To this point I was on the other day, there were 8 players and myself. All 8 players were Lords, Lady's, or high ranking tower players. And me, one lonely statter. I remember thinking how overpowered it felt and what a somewhat newer player might think.iria wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 6:52 am
Rank 8 - We have more rank 8s than we've ever had before, granted that is to be expected, but I think the added bonuses to humans and trollocs pushed people to actually work towards it. There's a 3-4 on ds and a 3-5 new on LS within the recent time. I imagine they'd have ended up there eventually, but I imagine the added bonuses pushed people to work towards it. I know I'm currently trying to get r8 on an alt, purely because of the added perks.
Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Well depending on the reason they are here, if they are competitive I imagine it'd just fuel them to set a goal for themselves to become one as well. If they are here for the roleplay I imagine it'd make them intrigued as well, since they see familiar names from the books (Tower, Gaidin, Red Eagles, Lancers, CoL etc) and they might interact with the clans they have an interest in. Better to see clanned people online than just statters/unclanned I imagine.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Can we make Anoluram less safe? Currently if a group is hitting it you can't get in without taking a key from one of the patties which is pretty tough to do without another big group and it's already behind a bunch of doors etc.. Basically locks out anyone looking to trap/kill smobbers. Understand its a bit tricky with the keys but maybe there could be another way to get in if there is already a group inside the smob zone/area?Elysia wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2019 2:24 pmI've had a plan for sprucing up Jafar so if people see the load on Anoluram is crap, they can do a randi-chest and take their luck. I've been short on time, so the plan hasn't gone anywhere yet. Since people are talking about rares though, would that something that interests people? An alternative if the visible load is crap? It obviously wouldn't work as well for smobs with chests, but people have been complaining about Anoluram specifically.
Also, instead of making Jafar better.. What about adding some better/tougher smobs to Seanchan? Could even make them part of a chain to get Oathies to take ways etc.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Imo there's a surplus of smobs already, so I don't think we need more smobs. No idea about the key thing, I'd have to look, but making an easy key load is obviously out of the question.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
I thought not to post here.. but whatever..
To get new people to play here, we first need to have a solid and large enough player base to sustain the influx of new players, to teach/nurture/kill/re-eq/etc them. Hence any advise how to draw back old players who left for whatever reason, is also very good in that it will flesh out our existing player base, which then afterwards can sustain new payers and hopefully keep them here.
1) Player numbers. As it is, player numbers are not even relatively low, but they are skewed. If you look at the player numbers site for average players, you see that DS over the past several months has averaged 3 players a day, with a whole lot more on LS. I think this is mainly because the of the End-game creep (more later), and because of the fact that there's so much more to do on LS. Also because LS with it's higher numbers, which in absolute terms are still relatively low, is more spread out, the PK drive that makes so much happen on DS, is less there if there are no LSers to be found. LS and DS are symbiotic: DS needs a healthy LS to have humans to kill in PK, and LS needs a healthy DS to keep the wheels of qps gathering through PK going, keep the danger alive so to speak.
2) End game creep: the longer a game exists, the more people will creep towards the end-game of their characters. You already see that this end-game is being reset a couple times , the latest example being rank 8 bonusses, leading to more rank 8. This is certainly not a bad thing, but see it as climbing the summit of mount Everest.. you are finally up there.. and then what? I have almost a decade back written a proposal for remorts on LS (and back then SS) side. Rather then everyone climbing the same mount Everest with all of his/her characters, I would rather see multiple, different summits for characters to reach. Some examples would be blademasters and gaidin for LS, DW Ogier and blademasters for SS, grey men and draghkar for DS. Dreadlords and Aes Sedai for channelers. By making these characters remorts, one also gets rid of the clan nonsense that some bonused clans need to go through to be able to be bonused. People from different clans can make blademaster, or gaidin (offcourse ALOT of things to go over to make this happen), but just as in the books, there could be an Illian Companion remorted blademaster, as well as a Lion Warden, etc, etc.
Just to make it clear: I think at this moment everyone is running the same track mostly to the same end game characters. Perhaps spicing these things up will bring back new elan to the mud, and perhaps bring back old players who have quit.
3) Mud size/peripheral lop-sidedness: A couple years back there was a welcome cutting down on the size of the mud. The worst thing we can do at this moment, is spreading things out to the periphery again. We must concentrate on the core of the mud, not on the periphery. Stop placing all the rewarding things on far off locations like IoMM, Jafar, Seanchan, etc. In the time when we had 120 people on at high times, 40 people on at low times, such a move could have made sense, and would not have interfered to much with the daily hussle and bustle of the mud. But with current numbers, you can log on LS, and see 80% of the mud smobbing in a big group on IOMM, and the 2 people who are not there, being statters. This results in a dead mud if you are honest, because basically: nothing is going on other then on IOMM!
