"Ask Not What SoD Can Do for You ..."

The reference to many people didnt include only those on during prime time. This included all players, How many people do you think will want to continue playing when they just put in lets say 100 hours (nothing in the grand scheme of MMO time but still) to progressing a character and then we decide o a server wipe will make things better! What do you think the chance of these players returning is? Small, to say the least. What do you think the chance of a previously retired player coming back and seeing there characters are all gone returning to the game is? Not that likely either. Point is of the players we have you will lose more by server wiping than it will be worth in a naive attempt to boost player base.
MMOs have people at different stages of the game at all times thats part of what makes them fun there is something to look forward to going to. If you make everyone jump through hoops they already jumped through to get back to the same point well lets just say, Your not going to help the server at all. You might make yourself feel better that you dont have XXXXXXXX number of people that are better geared or more experience but aside from that your not making anything better.
If you get irritated that you are not in the elite group of players there are a few solutions, A) play until you get there, B) Realize its a game for fun and then go have fun, C) Realize MMOs are not the game for you. I have family members that cant stand MMOs because they think they should be able to put in minimum time and be on an equal playing field as those that spend hours progressing there character, They just dont play them because they realize they just dont work for them.
 
Server wipe could be a great idea if it ran concurrent with a massive class mechanics and exp/cash drop overhaul.
 
A server wipe or new server will do nothing but go right back to our current situation in less than half the time it took SoD to get here. The problem with MMOs is and always has been the people playing it. The guy who is at the max sets the minimum. Also, The last thing you would want on a new server are people who played the game before, Though its not a great comparable to SoD (hits a larger audience hell bent for nostalgia) P99 is a good example of this idea and what a steaming pile of shit that is. You get everything bad about EQ and none of the good. Do you honestly think you are not going to just have the same problems on this new server/wiped server? It will just be the same thing over again, without the "fun" of being new to it

Yale
 
I don't see how a server wipe would help. I understand there are a few folks that want to start fresh. Why not just start a fresh character? I for one would stop playing all together if they did a wipe, even though my characters aren't tier billion. I go at my own pace. Ringers are the big issue as I said earlier. 2 boxing makes it easy to always have ringers on and still progress your character and guild.
 
People want to be able to start fresh on a clean slate where the experience of being new isn't pretend/diluted by ikisith droppables dangled in your face for vendor prices etc etc. I mean given enough time a new server would turn in to the same thing all over but as a secondary server it could be a pretty cool experiment.
 
Rorne said:
People want to be able to start fresh on a clean slate where the experience of being new isn't pretend/diluted by ikisith droppables dangled in your face for vendor prices etc etc. I mean given enough time a new server would turn in to the same thing all over but as a secondary server it could be a pretty cool experiment.
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where do i sign up?!
 
Rorne said:
People want to be able to start fresh on a clean slate where the experience of being new isn't pretend/diluted by ikisith droppables dangled in your face for vendor prices etc etc. I mean given enough time a new server would turn in to the same thing all over but as a secondary server it could be a pretty cool experiment.
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Yeah. Again, I don't care, but it's a bit disingenuous for people to just say "why not make a fresh char". A fresh char or fresh group of chars is not like a fresh world at all. It's the same reason people flock to betas for games they'll probably drop after a couple months: it's exciting being on a level playing field with a lot of other people, not being held back by established chars and guilds and twink gear and bot armies etc etc. Coming together and struggling against content that everyone will just skip within a year or two once the easiest routes become well-established. Blah blah.

I remember the most fun I ever had playing EQ itself was when they opened up the racial pvp server concept on the test server for the first time. 100 people in gfay not yet strong enough to take on orcs. Making some quick allies, collaborating to get ahead (how someone got to the point of making mastercraft(?) weapons within 2 days before more than a handful of people were in the teens, I'll never know), repelling raids of gnomes and getting swept up in launching some of our own. I think I only played 3 days and didn't get past level 12 on the ranger I was playing, but it was totally worth it. Yeah... probably not enough players to recreate something like that, though.
 
Zaela said:
but it's a bit disingenuous for people to just say "why not make a fresh char". A fresh char or fresh group of chars is not like a fresh world at all.
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I disagree.

I don't know about everyone else, but when I started playing this game, and the game it was built on, there were level 65s already. Some of those level 65s were raiding, and some of those were raiding inner prison or harder content. I don't even know what they would have been raiding, they were so far beyond me. So to me, and I imagine to the vast majority of people who have ever logged in on any mmorpg, there were other people who had a head start. Good for them. Cool that they have been playing and cool that they see it still being fun.

