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Joshh

Plans for population growth?

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Hello everyone!

With steam release being well underway and seeing declining numbers, just wanting to know if there is a plan in action / being discussed to help promote the game / bring in more players.

 

Thanks!

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Another set of new servers is out of the picture for a long, long while, unless we were to see Jackal and/or Challenge come back in some way. (which I'm honestly expecting)

Otherwise, advertising content updates and events, either dev or player held, are the main promotion opportunities that're left. 

VR could bring in a new crowd but I doubt many would stick around

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59 minutes ago, Synjor said:

VR could bring in a new crowd but I doubt many would stick around

Steam brought in a new crowd as well, but how many of them stuck around 1 year later? 

 

Bringing in new people doesn't seem to be the core issue. The main problem is player retention, which has from what I've seen so far, zero plan of anything concrete in the works. 

 

Even if the VR release brings in 5000 players, if only 500 players stick around 1 year later, is that really a win? And 2 years later when those 500 become 250 ? There's precedent in Wurm for such things.

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3 hours ago, Joshh said:

Hello everyone!

With steam release being well underway and seeing declining numbers, just wanting to know if there is a plan in action / being discussed to help promote the game / bring in more players.

 

Thanks!

 

Nope.

 

You have to remember Wurm is like...15 years old?   It's not new and making headlines, and most people searching for free MMORPGs found Wurm Online a long time ago. It's not going to make any top 10 MMORPG lists because there's just too many new alternatives out there that outperform it. I don't think there's really a high ROI in doing a sponsored Twitch stream campaign, it would certainly give a small boost depending on the streamer, but I don't think it'd be a great value. Wurm also just is a pretty boring game to stream. No one wants to watch someone sit there and mine rocks or slowly saw planks.

 

The best option would probably be Youtube advertising. 

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New servers been only way for population spike, so far. So i can see something like that coming, soon or later

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Wurm is interesting in that a lot of people who play this game take breaks. I think that focusing on trying to get the new people that steam brought in to come back after their break would be a wise choice instead of focusing on getting completely new people to start playing the game right now.

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Wurm population isnt that bad for a game like this and it will not get higher if they dont release something game changing content.

 

Population isnt the problem, its just to many servers making the game feel empty.

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1 hour ago, elentari said:

Steam brought in a new crowd as well, but how many of them stuck around 1 year later? 

 

Bringing in new people doesn't seem to be the core issue. The main problem is player retention, which has from what I've seen so far, zero plan of anything concrete in the works. 

 

Even if the VR release brings in 5000 players, if only 500 players stick around 1 year later, is that really a win? And 2 years later when those 500 become 250 ? There's precedent in Wurm for such things.

 

2 hours ago, Synjor said:

. VR could bring in a new crowd but I doubt many would stick around

 

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5 hours ago, Stinboi said:

Wurm population isnt that bad for a game like this and it will not get higher if they dont release something game changing content.

 

Population isnt the problem, its just to many servers making the game feel empty.

agree  too many servers, and keeping whats left apart. is making it worse.   join the servers.  and put up more sales. exp weekends. events and advertise the game.  give out gifts for simply logging in X amount of days.  vet rewards like other games do.  give us reasons to get in the game more.   my main has over 350 days in game over 10 yrs. but 320 of those days were the first 5 years alone.  I find players to spread out. we need easier travel double the wind speed for boats.  portals to starter towns. add more starter towns to the old servers that only have one.   maybe do something like allowing players to ride with wagoneers. hitch a ride from deed to deed. could be fun riding around the servers that way.

 

i wish i could win the lotto and invest in the game ,  

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Population growth right? 

 

Babies👶 are player-made. Events and videos can be made by players in game. 

 

Steam release, servers expand, updates, VR are dev-made. 

 

Players have less control on the dev-made, so players should focus on the player-made content to make the population grow.

 

Sounds right? 👶(with innocent eyes). Humanoids, robots, or even aliens too if u count them as population. They might consider robots as macro, but idk how to draw the line these days. 

 

Yes.

11 hours ago, Joshh said:

just wanting to know if there is a plan in action / being discussed to help promote the game / bring in more players.

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I think over time we need to simply consolidate the servers, way too many way too spread out, it sounds horrible but id sacrifice to have more people around and not feel as empty in the massive vast wurm

Edited by Jeston
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Well, NFI is okay-ish, I think, but SFI could surely benefit from a server consolidation, esp. the spread out puny island there.

 

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3 hours ago, Jeston said:

I think over time we need to simply consolidate the servers, way too many way too spread out, it sounds horrible but id sacrifice to have more people around and not feel as empty in the massive vast wurm

 

I understand wanting the population to grow to keep the game up and running but really don't relate to these concerns that people are too spread out and that the world feels "lonely". The world is quiet because many (if not most) of the players are introverted and enjoy being on their own. We like to do our own thing without having to negotiate with neighbours etc. We spread out by choice.

 

I do feel for those who are more social, but it seems that most of the population prefers to have good space from each other and to keep socializing optional. Forcing people to be closer together would not create a thriving social community the way many people seem to imagine it would. You'd see more issues with deed related drama and fighting over resources like hunting grounds, and probably lose a lot of players who feel claustrophobic with people around all the time.

