After many months of inactivity, a few suggestions...

[RainRain 591]

On 6/30/2021 at 3:17 PM, Oblivionnreaver said:

 ok we're on the track to find out if anyone did actually play during these supposed 0 player months

idk man what's the good in some independent amatuer poll on a clearly biased website compared to the assuredly highly rated information gathering methods of uhh adjusts glasses mmo-population.com? why should i trust some amateur independent source of data when i have perfectly good data on this website that clearly shows there were in fact 0 players who played WU during april? 😕

after all we can see it's a very common trend for other highly popular mmo's, like my personal favorite: scarlet blade. you see how the game lost all of it's playerbase in november of 2020? https://mmo-population.com/r/scarletblade/

obviously, we can trace this phenomenon to the fact that november is no nut november, of which of course anyone with a reasonable measure of self control (read: all mmo players) will simultaneously cease playing the game during that month. clearly the same phenomenon happened with WU, given that april is the--

wait a minute google april is the what awareness month?

[Oblivionnreaver 5,174]

you truly are the shakespears of our generation archirain

[Darnok 203]

14 hours ago, RainRain said:

idk man what's the good in some independent amatuer poll on a clearly biased website compared to the assuredly highly rated information gathering methods of uhh adjusts glasses mmo-population.com? why should i trust some amateur independent source of data when i have perfectly good data on this website that clearly shows there were in fact 0 players who played WU during april? 😕

after all we can see it's a very common trend for other highly popular mmo's, like my personal favorite: scarlet blade. you see how the game lost all of it's playerbase in november of 2020? https://mmo-population.com/r/scarletblade/

obviously, we can trace this phenomenon to the fact that november is no nut november, of which of course anyone with a reasonable measure of self control (read: all mmo players) will simultaneously cease playing the game during that month. clearly the same phenomenon happened with WU, given that april is the--

wait a minute google april is the what awareness month?

 

You are another person who did not understand the topic. The argument with zero players in a given month is just straw man fallacy.

The main topic of discussion is the declining number of players and the misconception that the content in Wurm (so advertised by veterans) is enough to keep players for several years, and the data shows that one year after the start of few new maps, most players quit, so something is wrong. Either the game mechanics are not interesting enough and new maps should appear more often, or you need to improve the game mechanics so that the average player interested in open world + sandbox wants to stay in Wurm a few months longer.

OR make the game cheaper and let players continue to play and develop characters (only slower) without paying premium OR after premium ends skills should not be lowered/capped, because why are they? After all, the player has paid for his character's level by paying premium and wasting time on acquiring this skill level.

I don't know which would be the best solution, but I know that if nothing changes the situation will not improve.

Edited July 5, 2021 by Darnok

[Sheffie 1,120]

New maps = increased server maintenance costs

Keeping skills without premium = reduced income

 

Whether these would increase player retention is academic, because the devs aren't likely to make changes that would hurt their balance sheet

[Darnok 203]

8 hours ago, Sheffie said:

New maps = increased server maintenance costs

Keeping skills without premium = reduced income

 

Whether these would increase player retention is academic, because the devs aren't likely to make changes that would hurt their balance sheet

 

More players = more income

More often new map = more players willing to buy premium to level up faster

More free land = more deeds and more income from upkeep

Edited July 6, 2021 by Darnok

[Sheffie 1,120]

On 6/30/2021 at 2:10 PM, Darnok said:

Several hundred players quit because I was right

 

The first step in solving a problem is finding the root cause.

[Ekcin 2,407]

I agree to no new maps (maybe except a Jackal revival). As to making cheaper, nonsense. The game is damn cheap already.

 

Another thing is "free player" treatment. As I wrote here:

It would be ok to uphold several f2p restrictions such as no villagers, no care for >1, no deletion protection after 3 months of inactivity etc. The restrictions would not harrass or punish free players as they do now, but create a serious incentive to sub. And for those temporarily unable to cover the sub it would make staying in Wurm (and eventually resubbing) less painful.

[Darnok 203]

12 hours ago, Sheffie said:

 

The first step in solving a problem is finding the root cause.

 

A significant part of players, if they do not have to pay for premium, will spend some of this money on increasing the deed size.

As I wrote earlier, you can introduce a fee for swimming between maps (kind of tax for crossing), if the new maps do not contain all the animals and plants, or if there are new ones that are not on the current maps players would have a reason to move between maps.

The first visit to a new island can also be paid extra, one time payment at cost of 1 month premium, this way the player pays to buy access to new content, as in the DLC system, with the fact that Wurm allows you to create a new content system with a smoother transition. Because a new animal or plant can be purchased by you from another player who bought a new island (DLC) and now that player makes money by selling the resources that he find there to players who have not yet decided to buy access to this map.

Such a system would motivate devs to create new content, attract players and allow devs to gain funds to improve features already existing in the game.

 

 

Edited July 6, 2021 by Darnok

[Sheffie 1,120]

Now if there's one thing that is guaranteed to turn players off, it's paid DLC

Edited July 7, 2021 by Sheffie

[Drayka 485]

This is all pure speculation. ANY theory that is believed can have facts found to support it and all other facts dismissed as irrelevant. That's how paranoid conspiracy theories WORK.

