Joe hosted a very interesting discussion on July 27 in the fairgrounds, in which he floated a number of ideas for improving player retention, particularly new players. I'm popping some of those ideas into this forum for continued discussion.
You know the story. A newbie logs on and discovers, if I stick around 5 years I *might* be able to go to cool places with the older exiles. Meantime I'm dog meat? This sucks, I'm outta here!
And invasions? If Joe aims them at newbies - the advanced exiles slaughter everything and pocket a few coins. If he aims at mid-level exiles, newbies are on the ground left and right, and the advanced exiles slaughter everything and pocket a few more coins. If he aims them at advanced exiles, they have a blast while everyone else gets one-hit, end of fun. No matter what he does, new players get screwed out of the fun. He could stick invasions away from town center - he did that after the fairgrounds meeting, in fact - but yeah, the disparity between old and new exiles has gotten pretty extreme.
At the top of the list for improving new player retention is an accelerated advancement scheme for new characters that gets them into the action at the higher levels faster - perhaps 5x current gain to rank 200, 4x to 400, 3x to 600, 2x to 800 or something along those lines. Being an old player who scrabbled up the hard way, you might think I'd resent this notion. Not so. There are never enough new players these days to organize the sorts of hunts we oldsters remember fondly. Getting them up to 3rd circle and even 4th quickly would let them start to join the community and do more adventurous things, and might be a positive retention factor.
I can tell you that a new character has a tough time when rats are dispatches, but SF is deadly and they need a healer to follow them around just to survive. So I'm pretty much in favor of an accelerated path for newbies.
An issue I'll raise, though, is how much of this accelerated experience gain should be "sharable." It would be darned easy to abuse it - if newbies with 0 ranks get 5x experience and that's shared, everyone with more than one account is going to start up newbie, share their advanced characters, and run around whacking rats. They'll just reset the new one to keep up the rank gain. No, I know *you* wouldn't do that. But we all know who would!
So the thing to do with shares is evaluate the recipient. If the recipient is <200 ranks, give 'em 5x the worth of the share. If >200 and <400, 4x. And so on. If a newbie shares an advanced character, it's worth 1x. No different from now.
Joe mentioned having adjusted the slaughter system a bit about 2 months ago. My advice on that subject is to keep adjusting. I don't think it's in the sweet spot yet. We want to retain older players too... they are the foundation of the community.
Joe floated ideas for letting people continue to have a presence if they aren't paying, such as letting them gain ranks, but no library experience... or letting them play but be unable to spend ranks until they renew. They both seem like promising ideas to me.
He brought up an old idea again: newbie areas only newbies can enter. A couple healers grumbled that they'd better let healers in, too. Well... yeah. We had a newbie area not too many years ago: the Myrm Highlands. Newbies used to lie around dead for hours and hours, and nobody could help. Out of frustraion it was opened up to everyone so we could get those caracasses out of there. If we do it again, we'll need to think good and hard about how we'll prevent a rerun. One possibility - permit an advanced character to enter for 5 minutes. That's plenty of time to effect a rescue, and not long enough to do serious rank whoring with the newbies. If a high level character tries to stay longer, he gets teleported to the pitch noids cave! Or maybe just town center, heh. In any event a newbie-only area has appeal if we can solve the rescue problem.
Joe has a special deal posted at his web site - open a new CL account, with 2 free months, for 5 bucks. He doesn't seem ready to lower the monthly or annual fees... so I don't know how many folks that will really draw in. But it might increase newbie traffic, and perhaps some of those will decide to settle in for the longer haul.
He also kicked around some rather radical notions involving release of the CL editor, minus the CL world data. With the editor, any player could create areas, monsters, and items. The server software would also be released, meaning you could fire up and test your creations. The GMs have expressed some concern that if Joe does this, they will be bombarded with new area submissions which haven't been developed within the narrow guidelines and conceptions that embody their own work. Perhaps with a bit more structure this can be avoided. I'm thinking of requiring some player-provided pre-screening to select the areas to be submitted for official consideration. We could do it right here at the Sentinal, perhaps... announce an area is ready to view, set up a private server, and let folks test and criticize. We could even have design contests, with the winners forwarded to the GMs. And... I like this one... we could set up design teams, players who work together on area creations. When the team is satisified with a creation, it's probably going to be better than if one person wings it. In any event some structure could be supplied to weed out the creations that should never steal a GM's time.
Lest you think area design is easy... it's not. The coding language for CL, SOCKS, is not well documented, and without world data you'd have few clues as to how things are done. That's a big, big stumbling block. Coders can be mentored, but that means GM workload, and they have enough of that as it is. My solution is to release some world data selectively, so that there are enough clues for self-starters to self-start.
Joe mentioned that making changes in today's CL is tough, because the world has become fairly large and complex. One notion to work around it is to set up a second official server and put new designs and scripts on that server. CL was originally designed with the idea of multiple servers, anyway - we just never had enough players, servers grew faster, and it wasn't needed. Two or more servers could share "clanning" data, fallen data, sunstones, etc, and it could be utterly transparent to players, while isolating new code and new designs that might fudge the old designs if it were running on the same server engine. If this is feasible - it might speed delivery of content, and more content might influence player retention. But if it's a lot of work, we're probably stuck with one server.
