The issue is the cultivating of new players. Very quickly, they can be drawn over to the dark side. Often these types of fast growing accounts burn out and either give up the game or run off and get as much eq as they can as fast as they can. Back when we ran a sub, people were more willing to learn how the game and the mechanics worked. That bred loyalty, learning and growing through the ranks. This culture is now nonexistant....i've posted an idea to refresh the eaely game, but i quickly realized the devs have no interest in doing anything except turn on "event autopilot" which drives revenue. Nothing wrong with that from their perspective since events bring in cash, but its death to the "community" of players that were the heart of the game....
The devs care less about new players, and more about lb players, simply because these are the people who keep spending large sums on the game. Once even these players quit however, and without the influx of new players, the game will start declining at a faster rate than it is now.
I think the biggest problem is, is that the devs keep introducing new lands, new buildings etc... these new lands/buildings can only be upgraded by one currency: gold. Therefor you can only grow stronger if you make a lot of gold, once you've made a lot of gold you can start upgrading again and at the end, devs will again introduce a new piece of lands and/or buildings because the BC players get bored. So what if, players can actually grow stronger by adding another currency. (I'm just starting to brainstorm from here, no waterproof idea has been thought out) - A new set of lands will be introduced and lets call them 'Lands of Terror', these lands are not a set of 25 lands, nor a set of 50 lands, but are infinite! - Lets say, 'battle wins' are a currency. So, once you are in a war, or a pvp arena (e.g. 1v1 or 2v2 etc.) you fight your opponents, and if you win that fight you can upgrade a building or explore a new land. But once you lose that fight, a building can be downgraded or destroyed or a land will turn unexplored and you'll have to fight another battle or war to get it back again. This way, no gold is needed to upgrade, no HTE is needed but just the mechanics and tactics of the game and how you understand will make you grow stronger and beat even more opponents. Of course this idea is far from waterproof, a lot of exploit can occur, match-ups might suck. But I'm sure many more warriors who are now hitting HTE will enjoy this and start warring so match-ups might be more easily made by devs. You can add a lot of interesting stuff to this war (PvP arena) idea, such as: irregular regen times; in a war your soldiers might regen after 4 minutes instead of 5 minutes. One last thing: maybe it's cool if players can invite each other to a battle arena and the other player can accept or decline their invitation. If the invitation is accepted they go to 1v1 each other for lets say 1 hour (can be determined by the players themselves), after 1 hour, the player who won most attacks, steals, assassinations, scouts gets a explored land. The player who lost, gets an explored land unexplored or a building downgraded or destroyed. I've got many more ideas about this but just too lazy to type them all out. This idea can be worked out by community totally and worked towards perfection, I'm sure you all are creative enough. I hope I have inspired some of you creative people. ~ Happy Kawing Bad
Troll machine posted a pic on a thread i cant remember, showing the decline of kaw in top gross apps after hte was implemented. Wish I could find the pic.
To begin I did not read all posts. That being said I believe the game to be stagnant. However their are 1500 plus at the top that are extremely active many new accounts start and soon after the addition begins the realization that 3 and 4 year players still are not BC. This causes the addition that we all experienced to wane much faster.
Bad: I actually agree on new lands and catering to bc players... I get it, it's hard to satisfy everyone, but even at my peak activity I couldn't keep up with buildings. I don't spend the money lb players do, but I have supported the app...I think others would be inclined to do so more if the game didn't FEEL like it was catered to the top 5% of players. I feel the "golden age" of Kaw was the first 18 months or so, when a player could actually make serious headway and build up some BFA in addition to buildings, and really learn the ins and outs of mechanics...OSF were mostly secret/private, and the clan mentality was really the cornerstone of the game. Those days are gone, but I sincerely believe that the devs should support those types of bonds, because that's what built the game. Not gold or glory as much as comraderie. Events of the last 24 hours have proven this, as Rusted, a former clanmate of mine fought to preserve the legacy of his old home. I could give you hundreds of examples of relationships forged with people I still get messages from today from 2,3,4,nearly 5 years ago. That's the game's foundation. As far as the retention of new players, that is a serious issue. I'll take the time in the next few days to a week to re-hash the ideas put forward on this thread and put together a comprehensive list of suggestions that we (the folks I'm working with) will discuss. If anyone legitimately wants to add to the discussion, my pm is easy to find, and I'll happily add friend or foe in a 3rd party app. Thanks for your time, ~j
↑ years of hard work and money spent by all players. Think about the thousands that have been spent by individuals. And then 'poof' , it'll all be gone ?