Look at the core of our mud: Take Andor as the human nucleus, take blight as DS nucleus. Concentrate new items around there, make sure that with our current low numbers, we dont leak to much people to far removed places like IOMM (long boatride) where their being online actually means nothing anymore for the wholist or mud-activity. Placing Murgoz into Rhamine was actually a good thing. Perhaps the sunken palace needs to be removed to a more centralish location as well (somewhere along the western GF area, west of roots patty where nothing really happens ever nowadays). Dont add smobs, but perhaps move smobs to other areas which make more sense and will add to activity there. For all the attention to detail and hard work that went into Tremalking, it is a really out of the way place for 1-2 smobs being placed. Move them to somewhere along the coastal zone areas more central. The same goes for some smobs in the deep south of Windbiters Fingers etc..
Flesh out our core areas, draw activity back there, and this will most certainly lead to more interaction, more activity and also more PK for those who are looking for that. As the prime example of past holidaze, I like to point out the elf king there, he was placed in the northern cut zone, and he added a ton of smobbing, but also alot of PK because him being there meant big groups running into eachother trying to kill the smob and/or eachother. Activity in the central zones spiked!
Another example was when there were PK bonusses for scalps from TV and Andor zones. Suddenly everyone went there to PK. Big spike in PK activity, only because there was a reason to be in certain zones, rather then smob on IOMM..
Perhaps I will think off more, but these 3 things are my main issues
To get new people to play here, we first need to have a solid and large enough player base to sustain the influx of new players, to teach/nurture/kill/re-eq/etc them. Hence any advise how to draw back old players who left for whatever reason, is also very good in that it will flesh out our existing player base, which then afterwards can sustain new payers and hopefully keep them here.
1) Player numbers. As it is, player numbers are not even relatively low, but they are skewed. If you look at the player numbers site for average players, you see that DS over the past several months has averaged 3 players a day, with a whole lot more on LS. I think this is mainly because the of the End-game creep (more later), and because of the fact that there's so much more to do on LS. Also because LS with it's higher numbers, which in absolute terms are still relatively low, is more spread out, the PK drive that makes so much happen on DS, is less there if there are no LSers to be found. LS and DS are symbiotic: DS needs a healthy LS to have humans to kill in PK, and LS needs a healthy DS to keep the wheels of qps gathering through PK going, keep the danger alive so to speak.
2) End game creep: the longer a game exists, the more people will creep towards the end-game of their characters. You already see that this end-game is being reset a couple times , the latest example being rank 8 bonusses, leading to more rank 8. This is certainly not a bad thing, but see it as climbing the summit of mount Everest.. you are finally up there.. and then what? I have almost a decade back written a proposal for remorts on LS (and back then SS) side. Rather then everyone climbing the same mount Everest with all of his/her characters, I would rather see multiple, different summits for characters to reach. Some examples would be blademasters and gaidin for LS, DW Ogier and blademasters for SS, grey men and draghkar for DS. Dreadlords and Aes Sedai for channelers. By making these characters remorts, one also gets rid of the clan nonsense that some bonused clans need to go through to be able to be bonused. People from different clans can make blademaster, or gaidin (offcourse ALOT of things to go over to make this happen), but just as in the books, there could be an Illian Companion remorted blademaster, as well as a Lion Warden, etc, etc.
Just to make it clear: I think at this moment everyone is running the same track mostly to the same end game characters. Perhaps spicing these things up will bring back new elan to the mud, and perhaps bring back old players who have quit.
3) Mud size/peripheral lop-sidedness: A couple years back there was a welcome cutting down on the size of the mud. The worst thing we can do at this moment, is spreading things out to the periphery again. We must concentrate on the core of the mud, not on the periphery. Stop placing all the rewarding things on far off locations like IoMM, Jafar, Seanchan, etc. In the time when we had 120 people on at high times, 40 people on at low times, such a move could have made sense, and would not have interfered to much with the daily hussle and bustle of the mud. But with current numbers, you can log on LS, and see 80% of the mud smobbing in a big group on IOMM, and the 2 people who are not there, being statters. This results in a dead mud if you are honest, because basically: nothing is going on other then on IOMM!
Look at the core of our mud: Take Andor as the human nucleus, take blight as DS nucleus. Concentrate new items around there, make sure that with our current low numbers, we dont leak to much people to far removed places like IOMM (long boatride) where their being online actually means nothing anymore for the wholist or mud-activity. Placing Murgoz into Rhamine was actually a good thing. Perhaps the sunken palace needs to be removed to a more centralish location as well (somewhere along the western GF area, west of roots patty where nothing really happens ever nowadays). Dont add smobs, but perhaps move smobs to other areas which make more sense and will add to activity there. For all the attention to detail and hard work that went into Tremalking, it is a really out of the way place for 1-2 smobs being placed. Move them to somewhere along the coastal zone areas more central. The same goes for some smobs in the deep south of Windbiters Fingers etc..