Zaela said:
not being held back by established chars and guilds and twink gear and bot armies etc etc.
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I certainly didn't feel held back by high tier players, whatever tier qualified as high tier back when I started. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I had no idea who they were, and I'm sure they didn't know or care that I existed. I don't see how someone vending BQ BoEs held me back, maybe it did.

I don't see a server wipe or fresh server however it happens as anything other than a short-lived solution at best. If the game can't be fun for new people joining the game now, what fun will it be for new people joining a new or wiped server when the early adopters hit 65?

Just questions for the sake of questions I guess. My level of caring is quickly fading.
 
Problem is, most new players these days don't look forward to getting to the next tier. They look forward to being 8 or 9 tiers higher right off, and bitch constantly that it doesn't happen faster and easier. That's both the nature of games these days, and of our low population. Obviously the population right now won't support enough to fill the ranks throughout the tiers, but the turn-over these days makes the high tier actually need these brand new players, encouraging the skipping of as many as 9 or 10 tiers now. Splitting our already low population into two servers would be a possible death blow, but just encouraging folks to start fresh on the current server won't go anywhere either imo, whether you argue it's a true fresh start or not, because people now, especially most new players, have zero patience for it anymore. And I honestly hate seeming negative about it all, but if you want to do something to cater to the growing impatient masses that make up most of the current gaming population, you'd have to change this game enough that it just wouldn't be the same game anymore. I wish I had something more constructive to say..... I personally am actually optimistic about the effects of getting 2.5 and the eqemu thing active, but who really knows if it'll end up being enough.
 
This is a bit of a tangent but I have often wondered why No Rent gear for players hasn't been experimented with more. They eventually disappear so they don't have to adhere as strictly to the power curve of where you get them and you can get a little wild with what they do. I think it's kind of ideal for lower level players, you could have zone specific no rent drops that they might get while just piddling around in that area and exping, they get a few hours use out of them and get to feel a bit more powerful for a while and because they disappear they don't directly devalue other items in the long term.
 
Rorne said:
This is a bit of a tangent but I have often wondered why No Rent gear for players hasn't been experimented with more. They eventually disappear so they don't have to adhere as strictly to the power curve of where you get them and you can get a little wild with what they do. I think it's kind of ideal for lower level players, you could have zone specific no rent drops that they might get while just piddling around in that area and exping, they get a few hours use out of them and get to feel a bit more powerful for a while and because they disappear they don't directly devalue other items in the long term.
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I like this idea sounds like a good spot for some initial problem solving adding some of these would be cool for example you could enter into black burrow and their is an NPC that if the character is bellow level 25 (just throwing a level on it) when the player hails them they can go through a dialog and then receive a class appropriate item that adds Banes/proc/etc that will only affect the creatures within black burrow. Something similar could be implemented at level 65 that checked AAs if the character has less than 250 (the amount to start tomes iirc) then they could get something similar. Monks could get fist weapons that had + 1 bane damage to X type of mob and allowed a proc that did Y to Z dmg to mob with a like 1% proc rate or something like this, casters could get some cool bracers that procced a DD with a higher proc rate etc. Seems like it would add a lot of draw and interest to new players.
 
You obviously completely missed the point of that post. It was to explain that this thread isn't to come here and say o lets leave everything the same it was to say lets come up with some ideas to improve the server population. Which Ludovician's response did none of. Instead he decided to insult ideas that were being presented which is completely opposite from what we want here.

Anyway on a note that actually contributes something to this thread and its purpose:
Add some more incentives for existing players to help newer players for example a point system in which they can gain points and then unlock a consumable of some sort for answering questions new players have in game or directing them to content that will answer their questions. Instead of rude responses from existing players because their question is "obvious" to the existing players while its maybe not "obvious" to the new players.
 
Latten said:
Witch quests are you speaking off ? The vah ?
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Yeah. I think retaining new folks was/is hard because the vast gap between old and new players. How do you span that gap?

Sure, a lot of players are looking for quick and easy gratification in games today yet P1999 numbers are more than healthy on a server that can't hold a candle to this one. P1999 doesn't produce results quickly/easily. What's the difference? Witch changes need to be made?

Sincerely, the wicked Which of the West.
 
I am playing on p99 with some shards of dalaya dudes. The game is fun because it forces you to group with people and there isnt such a huge gap between the high end and the new guy.

if you decide to play on p99 my name is Nebi and im playing a bard. I look forward to single box grouping with you and not having a plethora of uber tanks to trivialize everything.
 
As far as new player retention goes I think one of the most important things that could be done is rebalancing the tiers in a way that's actually conducive to playing the game.