 

Now you can stand there all day and say "I speak for everyone who quit, even though they aren't joining me on this thread, and this is why they left. I predicted it would happen, and it did. See! I was right! This is absolute proof that everything I say is to be taken as absolute fact."

 

But that's not how the scientific method works. Most people who have been subjected to a social or political campaign have had proven to their satisfaction that statistics can be misrepresented to attempt to prove anything by logical fallacy, including that your great-great-great grandmother MUST have been an extra-terrestrial lifeform invading planet Earth, in order to achieve world domination by outbreeding the natives.

 

Just because financial theorising is more mainstream-acceptable, than some well known and widely-ridiculed fringe theories, this does not make your logical premise any more sound.

 

Speak for yourself, and allow others to speak with you if they agree. That's how this forum tends to work, in my experience. Gaming communities are not all neatly-identical. Different personalities are attracted to different genres of game, and to different styles of gameplay within that genre. In my experience of reading reviews, every single gamer has a unique set of likes and dislikes, which is why the gaming industry can support such a broad spectrum of games, and even many near-identical games despite a limited pool of disposable income for financing them.

 

There's no such thing as 'the perfect game for everyone' if everyone in that community is determined to selfishly have 'the perfect game for me'. That's not how communities work, in my personal experience of player-drama. However that does NOT licence me to go to a community and say "You're all wrong, everything you do is wrong, everything you want is wrong, and everything you are doing is going to lead to the impossibility of something I want for me personally, and what I want, and believe, and take to be absolute fact for myself, is all that matters in the entire world, so shut up and accept that you must do exactly as I say, or lose everything you care about." Because, me, with an ounce of respect, if not for myself then for the continued wellbeing of my immediate social circle, let alone those peripheral to that group, is going to reject that argument. Especially in the PvP community, shrunken as it is. And I suspect, this is true for the veteran PvE community, though they are not part of my social circle and I cannot claim to understand their culture to a useful level.

 

There's a reason RL politics and religious issues are banned topics by the moderators. One cannot force people to believe what one has come to believe, just because one happens to believe oneself to be 100% right and anyone who disagrees with one is ones utter inferior and their opinion is not only worthless, but to be eradicated with extreme prejudice. In my limited history of experiencing PvP drama, that attitude tends to lose people allies on the long-term, though it may gain them in the (very) short-term.

 

Just because this is about financial profitability strategy, and not directly about political or religious idealism, does not mean one can safely ignore basic tenets of human psychology to achieve absolute victory over any voices of dissent that are encountered. In a way, coins are ultimately just voting tokens in a very broad, treacle-slow and ongoing ideology popularity contest. But as you personally are apparently not financially successful in-game, and don't value the in-game financial system as it exists now, why should any veteran PvEer, let alone the Devs, take your word as financial gospel? And that's even assuming that coin transactions are the ONLY acceptable way to express your opinion and achieve your aspirations, which is clearly a fallacy in itself. There are no financial transactions in the community I am in, apart from the core game-mechanic defaults (upkeep, premium, etc.) and yet we manage to have ongoing, long-term and highly complex relationships without it. Too complex for some.

 

So I'll say to you personally, what I said to MYSELF when I came back to the Wurm community after 6 years: You aren't up-to-date, you are out-of-touch, you will look like an utter idiot to those around you at first, and if you want to be successful alongside this community, you are going to have to invest time and money into these people and their self-built culture, and be willing to value their opinions as at-least equally-valuable to your own, however challenging and frustrating that may be to achieve. Learn to change what you personally are prepared to do and experience, before you expect anyone else to change.

Edited July 7, 2021 by Drayka

[Darnok 203]

On 7/7/2021 at 3:04 AM, Sheffie said:

Now if there's one thing that is guaranteed to turn players off, it's paid DLC

 

And that is why on steam so many games is making DLCs 😄

[Drayka 485]

17 hours ago, Darnok said:

 

And that is why on steam so many games is making DLCs 😄

 

And conveniently, you don't have statistics for how many players stopped playing, or refused to buy these games, because it was a pay-to-play DLC game.

[Darnok 203]

21 hours ago, Drayka said:

 

And conveniently, you don't have statistics for how many players stopped playing, or refused to buy these games, because it was a pay-to-play DLC game.

 

It was you who wrote that some players stopped playing because of DLCs, so according to the rules of science, you should provide the proof.
 

[Sheffie 1,120]

On 7/7/2021 at 4:04 AM, Drayka said:

You aren't up-to-date, you are out-of-touch, you will look like an utter idiot to those around you at first, and if you want to be successful alongside this community, you are going to have to invest time and money into these people and their self-built culture, and be willing to value their opinions as at-least equally-valuable to your own, however challenging and frustrating that may be to achieve. Learn to change what you personally are prepared to do and experience, before you expect anyone else to change.

 

This got five likes.

Your posts in this thread, in total, have got... zero likes.

I know. Not very scientific.

But it is worth thinking about.