Joe also suggested he might consider allowing "private" servers to be hosted by anyone, anywhere, possibly with links from the CL world. Such private servers would entirely consist of player-created worlds. There'd be no fee for using them, and ranks or items you gain in such worlds would not carry over to the real CL world, I suppose. But as this idea would tend to reduce player population in the CL world, I think it's not a helpful approach to solving the retention problem. We need more folks in the accessible community, not fewer.
Many players voiced their view that more stories and more quests would help with player retention. I'm certainly in agreement. Joe mentioned they're working on a "cool" adventure/quest but it has to wait until a "less cool" one is done, and the "less cool" one isn't one that inspires 25 hour day work sessions. Well, ok. But it seems to me there's room for small stories and small quests, too. Everything doesn't have to be a save-the-world crisis. A suggestion was put forward from the crowd to appoint some story GMs who concentrate on such things, and I like that idea. Heck, I argued for it over 5 years ago.
I threw in an additional thought: how about more non-rank skills? The GMs have complained for years that many players - and I'm on their list - focus too much on rank whoring and not enough on other things. Pfft. Nearly everything you do depends on ranks. If they want us to be more interested in non-rank-gain behavior, we'll need more things to do that have nothing to do with ranks.
A classic example of how ranks screw things up is how blacksmithing was implemented. You need a ledger just to have a decent chance of smelting ore! Doing that for an advanced exile would take years and drive up slaughter without adding any combat skills. That means NO advanced exile will ever learn that skill. Newbies, too, would be crazy to train it - it would drive up slaughter and they'd be weaker than mystics, and no shares to compensate. So blacksmiths - every single darned one - are library characters. What does that do for RP, hmm? "Oh, you need a smith? Hang on while I get mine out of the library." Hmmph.
Some years ago one of the GMs asked me how to do blacksmithing, and I answered - make it quest driven, make it real hard to complete, and make it expensive. They went with the tired old "kill a critter, learn a language" model instead.
We've got too many things to train as it is. What we need now are quests worth pursuing - tough, hard, and rewarding when we succeed.
I probably left out some of the things that Joe talked about, but this is enough to get the juices flowing. How about your thoughts? What can Joe do to improve player retention, especially new players? What will it take to keep *you* playing for years to come?
Post your thoughts!
You know the story. A newbie logs on and discovers, if I stick around 5 years I *might* be able to go to cool places with the older exiles. Meantime I'm dog meat? This sucks, I'm outta here!
And invasions? If Joe aims them at newbies - the advanced exiles slaughter everything and pocket a few coins. If he aims at mid-level exiles, newbies are on the ground left and right, and the advanced exiles slaughter everything and pocket a few more coins. If he aims them at advanced exiles, they have a blast while everyone else gets one-hit, end of fun. No matter what he does, new players get screwed out of the fun. He could stick invasions away from town center - he did that after the fairgrounds meeting, in fact - but yeah, the disparity between old and new exiles has gotten pretty extreme.
At the top of the list for improving new player retention is an accelerated advancement scheme for new characters that gets them into the action at the higher levels faster - perhaps 5x current gain to rank 200, 4x to 400, 3x to 600, 2x to 800 or something along those lines. Being an old player who scrabbled up the hard way, you might think I'd resent this notion. Not so. There are never enough new players these days to organize the sorts of hunts we oldsters remember fondly. Getting them up to 3rd circle and even 4th quickly would let them start to join the community and do more adventurous things, and might be a positive retention factor.
I can tell you that a new character has a tough time when rats are dispatches, but SF is deadly and they need a healer to follow them around just to survive. So I'm pretty much in favor of an accelerated path for newbies.
An issue I'll raise, though, is how much of this accelerated experience gain should be "sharable." It would be darned easy to abuse it - if newbies with 0 ranks get 5x experience and that's shared, everyone with more than one account is going to start up newbie, share their advanced characters, and run around whacking rats. They'll just reset the new one to keep up the rank gain. No, I know *you* wouldn't do that. But we all know who would!
So the thing to do with shares is evaluate the recipient. If the recipient is <200 ranks, give 'em 5x the worth of the share. If >200 and <400, 4x. And so on. If a newbie shares an advanced character, it's worth 1x. No different from now.
Joe mentioned having adjusted the slaughter system a bit about 2 months ago. My advice on that subject is to keep adjusting. I don't think it's in the sweet spot yet. We want to retain older players too... they are the foundation of the community.
Joe floated ideas for letting people continue to have a presence if they aren't paying, such as letting them gain ranks, but no library experience... or letting them play but be unable to spend ranks until they renew. They both seem like promising ideas to me.
He brought up an old idea again: newbie areas only newbies can enter. A couple healers grumbled that they'd better let healers in, too. Well... yeah. We had a newbie area not too many years ago: the Myrm Highlands. Newbies used to lie around dead for hours and hours, and nobody could help. Out of frustraion it was opened up to everyone so we could get those caracasses out of there. If we do it again, we'll need to think good and hard about how we'll prevent a rerun. One possibility - permit an advanced character to enter for 5 minutes. That's plenty of time to effect a rescue, and not long enough to do serious rank whoring with the newbies. If a high level character tries to stay longer, he gets teleported to the pitch noids cave! Or maybe just town center, heh. In any event a newbie-only area has appeal if we can solve the rescue problem.
