Just watched today's livestream and Ravalox asked for suggestions to increase revenue/visibility for SotA. I came up with some ideas - if you have a suggestion, please post it here. You could do a 10th anniversary marketing campaign. The general message could be to "give SoTA another try" now that it's had 10 years of dev time, improvements, changes, etc. Send a press release to the review sites, ask them to do another review. Send out a mass email to all players/previous players with a reason to log in again. The important thing is to email ALL accounts - many people have played this game over the years. Give players a reason to login continuously for a period of time, like 10 days of rewards if they log in for any 10 day period between x and y date. The rewards should encourage people to try out different features of the game or spend cotos in the store. You could give out cotos that are account bound so you don't kill the economy. Maybe do the vet rewards thing, people loved that in UO. Perhaps have a lottery for a few big rewards where people get an entry ticket every day they log in, or they get tickets from killing mobs/farming nodes (with a max # they can collect a day.) You could also bump up the rewards for treasure hunting chests since that's an interesting new feature - or you could collect tickets from chests as well. Point is, you have a great game and a great opportunity with the 10th anniversary to increase visibility and your player base. So I suggest you spend your time on marketing activities instead of the low-value tweaks that have been coming out over the past year or two. I don't mean to be negative by saying that, I understand you have a very small dev team. Point is, use your time wisely - and use it on things that are going to drive people back to the game and therefor drive revenue. Good luck!
I promise you, if SotA implemented a ramping daily bonus, I would never play it again. These days that is a blaring klaxon that a game is about to use every trick in the book to clean out your wallet. SotA is an okay game, it does nothing exceptionally, but also nothing so horribly as to be off-putting. It's decent to kill a few hours here and there but getting carried by folks with ten times your power level is only interesting for so long.
I'm glad that the team is finally showing some awareness of their business model. 1) Immediately remove all previous telethon rewards and backer items from the shop (they were only supposed to be available for that short amount of time - promise broken - multiple times - that disaffected a huge portion of people) 2) Create New items every release a) several of those items should only be available for a short amount of time - re-establish the concept of rares b) create in-game "craftable" versions of those items that are lesser "quality" 3) Micro transactions - items should be no more than $10. Coto prices should be 100/200/500/1000 4) No items should be no-trade (there's no real valid reason for it) - exception possibly SOME (most should be freely tradeable) quest related items.
I agree with the OP's market strategy, with one caveat. You need some new content that is bug free to bring back both older players, socials to review, and entice new players. By new content, I mean a good meaty chunk. It has to be a new mechanic, class tree, new region with questing, some new dungeons with changing daily quest/changing layout for replay. On top of that, loot needs to be more interesting. I suggest that armor/weapons, and good armor, can drop, you just need to be able to extract pieces and socket crafted armor to enable crafted to be the best. All armor and weapons should have sockets and perhaps we add a new armor piece slot. Perhaps a rune drop that gives a short-term change to the ability of an existing skill, something powerful and limited for a couple hours to a day and nothing we can ever craft. Also considering we have levels that never end, a kind of AA system like Everquest might be a good bonus of variety for people to achieve both old and new. Since, sadly, most of that requires more funding, you are rather limited. 1. Dev run public events with attendance rewards and special lower priced store items; including small advertisement maybe through your partnered streamers. Give the streamers a special item to hand out to advertise (a small wall certificate of invitation or such). These could be seasonal and are not the same as a coto bonus purchase. Think cheap decorations or wearables. Earn a pattern for attending the event or buy the fancier item on the store. You may need to have the event over a few days to cover time zones and player availability. Participation increases reward; just don't make it too mind numbingly grindy. 2. Invest your time into letting players develop dungeon and quest content. It's a good niche area that no game has really done a good job at. It gives you something to stand out in the crowd and you already have a backbone in place. 3. Contests for the next Monthly log in reward creation. 4. More frequent SoTA livestreams of the game. Tutorials for the new folks, tips and tricks, advanced building techniques, fishing trips, pub crawls, pvp battles, pure AMA, play with a dev, attend a player run event, etc. 5. The unpopular choice, remove coto's from dropping in game.
(re-)about face on the whole discouraging "certain transactions" open a trading section of the website that allows players to put up their items, which are held in escrow (by catilarium) for a percentage fee do everything @Jack SinAssist said above
There's an inherent catch-22 in in adding more content while also adding sources of additional power. If everything can be socketed and powerful items and slots are added then so much of the existing content is made redundant (by becoming trivially easy) that you're just treading water. I agree something new and interesting is great for us longer term players, but overall it seems counter-productive. Granted everything could be rebalanced, but that would be a monumental task and in the past has always led to more discontent from players than approval, even when overall power was increased. And there's a lot of history to point to. Imbued sockets, bandit armor, ephemeral and enduring relics, the Frost Giant mega-boss, Lamech's Bazaar and Myrkur, second ring slot, dramatic expansion of the belt slot, pet gear slots, revamped food and potions systems, player-event trophies and commemorative cloaks, Bard tree, double XP periods, helpful automatons and a new tutorial quest, development live streams, conversationalists, and so on. Those expansions and changes to the game cover pretty much everything you've described, aside from dynamic questing.
I know power creep is surely an issue, but adding more power for higher level and new zones is reasonable. You can introduce some of the new socketed options in episode 1 higher tier zones and enhance it in Episode 2 zones and Episode 3, as or if we get there. As to the history, it's just that. It has been played to death by many. If you watch current livestreams, they are a tad on the dull side, and we have lost tutorial, game showcasing, and entertaining livestreams. Double exp has become rarer, and a lot of gear, bosses, farming, and conversationalists were not balanced or completed. Heck one part of the Bard tree has been disabled for how long, let alone the ridiculous amount of agro and cast time for that tree. There were left over promises of more to come for a lot of systems. Even dungeons have yet to be enhanced, or bug fixed. I know they are working on it, and we all appreciate the effort a small team is applying. I am just trying to showcase what you would need to do to take advantage of drumming up interest for new and old players. You need to put a best foot forward before you talk to publications as you don't want to lose the positive impact of new player experiences or risk a crappy review.
I agree completely that work should be continued in those veins, and was reading your suggestions more as "do the same thing again, in a different way" I suppose, which is what I think would be folly. Some of the details aside (personally I think we need harder zones for the current power level of players, rather than the other way around) it would be great to see further development of the parts already largely in place.
