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Keeping old players happy -
You know what would be a horrible quest? If you had to just stand in one room for 15 minutes trying to keep a frail NPC alive and then get shit for XP for all your effort. Man, that quest would suck. People would hate that quest. Nobody would play that fucking quest if they had any other option for getting XP.
And yes, I know we totally had that fucking quest in the game. Even with the changes where we don’t have to keep the NPC alive, it still sucks and is seldom run. There’s a lesson to be learned here (and I am very sorry to say) you still haven’t learned it.
There are a number of analogies I could make here. The government spending a ton of money trying to fight something that shouldn’t have been illegal to begin with when they could have been making money by legalizing and regulating it. Back to the car analogy, it’s like you have such a hard-on for making a car that can only be one color you spend time and resources trying to design a paint that can’t be painted over because it upsets you that people are painting your car a different color than you wanted them to.
Many popular inventions actually started as something completely different – but someone smart made a lot of money by following trends and switching the function of the product to where the demand was, instead of wasting time trying to sway the tide of what people wanted.
It’s not brain surgery people: know what people want, give them what they want and make some fucking money.
But not you. No, not SSG. If someone is enjoying your product and paying you money to enjoy it, but not playing with it exactly like you want them to – you’re going to walk over there and slap it out of their hands and waste the time and resources into trying to force them to do play with it exactly how YOU want them to play with it.
Make your car in more fucking colors.
Let’s look at the changes to Thrill of the Hunt. If you spent more than 10 minutes on modify that quest that you could have been spent improving something that actually needed to be improved, you absolutely wasted time and money.
Seriously, whoever even suggested those changes should either be fired or taken out back and have some of the stupid beat out of them for wasting company time and money.
That quest and EVERY quest should have multiple ways of running it. A relatively powerful toon of any class should have multiple options of succeeding in a quest. We should be able to use the environment to our advantage – it is smart, fun and enjoyable finding ways to do something that takes a group to do and finding a way to do it yourself. It’s called fun. It’s called self satisfaction. You should not be discouraging it, you should be providing it and encouraging it.
You should never, ever, ever, ever revisit a quest because people are completing it too quickly. You should only be revisiting quests if people are having trouble completing it because of the damn ladders (for example).
10 years I’ve watched you trying to pull your finger out of the Chinese finger trap and it’s so painful to watch I’m going to tell you how to do it.
Push in. The answer has always been to push in.
Doors should not only open if the crowds are killed, people should not be punished for not being able to group and people should not be punished for running a quest too quickly.
PEOPLE SHOULD BE REWARDED FOR RUNNING SLOWLY AND COMPLETING EVERYTHING!!!
Put better loot in opt chests
Double the XP of opts and opt bosses so people want to run them
Jack up the kill count bonuses by at least 5% and the same for ransack
Give us a reason for running things how you want them to be run, don’t punish us for playing how we want to play. Missing loot and XP should ALWAYS be the punishment, if you’re doing you job right, you’d never have to change a quest to discourage zerging. Give us a reason to run everything (loot and xp. The answer will always be loot and xp) and if someone wants to skip that and lose out on loot and xp – FUCKING LET THEM. Just let them be. Let them enjoy themselves. Stop listening to the annoying whiners like the Gramhs on the motherboards. Create a fun, diverse game and FUCKING LET PEOPLE PLAY IT.
You want people to group? 5% standing bonus per person in the party with frequent 10% bonus weekends. Don’t make us do what we don’t want to do – reward us for doing what you want us to do.
Add rare augments, higher drop rates of rare skill tomes, filigrees, or new exciting loot to be mentioned later to opt chests and people WILL run those opts. Don’t put speed bumps down to discourage zerging, create a reason for us not to zerg (did I mention loot and xp? I can’t mention that too much. People play this game for loot and XP).
Let’s switch from the meta players to the old flower sniffers, because we do have duel levels for old and new.
Specifically the dallies. Personally I hate them. Can’t stand them, find them boring as hell. Running the same quest once a day would be bad enough, but the thought of twice a day makes me puke a little in my throat.