Flesh out our core areas, draw activity back there, and this will most certainly lead to more interaction, more activity and also more PK for those who are looking for that. As the prime example of past holidaze, I like to point out the elf king there, he was placed in the northern cut zone, and he added a ton of smobbing, but also alot of PK because him being there meant big groups running into eachother trying to kill the smob and/or eachother. Activity in the central zones spiked!
Another example was when there were PK bonusses for scalps from TV and Andor zones. Suddenly everyone went there to PK. Big spike in PK activity, only because there was a reason to be in certain zones, rather then smob on IOMM..
Perhaps I will think off more, but these 3 things are my main issues
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
What about shop loads aswell. Then newbies can do gold quests and look at stuff in shops to buy a decent set.Dartes wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2019 5:39 pmA 'tell guardian lithe abs/combo/dodge kit' would be kinda neat. Not good enough to pk in, no trInks, I think even the abs kit has like less than 70% abs... but it gives a newbie a survivable regear to get back to their corpse or join an smob group!Raefnal wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2019 3:34 pmObviously he was at a point of frustration, we've all been there. But I think what he said pushed him over the edge has merit. I wonder if like 'tell guardian kit' there could be a medium kit that you can ask for, and perhaps you can ask for each kit a max of 3 times?
I remember a new player just the other day was asking about the stats on an item he was looking at in a shop.
Last edited by Treach on Thu Oct 31, 2019 11:33 am, edited 2 times in total.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Anything that is broken or confusing should be given priority before the new TV show is released imo.
Camo, chains, taveren etc... If a new player asks about it and the answer is that is broken or not used anymore. Than it makes the game look bad.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
I'm going to start reaching out in game communities that maybe aren't as traditionally considered. Advertising to other MUD people on the Top 20 List and /r/MUD is great - but we're not really advertising to people playing indie games or similar. I know the mentality of "people just don't play these games anymore due to AAA graphics games existing now" is prevalent, but I strongly feel that this isn't true. Yes, the % of gamers playing "alternate" indie text based games is smaller - but the absolute number is likely unchanged or even more than it ever was due to the sheer number of people playing games these days. Purely ASCII games are going strong, even if some of them have tilesets*. There are tons of people playing C:DDA, or Dwarf Fortress, traditional rogue-likes (I think these people would be really into the PvP of WOTMuD), and so on. There are tons of people playing deep games with simplistic graphics like UnReal World. These people don't care about AAA graphics. It's about the gameplay. We should reach out to these communities! I *love* these types of games and hadn't even heard of WoTMUD (or really any MUDs) until just a few years ago. And now I am loving WoTMUD.
*and we can get a really decent GUI going for Mudlet if we wanted - Adael's already done most of the back end stuff to make it work so just attach some buttons and graphics to that inside a pretty frame and we can present new people with a ready to go kit (for example, Dwarf Fortress does this with the Lazy Newb Pack). That said there's a good chunk of players that prefer the ASCII 'graphics' to tilesets.
It's not really true anymore though. DS will get you equipped and exp'd just as easily if not moreso than LS will, you don't need to mess about with horses, you don't need to mess about with lights, iirc they can chop up corpses for meat without needing survival, they can refill blood skins from corpses (iirc??)... Seems fairly newbie friendly to me? The roughest thing about DS for new people is when you dunno what to do and the who list is empty.
I feel like instead of warning them off entirely it should just be mentioned that this side is more PK oriented.
In general the bottom end economy could be looked at; I can imagine being a noob and scalping a bunch of rats or catching a bunch of fish only to realize it is an absolute pittance even just relative to the rent costs or buying anything really. What is it, like a copper per shadoweye scalp and a couple coppers per fish? Those activities, cool as they are, are basically pointless outside of novelty. They should be worth something. Has the added bonus of more people out doing stuff, which creates opportunity for PK and sustains the who list numbers.
For example - when I'm out making iron bars, it is because they are worth the time to go grab a pickaxe, mine the ore, smelt it, etc. They are valuable for crafting and in demand. I've sold bars for 50-100 crowns to players before. People can (and have) caught me out while I'm doing that. But if the bars had no purpose and sold for 2 coppers then I would never do it because why?
e: Heck you could make a whole mini game out of fishing if you added in a few different types of fish, did % chance to catch the rarer ones, made the rarer ones worth more coin to the fish merchant, and made it vary based on zone and time of day also. People spend hundreds of hours in WoW just fishing. It's not about graphics.