Respect Joe, what started with a 6 words forum thread that I thought would just create some polemics and be locked quickly, grew into an excellent thread with a lot of food for thought. Well done. The player base seems to be shrinking, if I judge it by the activity of the wc I´m in. I do however see quite a few new players joining, which looks positive. I do think that Obi has said most what could be said about some shortcomings of the game and their impact on the player base. A few of his points are excellent and are some that struck me too. This in my opinion is one of the best analysis I´ve seen. A few years ago, clans were doing hauntings day and night and most clans were doing it as cash cow. It´s an easy eb, that paid well during the Highland era. It never got replaced by another easy eb paing well for the HF or Abyss era, but the new cash cows are SS, TS, AFF (next to HTE) for clans able to finish those. And there you have a problem. Clans around clan rank 200 with less than 2/3rds of active members won´t be able to do those. Either they rely on HTE to keep their players satisfied, or they face an exodus of their large players towards top 20 LB clans. You basically managed to create a depletion of big players in midsized clans and those are slowly dying. Gwen also made very accurate observations. In the past, large accounts (HLBC, vets,...) were easier to be found in academies as they didn´t sacrifice that much in growth. Ambush was an excellent eb as it permitted newbies as well as build complete players to hit it with a very decent plunder payout. Compared to haunting, one didn´t lose that much hitting Ambush. Honestly, nowadays you almost have to be Mother Theresa to stay in an academy past 10 or 20m cs. Adjustment of the plunder curve on lower tier ebs might be the solution, but it needs to be carefully thought out. Plenty of other things come into my mind, like additional equipment drops in those low tier ebs, new lower tier ebs (not sure about this, as newbies shouldn´t know the old ones anyway), double plunder promo ebs (though you may argue that the BR ebs kind of took that over and created a bit more variety in ebs running). Oh yes, really get rid of those "gather 4 kind of items" events, it´s just painful. I would prefer them to be just activity based (with HTE having a larger payout, sure, why not). I do think that it is also of our own responsibility to try to retain the newbies joining. I like the implementation of the "new" spell as well as the wc update, but we as players can´t rely only on those mechanisms to do magic. We have to approach those players. Volleying them to billions is all nice, but it doesn´t really help them find their way in this game. I rarely volley new accounts, but I try to give one or two building tips as well to direct them to some academy (thanks Daphnia for that thread) by walling them. I guess that´s still an old reflex from my days as academy admin and owner, I somehow miss those... The main aspect of this game that all keeps us sucked in, is the social one. Compared to other games, we have a fantastic community, let´s use it to keep this game alive.
The task force has been all abuzz the last few days with ideas and the like, and we'd like to share them with the community: Hitting the high notes: -Player retention (new and existing), -Focus on clan unity and system, -Expanding plunder for academy level eb, -Expansion of quest system, -More developed tutorial, -Addition of max plunder to new user spell, -Removal of new player volley announcement, -Changes to hit range for non system-war pvp, -Improved interface, -and increased reward for pvp Quite a few players receiving consistent support from the community have recently been added to the conversation aimed at creating a better gaming experience for the community. Please keep up the good work and let your voices and ideas be heard. ~j Special thanks to Obi, Frog, and Sir_Misfit for their focus and expansion on initial ideas, and to some iG jackhole for driving the conversation.
Glad we have a task force on it, good job. I remember that suggestion thread from Killzone in the past, that was one nice thing too. I agree on most of your points except for one: the removal of the volley announcement in wc. I might have been one of those that came up with this idea, as well as the newbie spell on some tutorial revamp thread and once it came live I suddenly was extremely sceptic. It didn't seem to achieve what I thought it would. Sure, it adds to the depletion of low cost allies, but this was the case even before its implementation. A few players already were scanning for low priced allies and volleying them up. A new mp solution for newbies could solve the associated problem imo. Nowadays, when I catch a newbie telling me he can't keep an ally in his hiring range, I advise him to play the volley game by just using those wc announcements. In fact, I do think it's quite effective to get enough cash to buy that first ally that sticks more than 1 hour.
Kassio, Apologies for the late reply, but realistically, the wc advert destroys the ally market as a whole. It overpriced all allies, especially new players who've pretty much only finished the tutorial. I'm not going to say it's unfixable, but it does flood the market with heavily overpriced inactive allies thereby making the market unattainable for new players and in many ways removing a valuable teaching element for many new players and creating a larger disparity of new and established players. While yes, many can play the wc vollies, it negates low-level vollies that have long been the lifeblood of training clans and puts that gold out of reach by putting a "free money" sign in wc. Furthermore, we end up with hundreds of inactive accounts with no intent to grow that could eventually cost current active players billions as they're reset, which could, imo, lead to further player defection and frustration. Again, no offense intended, but others, along with myself, feel that there are other ways to effectively grow and retain the player-base.
In addition to the original response, this idea simply changes the power-brokers in the game economy short-term, and has little long-term benefit. It's been done 3 times.