Edited by Vorticella
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Well, you could start lightly by leaving the 3 main SFI islands Chaos, Independence, Xanadu as is and just consolidate the minor islands into one island server cluster without any server borders.

 

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10 minutes ago, MarquisDeCarabas said:

Well, you could start lightly by leaving the 3 main SFI islands Chaos, Independence, Xanadu as is and just consolidate the minor islands into one island server cluster without any server borders.

 

What about people who have settlements on multiple of those servers? Those who are in different alliances between them?

If small servers get connected in to one server Xanadu size, the 1 settlement per character rule would have to be done away with.

 

Caring for 10 animals on each server would kill a lot of animals as well if they were to be merged.

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4 minutes ago, Locath said:

 

...

If small servers get connected in to one server Xanadu size, the 1 settlement per character rule would have to be done away with.

 

 

I wouldn't consider this to be a bad outcome.  ;)

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On 3/4/2022 at 6:45 AM, Jeston said:

I think over time we need to simply consolidate the servers, way too many way too spread out, it sounds horrible but id sacrifice to have more people around and not feel as empty in the massive vast wurm

 

On 3/4/2022 at 10:13 AM, MarquisDeCarabas said:

Well, NFI is okay-ish, I think, but SFI could surely benefit from a server consolidation, esp. the spread out puny island there.

 



No and no the last time wurm had closed down servers where people played on we dropped down with 60-70% if not more then that and struggled for years to come back my friends list still has many people who never came back from that time on it.
Making the world smaller will not help with numbers it will only drive people to say "oh the server that i was playing on is gone now i guess i will just uninstall all my work is gone" you want new players and denser population? Make the game's early game easier to understand make the game have a friendlier control scheme, the graphics are outdated sure but what holds wurm back is how the players interact with the game itself.

We were promised a ui overhaul and we got a reskin, we were promised a lot of "grand" things only to be let down time and time again, when steam release hit we were told "we will start advertising soon within a month or two after release" never happened.
You want this game to grow? Get dev's who have 1 the time and 2 know how to properly code and are held up to a schedule and quality, no more empty promises no more half assed buggy released updates that require fixes for months on end.

The issue isn't wurm's world(servers and landmasses on them) its the management that has let the game run stale and the control scheme and ui that drive away people, had they upon steam release kept up a schedule of "Here is the road map of planned projects" and gone "in q1 of 2020 we try to aim for these projects" and so on and on and delivered on that then a lot more people will come back to play if they saw that wurm received updates that pop up on steam's update feed.

Wurm has no presence on twitch nor on youtube the odd streamer here and there doesn't count and i do not mean "we should get big time streamers to try it out" as that just leads to trouble, no there needs to be an official yt channel where patch notes are talked about where upcoming events are spoken of were there is a running series of exploring wurm's vast and vibrant history from the good and the bad make it a vibrant community place where at the end of the video's questions from the community are answered were simple events are hosted via yt livestreams with item of your choice as a reward or something simple like that.

We were told "we are working together with x to create events" and we got 1 event that was a rehash of something the community has done in the past with 250 dollars worth of prem time(something wurm staff could have done without the help of a sponsor honestly) we were told so many things over the years and they always fell short of them.

The reason you dont see thousands anymore isn't because wurm's servers are to plentiful and empty its because the staff that have been running it for a long time since rolf lost interest(lets face it he did) and development slowed down to a crawl and things were constantly backpaddled and devs were taken on to work on things they wanted to work on and they wanted to change even if it wasn't really for the best of the game.

You want a vibrant community? Get staff that will work on trying to make it vibrant wurm will grow if 1 it has a web presence of a nice place to be(not the current and past "oh there are a lot of upset players at the devs" look) and 2 has a record of active proper development.

Indie games live and die by how their staff treat their games you can have the most ingenious new way to play a game but if you miss manage it everyone will leave, a great example is a lot of the factorio knockoffs.

Factory sims are a big genre(look at factorio and satisfactory) with tens of thousands playing it but there is 1 difference between those 2 and other factory sims and there is a reason why factorio wins steam awards every year because of it.
Its community and the developers who are part of it, jace and snutt for satisfactory created a series of video's that were both cringy yet fun to watch did live streams to show community content if there was no dev content made silly fun stuff to engage with the community and those who like the social part joined in.
Factorio's devs decided to go down the route of being technical as they have a lot more tech savy people playing it and it worked the friday facts were a big hit in engagement, they fixed bugs quickly sometimes even within hours
When factorio's 0.17 hit they had 22 updates in rapid succession with over 1000 bugs fixed in a short span of time they checked their forums and fixed everything they could we broke it they fixed it, we talked about something confusing they engaged not as someone above you but as a fellow factorio player.