*and we can get a really decent GUI going for Mudlet if we wanted - Adael's already done most of the back end stuff to make it work so just attach some buttons and graphics to that inside a pretty frame and we can present new people with a ready to go kit (for example, Dwarf Fortress does this with the Lazy Newb Pack). That said there's a good chunk of players that prefer the ASCII 'graphics' to tilesets.
Related to this: should stop warning new people that DS is the harder side and that they shouldn't play it until they have more experience. If I recall correctly that's right there on character creation still?Razhak wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 10:22 am1) Player numbers. As it is, player numbers are not even relatively low, but they are skewed. If you look at the player numbers site for average players, you see that DS over the past several months has averaged 3 players a day, with a whole lot more on LS. I think this is mainly because the of the End-game creep (more later), and because of the fact that there's so much more to do on LS. Also because LS with it's higher numbers, which in absolute terms are still relatively low, is more spread out, the PK drive that makes so much happen on DS, is less there if there are no LSers to be found. LS and DS are symbiotic: DS needs a healthy LS to have humans to kill in PK, and LS needs a healthy DS to keep the wheels of qps gathering through PK going, keep the danger alive so to speak.
It's not really true anymore though. DS will get you equipped and exp'd just as easily if not moreso than LS will, you don't need to mess about with horses, you don't need to mess about with lights, iirc they can chop up corpses for meat without needing survival, they can refill blood skins from corpses (iirc??)... Seems fairly newbie friendly to me? The roughest thing about DS for new people is when you dunno what to do and the who list is empty.
I feel like instead of warning them off entirely it should just be mentioned that this side is more PK oriented.
I agree with this also. If possible just comment these things out so if they are borked they just don't appear at all? I know that's coding, though.
Haven't done a lot of game design but I suspect the graphics themselves probably have little to nothing to do with network lag. That said I'm sure there is some streamlining that could be done, if only because there almost always is room for improvement in anything
We have the weary merchants that will sell you dodge/abs/parry basics for 500 gc - but this isn't something new people would know about nor really be able to afford. I feel like we could have a similar MOBOL that will sell you a guardian kit or some very entry level basics for 20 crowns or whatever? Like a quartermaster in Caemlyn you can requisition an ultra basic kit from maybe.
In general the bottom end economy could be looked at; I can imagine being a noob and scalping a bunch of rats or catching a bunch of fish only to realize it is an absolute pittance even just relative to the rent costs or buying anything really. What is it, like a copper per shadoweye scalp and a couple coppers per fish? Those activities, cool as they are, are basically pointless outside of novelty. They should be worth something. Has the added bonus of more people out doing stuff, which creates opportunity for PK and sustains the who list numbers.
For example - when I'm out making iron bars, it is because they are worth the time to go grab a pickaxe, mine the ore, smelt it, etc. They are valuable for crafting and in demand. I've sold bars for 50-100 crowns to players before. People can (and have) caught me out while I'm doing that. But if the bars had no purpose and sold for 2 coppers then I would never do it because why?
e: Heck you could make a whole mini game out of fishing if you added in a few different types of fish, did % chance to catch the rarer ones, made the rarer ones worth more coin to the fish merchant, and made it vary based on zone and time of day also. People spend hundreds of hours in WoW just fishing. It's not about graphics.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Re: fishing, there was a problem with people botting that stuff for hours on end, it's why rewards were downed. Cheating really often is we can't have nice things, because mobol and thus our ability to patch things up is limited.Reyne wrote: ↑Thu Oct 31, 2019 2:09 pmI've sold bars for 50-100 crowns to players before. People can (and have) caught me out while I'm doing that. But if the bars had no purpose and sold for 2 coppers then I would never do it because why?
e: Heck you could make a whole mini game out of fishing if you added in a few different types of fish, did % chance to catch the rarer ones, made the rarer ones worth more coin to the fish merchant, and made it vary based on zone and time of day also. People spend hundreds of hours in WoW just fishing. It's not about graphics.
That said, the reason I posted was your comment on iron bars. I've been working on a raw materials broker, e.g. iron bars, the wooden poles and knot of leather straps and I've been pondering how many bars for what price, so your comment helped.
Re: Adding to our Playerbase - Campaign
Boo people suck D:
Maybe just add a daily limit to what the fish merchant will buy though (say 50-100 crowns per day max) so even if they do bot and manage to not get caught by a PKer it's not that big of a deal?
This is very cool thoughThat said, the reason I posted was your comment on iron bars. I've been working on a raw materials broker, e.g. iron bars, the wooden poles and knot of leather straps and I've been pondering how many bars for what price, so your comment helped.
Sometimes I make too many bars and it's kinda expensive to store them in rent for what they are!