can do everything so no one feels special when they GM something, because you could craft the same item at level 40. The game is to easy in some aspects (skills gates) and hard in the wrong ways (takes 20 hours of boring grinding to make anything worth while). The bone suits were a step in the right direction, if you take out the grind for the other mats. Killing trolls with friends is fun. Sitting in a dark mine for 20 hours dbl clicking ore nodes is not.

    Just want to add that above are my negatives right now, there are a lot of positives but I don't want their heads to get to big right now, we have work to do. I am just worried most players have already moved on.
     
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2016
  20. Duke Lorimus

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    I think sota is going to do very well. It's the strange things the people want and push for the funding to do... That becomes repurposed later that makes something new and would not normally even been considered due funding

    I have my Debbie downer and or negative Nancy days . But I've never witnessed a project like this come together.. and in many cases we are still just seeing scattered chapters in a much bigger story.
     
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