The dailies should never, ever, EVER seen a nerf. EVER. Let them grind them. Let the bored house wives and husbands do their little thing they enjoy – because they giving you money instead of Candy Crush and you want people who are giving you money to continue to give you money – they’re only going to do that if they enjoy doing what they’re doing.
Mostly though – YOU WANT PEOPLE TO STAY IN EPICS AS MUCH AND AS LONG AS POSSIBLE
You don’t want old players running heroic or even iconic past lives. You want them to go to epics, stay in epics and live happily in epics.
Because people in epics stop earning favor and free points.
You seem to not put much value on your own points and, to a degree, you’re right. Being able to grind out favor produces free points and people earning free points don’t spend as much.
So give them every incentive NOT to earn free points so they buy more. That means more time in epics and less TRs. Less TRs, less free points. Less free points, more money spent on the game. Seriously, it is not brain surgery people.
Dailies should not be nerfed, the rest of the epic quests should have an XP overhaul to make them more compatible. After a certain point the epic XP just dries up and you really have no choice but to TR to reset things – which gives you somewhere in the 800-1000 free points range depending on how much favor you grind on your way through to level 30. That’s 800+ points they don’t have to buy later.
Bump up epic xp where people can run more content through multiple epic lives without Tring
You’ve already added a 4th tier to each sphere, which is good and I would have suggested that – but you’re overdue for making a 5th sphere for people to grind through. Introducing a new class in conjunction with a 5th sphere would be a really good goal to work towards in the future.
And finally – if someone wants to grind out reaper points; for fucks sake let them. I found Amber Temple farming to be possibly even more boring than the dailies and tended to avoid it. But for some people that’s pretty much all that’s left for them to do in the game. They have the gear they want, they have triple completion in heroic and epics, what’s left for them? If grinding out 1/100th of a reaper point every 5 minutes makes them happy, fucking let them be happy. Take their damn money and tell Gramh* to shut the fuck up. He isn’t doing you any favors.
To review:
Don’t nerf, don’t punish – add incentives for playing the game
Increase rare and optional’s Xp
Add better loot to optional chests
Add better and more frequent bonuses for grouping
Encourage people to stay in epics
Epic XP overpass
Don’t nerf dailies – increase xp in other quests
Donuts
Boobs
*not literally Gramh, just the Gramhs of the world in general.
New players -
More than anything I feel this is where you guys are really dropping the ball. A big part of that comes from a weird mix of trying to keep the meta players happy back in the day by constantly upping the difficulty level, which screwing them at the same time by forcing them to run quests exactly how you wanted them to be ran.
The fact is (he admits begrudgingly) DDO is a great game, but it is not easily accessible to new players due to the learning curve, the power crawl, and just because there is so damn much content in the game.
As mentioned in the original post, new player interest is dwindling. Sharn isn’t bringing them in like RL and RL didn’t keep nearly as many as you needed. Despite the dated graphics, most of the new players start out loving the game but end up crapping out because of all the content they have to buy and (mostly) because after a certain point the game just becomes too damn hard. Most of the older gear offered was crap when I started playing 10 years ago and flat out doesn’t allow new players to keep up with the power crawl.
These are the two aspects on maintaining new players that time, attention and resources should be put towards – not retweeking old quests because old players run them too quickly.
Combating power crawl – we have reaper now to keep older players happy. I love reaper. I’m totally on team “reaper saved the game”. Good job whoever came up with reaper! You created the difficulty scale this game desperately needed.
That said, you need to unfuck up the basic difficulty levels of Norm-Elite, specifically elite. Elite is far harder now that it was when I started playing. Hell, with the bump up in DA, elite is far more difficult now than it was 4 years ago. Elite needs to be turned down a little. It should be hard for a new player, not inaccessible. Yes, at one time elite was aimed for the best of the best with a million past lives and all the best gear so they could pat themselves on the asses and feel uber.
We need to get past that. We have reaper for that now.
It needs to be scaled back to something closer to what it was 10 years ago. But I know that’s hard and maybe undoable, so here’s a better alternative.
Create better starting gear.
The starting gear hasn’t been overhauled in…fucking forever. The starting gear is crap. It was crap 10 years ago. It’s crap and it doesn’t help a newb through the curve. As far as new player retention goes, I would consider this a top priority.