Joe has a special deal posted at his web site - open a new CL account, with 2 free months, for 5 bucks. He doesn't seem ready to lower the monthly or annual fees... so I don't know how many folks that will really draw in. But it might increase newbie traffic, and perhaps some of those will decide to settle in for the longer haul.
He also kicked around some rather radical notions involving release of the CL editor, minus the CL world data. With the editor, any player could create areas, monsters, and items. The server software would also be released, meaning you could fire up and test your creations. The GMs have expressed some concern that if Joe does this, they will be bombarded with new area submissions which haven't been developed within the narrow guidelines and conceptions that embody their own work. Perhaps with a bit more structure this can be avoided. I'm thinking of requiring some player-provided pre-screening to select the areas to be submitted for official consideration. We could do it right here at the Sentinal, perhaps... announce an area is ready to view, set up a private server, and let folks test and criticize. We could even have design contests, with the winners forwarded to the GMs. And... I like this one... we could set up design teams, players who work together on area creations. When the team is satisified with a creation, it's probably going to be better than if one person wings it. In any event some structure could be supplied to weed out the creations that should never steal a GM's time.
Lest you think area design is easy... it's not. The coding language for CL, SOCKS, is not well documented, and without world data you'd have few clues as to how things are done. That's a big, big stumbling block. Coders can be mentored, but that means GM workload, and they have enough of that as it is. My solution is to release some world data selectively, so that there are enough clues for self-starters to self-start.
Joe mentioned that making changes in today's CL is tough, because the world has become fairly large and complex. One notion to work around it is to set up a second official server and put new designs and scripts on that server. CL was originally designed with the idea of multiple servers, anyway - we just never had enough players, servers grew faster, and it wasn't needed. Two or more servers could share "clanning" data, fallen data, sunstones, etc, and it could be utterly transparent to players, while isolating new code and new designs that might fudge the old designs if it were running on the same server engine. If this is feasible - it might speed delivery of content, and more content might influence player retention. But if it's a lot of work, we're probably stuck with one server.
Joe also suggested he might consider allowing "private" servers to be hosted by anyone, anywhere, possibly with links from the CL world. Such private servers would entirely consist of player-created worlds. There'd be no fee for using them, and ranks or items you gain in such worlds would not carry over to the real CL world, I suppose. But as this idea would tend to reduce player population in the CL world, I think it's not a helpful approach to solving the retention problem. We need more folks in the accessible community, not fewer.
Many players voiced their view that more stories and more quests would help with player retention. I'm certainly in agreement. Joe mentioned they're working on a "cool" adventure/quest but it has to wait until a "less cool" one is done, and the "less cool" one isn't one that inspires 25 hour day work sessions. Well, ok. But it seems to me there's room for small stories and small quests, too. Everything doesn't have to be a save-the-world crisis. A suggestion was put forward from the crowd to appoint some story GMs who concentrate on such things, and I like that idea. Heck, I argued for it over 5 years ago.
I threw in an additional thought: how about more non-rank skills? The GMs have complained for years that many players - and I'm on their list - focus too much on rank whoring and not enough on other things. Pfft. Nearly everything you do depends on ranks. If they want us to be more interested in non-rank-gain behavior, we'll need more things to do that have nothing to do with ranks.
A classic example of how ranks screw things up is how blacksmithing was implemented. You need a ledger just to have a decent chance of smelting ore! Doing that for an advanced exile would take years and drive up slaughter without adding any combat skills. That means NO advanced exile will ever learn that skill. Newbies, too, would be crazy to train it - it would drive up slaughter and they'd be weaker than mystics, and no shares to compensate. So blacksmiths - every single darned one - are library characters. What does that do for RP, hmm? "Oh, you need a smith? Hang on while I get mine out of the library." Hmmph.
Some years ago one of the GMs asked me how to do blacksmithing, and I answered - make it quest driven, make it real hard to complete, and make it expensive. They went with the tired old "kill a critter, learn a language" model instead.
We've got too many things to train as it is. What we need now are quests worth pursuing - tough, hard, and rewarding when we succeed.
I probably left out some of the things that Joe talked about, but this is enough to get the juices flowing. How about your thoughts? What can Joe do to improve player retention, especially new players? What will it take to keep *you* playing for years to come?
Post your thoughts!
I mean, I've been playing CL for what, five years? six? and I can't take a break without being punished.
small things get wiped out by rangers. My thoughts, create an AI for large-ass critters that ignores exiles who's level is far "below" them (give the AI /pull capability to avoid newbies blocking, or have it munch newbies if they block it too long 
). For example, a new darshak uber-elite who ignores anyone with less than 1500 ranks, yet kicks the shit out of Michael (insert favorite "brick") etc. It could work the other way too, an AI that avoids the power players and goes for the younger exiles, this may be more difficult to do, as some of us still hunt rodan's simply cuz they are so damn annoying