Changes to the game will to an extent attract new players and to an extent push existing players towards quitting. Whether the change is a win, in the long term, is a question of balancing new players gained with current players lost. The problem with this calculation is that — and I don't think you disagree with this — a lot of new players don't stick around for very long. So the number of existing players who are opposed to an idea is in fact a reasonable indication of how much it would hurt the devs to implement that idea. A better approach is a suggestion that is popular with existing players and which might also attract new ones.

[Darnok 203]

7 hours ago, Sheffie said:

 

This got five likes.

Your posts in this thread, in total, have got... zero likes.

I know. Not very scientific.

But it is worth thinking about.

Changes to the game will to an extent attract new players and to an extent push existing players towards quitting. Whether the change is a win, in the long term, is a question of balancing new players gained with current players lost. The problem with this calculation is that — and I don't think you disagree with this — a lot of new players don't stick around for very long. So the number of existing players who are opposed to an idea is in fact a reasonable indication of how much it would hurt the devs to implement that idea. A better approach is a suggestion that is popular with existing players and which might also attract new ones.

 

Don't you understand that Wurm doesn't exist in an alternate reality where other products and their attractiveness don't matter? When designing anything, you have to take into account what the competition also offers and what attracts players. No major changes, just adding new textures, or some small GUI tweaks will not fix anything. Wurm was created a long time ago and its main mechanics are no longer attractive today, players who defend what is now available in Wurm are defending their habits and their hobbies, but they hurt themselves and the product.

 

Who today would like to play PvP after watching this movie? It can't be fixed without big changes.

 

 

[Drayka 485]

11 minutes ago, Darnok said:

Don't you understand that Wurm doesn't exist in an alternate reality where other products and their attractiveness don't matter? When designing anything, you have to take into account what the competition also offers and what attracts players. No major changes, just adding new textures, or some small GUI tweaks will not fix anything. Wurm was created a long time ago and its main mechanics are no longer attractive today, players who defend what is now available in Wurm are defending their habits and their hobbies, but they hurt themselves and the product.

 

Who today would like to play PvP after watching this movie? It can't be fixed without big changes.

 

Me for one. And unlike you, I'm paying to play Wurm Online. And guess what? My payments to play this game as it is right now, whatever its challenges, let alone what it may or may not become well beyond my power to control it, are going towards the pool that funds the wages of the Development Team and their development budget. YOU aren't so much as paying them even to keep this game running as-is, let alone prepared to fund it to develop it into what you are proposing, and would appease your learned-ideology specifically. For people who live in a reality where there are actual up-front costs to putting ideas into action, not everyone is prepared to gamble everything they have and have worked for thus far, for the chance of 'more profit', based solely on a deliberately insulting sales-pitch by someone who portrays themselves as too-good for a community they have opined to be inferior in every way that matters to them. All you're currently doing, is picking fault from the sidelines as self-appointed and blatantly contemptuous, judge-and-jury.

 

I'm prepared to 'throw my money away' on this game, regardless of whether the development team continues to develop this game in a way I personally would like them to, and would suit me personally. I'm paid up one account well into next year, and I'll be paying in more money, as further funds become available to me. For NO guarantee. For what already exists and may become much less a game I would want to play, if I wasn't already invested. And I'm not the only one. Lots of us are prepared to gamble our RL-income on this community's future, knowing the risks and hoping for something better in spite of that.

 

What are you doing? Other than finding fault from your safe, outsider perspective and making a lot of noise about it? At least those who play on the same server as me, on those accounts you deride as not-being-worthy of you playing alongside them, are part of this community. Part of my extended family, in a sense, with all the drama that comes with that. And I selfishly DON'T want them replaced with a ton of fashionable players who will move on to the next game after less than a year, and leave Wurm in the dust of their wake without any regard for the development team, other than they have padded their wallets for a few months and no longer care what happens to them or their dreams.

 

All you seem to be able to see, from what you have written thus far, is 'product', not people. Profit, not relationships. And I'm sorry, but Wurm Online requires a bit more than that to be successful at this game and this community. Perhaps, unlike other games you have played. Perhaps unlike other companies you have worked for in RL. There's lots of profiteering in RL that sacrifices the wellbeing of its employees and customer-base, for the sake of greater profit for those in power. That doesn't make it laudable practice worthy of being promoted. That doesn't make it worthy of replacing what we have here.

 

So if you want to be part of this community, BE part of it. Invest, instead of coming up with every fiscal reason you can think of to not do so, and arguing that we're the ones with the problem. Because your ideology seems more toxic to you, than the changes you propose would seem to be to this community. Maybe it's time to try something the popular crowd WOULDN'T do, in your judgement. For your own selfish best interests. Because, why would you be here otherwise?

 

You'd already be long gone if you didn't already know in your heart, that Wurm Online offers you something that you can get nowhere else. Instead you're still here, posting, fighting for change, railing at how none of this makes sense. Fighting to win the ultimate argument of unfettered profiteering vs community building. I think this is an argument that, for your own best interests, you can only come out ahead in, by losing to us. The only question is, whether you are yet ready to take that leap of faith.

[atazs 965]

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