Rework the basic Korthos starter gear to make it more viable in today’s DDO, then pick a quest pack that isn’t completely embarrassing somewhere in 3-6 level range and create a few nice, tight sets (NOT CRAFTING). Just something decent that helps the new players not only get through to, but also lets them play RL to get the gear they need to carry them through their first life. Hitting the weak spots of gear in the right place would go a long ways towards keeping new players in the game.
2nd point – the wall of adventure packs
What’s the goal here? Do we want to sell subscriptions, packs, or both?
If you want to sell subscriptions you need to give subscriptions away. Never let your client feel intimidated by choices. “There’s too many packs, I’ll never have them all” does NOT lead to subscriptions – it leads to quitting. It leads to the feeling that there’s too much money to be spent in this game and it’s easier to just buy a triple A game instead.
You give them a taste. Two weeks to a month in every new account should be given a free two week to month long trial subscription. Let them see 1st hand what VIP offers them. Let them see how much they’re getting for such a small investment. Let them see and experience it because if you just leave it to their imagination, they’re only going to imagine negative things and leave.
Another option (and actually both should be used) is an updated starter package. Throw a free race (I’m looking at you half-elf that no one wants ever), 3 or 4 of the older packs and something nice for 10 bucks. Make them feel they’re making headway into the game instead of being intimidated by how much more they need.
And for the love of God, permanently lower the price of the really old packs or make them free to play. The longer someone plays, the more likely they are to spend money on the game. Even if it takes a year or more, eventually they’re going to shell out money – if they stay with the game. Very few people can actually play the game for free, and those that do are never going to spend money anyways – so it’s a non-issue.
But you don’t want a real, potential paying customer to save up his points and then accidently buy the Restless Isles as his 1st paid content. That type of purchase (and to them it is a purchase, they worked hard to earn those points) can kill incentive for continuing with or spending money on the game. I’ll admit I had a massive hang up for spending money on an online game when I started. Easily the 1st 4 or 5 packs I bought I got with grinding. I got over it, stayed with the game and have easily dropped thousands of dollars since.
Stop trying to squeeze every nickel out of customers. Know your weak spots and cut your losses. Know when making a sale is actually losing you 5 sales later on. Some of that old content needs to be either cheap as hell or F2P.
3rd point – Hires. Fix them.
To say the hire AI is horrible is being nice. We know this, you know this, everyone knows this.
The metas will back you that hires shouldn’t exist or no time should be put towards improving them. They’re wrong. Very wrong.
You basically have two choices at this point to stretch the game out – server mergers or fix the hires. In the long run, fixing the hires will be the easier of the two.
We’re no longer in the hayday of DDO. We’re well past the point of using a hire to fill a single, empty spot or for people who want to mostly solo. Hires are needed now more than ever because most heroic parties are flat out not going to fill. There’s just not enough players running the same levels and content at the same time and that’s only going to get worse, not better.
New players need hires. New players need good hires. New players need hires without those stupid cool down timers every time you summon them which makes them unable to do anything when you need them most.
I know all the arguments – spaghetti code, time, resources, blah blah blah. Well, think about the time you spent jacking up Amber Temple and Hunt, that’s time that would have been better used working on hires.
And complicated problems do sometimes have surprisingly simple solutions.
Don’t go in and try and fix old hires. It’s a waste of time.
Create a single, good AI, then scale it up and reskin as needed. We don’t need hires with “personalities,” we need hires that don’t take 5 minutes to cast a heal spell and that can rez when needed.
Build a decent AI and tweek that for level needs. You’ll find that much, much easier than trying to go back and repair all the glitchy hires in the game now.
You want DDO to be a fun, challenging experience for new players, not “well, it wouldn’t be that bad if I could get a group or the hires didn’t suck,” or even “it’s a pretty good game despite sucking horribly in these many, many ways.”
I totally get where your resources are limited but (and I’m being nice here), your resources wouldn’t be nearly so limited now if you’d known where to prioritize your changes five years ago.
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Pointless "Hey SSG" Thread (Read 8081 times)