The early tiers are a cluster fuck of imbalanced bosses with loot that's nearly useless to everyone. The Vast majority of the first three tiers at this point servers no purpose other than dropping ancients and the rare relic. I personally a lot of this being turned into 6 mans that can be done by people in cmal/tmap/droppable gear would go a long way towards making new players have content usable by them.

After that the tiers need rebalanced to reflect the fact that while a lot of the early devs had good ideas and great intentions, having zones that are tier 2 on one side and tier 5-6 on the other is a horrible design mechanic. It leads to having to hop between zones just for 1-2 targets because anything else in that zone is not appropriate. Really it'd serve sod well to rebalance all the tiers and make singular zones closer in tier rather than having zones that span 4+ tiers. The low tiers would be much better if you could go to PoAir/Torment/NDHK and not have to clear through tier 2-3 trash to get to the relevant tier 4-5 bosses that actually drop useful things. If the entire zone was an appropriate tier it'd make clearing trash for trash drops and killing previously nuisance bosses actually useful.
 
langdorn said:
Yeah. I think retaining new folks was/is hard because the vast gap between old and new players. How do you span that gap?

Sure, a lot of players are looking for quick and easy gratification in games today yet P1999 numbers are more than healthy on a server that can't hold a candle to this one. P1999 doesn't produce results quickly/easily. What's the difference? Witch changes need to be made?
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Differences: true nostalgia to classic EQ; hard to overstate how off putting a new world/lore/class design can be for people in the market for playing a 15 year old game; a gap that is orders of magnitude more manageable both in terms of grind and gear (mudflation didn't completely ruin gear until Luclin); no boxing keeps toolbags from using their friend's/third cousin once removed's/dad's character to instantly develop a false sense of entitlement; larger population increases chance of finding a posse to roll with on p99 while sod is pretty much entirely populated by a very specific kind of crazy; BoE doesn't completely trivialize the leveling process thus making it unenjoyable (like a game genie); a different objective- anyone proposing grand changes to p99 gets laughed at and ignored for good reason while on SoD community feedback like the QoL thread just gets ignored more often than not which makes for sad pandas.
 
Another thought (seems like a good idea currently but havnt entirely thought it through yet) Implementing some lower teir 6 mans. Yes i know we have cmal and its great for lower tiered toons to get gear chance at ancients etc I think implementing more of these on a 3ish day timer would help out the lower end playerbase as well allowing them to not need a full force of 18 ppl to go get upgrades and spells. (obviously this is a lot of work for devs) A maybe simpler option would be to put in a npc in cmal that if you go through dialog will pop the boss for your group (once per 3 days you can kill the boss) and would then flag everyone in the group as unable to participate again for 3 days. Would also need a way to prevent a group from grabbing 1 new member and doing the same mob again (maybe just making it so those that have already done the boss cant get loot but can still go to help/get exp)
 
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Thade said:
As far as new player retention goes I think one of the most important things that could be done is rebalancing the tiers in a way that's actually conducive to playing the game.

The early tiers are a cluster fuck of imbalanced bosses with loot that's nearly useless to everyone. The Vast majority of the first three tiers at this point servers no purpose other than dropping ancients and the rare relic. I personally a lot of this being turned into 6 mans that can be done by people in cmal/tmap/droppable gear would go a long way towards making new players have content usable by them.

After that the tiers need rebalanced to reflect the fact that while a lot of the early devs had good ideas and great intentions, having zones that are tier 2 on one side and tier 5-6 on the other is a horrible design mechanic. It leads to having to hop between zones just for 1-2 targets because anything else in that zone is not appropriate. Really it'd serve sod well to rebalance all the tiers and make singular zones closer in tier rather than having zones that span 4+ tiers. The low tiers would be much better if you could go to PoAir/Torment/NDHK and not have to clear through tier 2-3 trash to get to the relevant tier 4-5 bosses that actually drop useful things. If the entire zone was an appropriate tier it'd make clearing trash for trash drops and killing previously nuisance bosses actually useful.
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I agree, I would even go so far as up to T4. turn NDHK and other raid zones of that ilk into a 6 man zone. would give the new players a way to gear themselves decently and get relics.
 
Nebi said:
I am playing on p99 with some shards of dalaya dudes. The game is fun because it forces you to group with people and there isnt such a huge gap between the high end and the new guy.

if you decide to play on p99 my name is Nebi and im playing a bard. I look forward to single box grouping with you and not having a plethora of uber tanks to trivialize everything.
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By single boxing groups, do you really mean swarm kiting all of OT or BW to PL everyone?

I can't believe you guys went to the dark side, there is no turning back :(
 
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