What wurm needs is proper engagement and sticking to goals those two points will grow wurm slowly over time and bring back people who stopped playing it as something else came out.
We don't need front page of steam, we need positive reviews on steam(The amount of reviews talking about controls and the ui is way to high)
We don't need fancy features, we need bug fixes for existing systems(Do please do a proper ui overhaul though bring it up to modern times)
We don't need less servers, we need community engagement from the devs
We don't need ad campaigns with twitch streamers, we need a proper presence on yt in the form of a community channel that shows its alive and well maintained and well kept up

The game itself needs to be easier to control but the content itself is fine its the box that wurm is kept in that looks run down and is falling apart that needs fixing with the contents just needing some rearranging and dusting.

Edited by Pandalet
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Advertizing the game as an "idle game"or a clicker might help. Its not that far off from reality. If more actions can be queued, perhaps less tedious.

 

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17 hours ago, Reverent said:

Advertizing the game as an "idle game"or a clicker might help. Its not that far off from reality. If more actions can be queued, perhaps less tedious.

 

 

This, so much this.  They really just need to dumb the game down and make it work friendly - no loss of items on death on non pvp servers, more actions q'd, etc.

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16 hours ago, sweatygopher said:

 

This, so much this.  They really just need to dumb the game down and make it friendly - no loss of items on death on non pvp servers, more actions q'd, etc.

wont happen, imagined the same after rmt drop, some kind of change to mechanics to welcome different and new crowd, nope

Edited by Finnn

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15 hours ago, sweatygopher said:

 

This, so much this.  They really just need to dumb the game down and make it work friendly - no loss of items on death on non pvp servers, more actions q'd, etc.

Get more mind logic and the argument for a bigger action queue disappears honestly even with 2.4 second actions having 8+ makes the game be playable with 3 accounts at once we really don't need to queue up more then 10 max(let alone the rebalance of stamina loss that is needed)

As for dumbing the game down that will just destroy the game's identity that is like taking minecraft and adding in hunger and food and a skilling system like wurm(that is as slow as wurm) yes there are mods that on their own do that or work together but their popularity is slim, there was this mod that remade mc in its entirety to make it way more complex(gotta find flint shards and sticks from bushes as you cant break any blocks and cooking was different and so on) and sure it had its niche of players but it never became as popular as say an automation mod or magic mod.

Hard and complex survival mechanics are not everyone's cup of tea but there are plenty of people who do enjoy it so making the game easier wont help you get more players they will still just play mc what wurm needs is a online presence as it doesn't have one it needs a friendly welcoming view where the devs work together with the community not against the community where both sides work together to make wurm as great as it can be with the identity it has while making it look better and easier to interact with not by taking what it is and stripping away the "hard" parts.

A proper easy to follow written and visual and interactive guide system that allows for 3 different ways of learning about mechanics in a guided process more advanced then the current weird tutorial(or any of the past) would make it a lot easier already for players who start out.

The assumption a lot of players have in this day and age of instant gratification is that games have to be quick it should take a few months max to max something out and then move on to the next game or mod it to get new experiences but because wurm is a multi year thing people underestimate it and feel frustrated things like this need to be made clear but no where is that shown that wurm is a game you can play for years and still not finish anything off not because skills are that slow(they really arent) but because there is so much to do.

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Everything I Don't Like Is What's Wrong With The Game. A Novel. 

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9 hours ago, wipeout said:

...
Hard and complex survival mechanics are not everyone's cup of tea but there are plenty of people who do enjoy it so making the game easier wont help you get more players they will still just play mc what wurm needs is a online presence as it doesn't have one it needs a friendly welcoming view where the devs work together with the community not against the community where both sides work together to make wurm as great as it can be with the identity it has while making it look better and easier to interact with not by taking what it is and stripping away the "hard" parts.
...
 

 

Err..., beg your pardon, in which way or form is this game hard, at least on PvE?

I've been playing now for about 10 months on my main, died once in suicide when due to my own folly I dropped down a mine shaft without a pickaxe on me.

Raised the char to now 70.2 fs without dying to any mob with my own crafted crappy armor and weapons.

All it takes is an inordinate time consuming amount of tediously clicking 'continue' et al, or leafing through countless pages of wiki information for the more obscure in-game mechanics.

 

Edited by MarquisDeCarabas
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Its not hard at all nor do i find it very complex, just time consuming.

 

What i believe wurm is missing its proper end game content. Ive seen so many quit after they finish building a deed becouse, well not mutch to do after that  im one of those that have grinded my ass of but very few of the 90+ skills have i gotten use 

 

But the hard work is why we stick with wurm, if any believe in a huge playercount increase it will never happen. 

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1 hour ago, Stinboi said:

What i believe wurm is missing its proper end game content. Ive seen so many quit after they finish building a deed becouse, well not mutch to do after that  im one of those that have grinded my ass of but very few of the 90+ skills have i gotten use 

 

Agreed here. We work towards getting so many skills up to a certain level but after that point how often do we use them? After you get your nice set of tools to 80-90 ql, how often will you imp them again? 

 

We'd need some end content that requires us to use the entirety of Wurm's skills for certain purposes. Would be fun if we could invade Valrei or something, and have to deal with all the Valrei mobs and armies posted in the heavens. Something that's challenging, brutal, deadly and really feels like you're working as a team again for a common purpose. Just dreaming. 

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