Month: July 2007

Getting and keeping new players is turning out to be much harder than I originally thought.

The first problem is that the original zone designs called for a minimum of 20 players to be fun. I don’t usually have 20 players simultaneous though, which is a self-defeating prophecy. Plus the zones that I spent the most work on was the larger ones for hundreds of people, so most of my effort isn’t yet visible.

The second problem is that some people still can’t run, or those that used to run no longer can. Part of the problem is Ogre 3D does a full file scan, so older deleted files are still used, and cause errors. Usually the autopatcher deletes these but sometimes I have to reset the autopatcher database so it doesn’t happen.

The third problem is that when there are only a few players online no amount of ship designing is going to make it so that the newbie can sometimes kill the expert. With less than 15 or so people the newbies don’t get those lucky kills and don’t have fun.

The fourth problem is not enough newbies come online at once to play each other. So they sit in the newbie zone for 10 minutes, go to the regular zone, and get wasted as above.

What I might need to do is put Armada (500 players) on hold for a while and work on a zone very friendly to new players, that works well with very low populations. I’ll think for a while on this. Throwing out some possibilities:

1. Speed kill competition in a very small zone with at most 5 players, no spectators allowed. Most kills in time X wins. Since dying doesn’t matter, newbies have more fun.
2. Racing mode, just race around a track
3. ???

*** EDIT ***

Got a good idea for target drones. Adding that now. I will have them rotate to shoot at you. Shouldn’t be too hard.

I saw some newbies play for 10 minutes, fly right into a hail of bullets, say “I can’t play against ships this powerful” and quit. The real reason they were quitting is not the power of the enemy ships, because all weapons and ships are equal. It is because of a perceived unbalance, where other players of higher level would have a wider range of weapons available and this was assumed to mean more powerful. As it is a convenient excuse for poor play, it was considered as a game inbalance, and they quit.

On my part, there were three problems here.

1. The skill balance difference is still too high, with a 4:1 ratio between the best and worst players. This is far better than before, and I’m running out of ideas on how to balance it. It would be good if I can get it down to 3:1 though.

2. The initial weapon I was giving newbies (standard momentum based gun) still took too much skill to use, as in you’d have to play for a while to get the feel of how fast your bullet moves, how much to lead, how fast your ship rotates, in order to hit anything. It’s sort of like the first time you use the grenade launcher in quake, where everyone else has chain guns. It wouldn’t be very fun unless you were unusually patient or skilled. In response, I increased the Guided part of guided rockets, and make this a level 0 item, so you get it for free right away. Guided rockets take little skill, mostly strategy, and from what I’ve seen newbies like having it.

3. Even with the first two points, newbies are willing to tolerate this if they feel the challenge is temporary and surmountable. I took my queue from Planetside here, and made it so you can unlock all the weapons and items in a few weeks with dedicated play. This is much different from my original play of taking 6-9 months. Planetside is also a skill-based game, and I can see how having unusable weapons can feel unfair. What’s funny is people actually complain now it’s too easy to level, but I think that’s just because they were used to the old system. It actually takes about a year to reach max level if you were to play religiously, but right now you don’t get anything past level 20 or so.

Every time I ask people how they like it I get positive feedback. It feels good, but I’m only hearing from the people that stuck around in the first place. I’m more concerned about the guys that jump in and leave in 10 minutes. It happens less, but it still happens, and I hope to discover and address why.

I was a day late in submitting but they don’t seem to mind since I was talking to someone there about the upload. Or at least I hope they don’t mind. I will check for my game in a few days.
Indy Game Showcase

I hope everyone will vote for my game 🙂

A guy logged into the game when I was there to help him out – give him some free kills against me, show him what to do, etc.

He got to level 3, bought an energy mine, and killed himself with it trying to use it against me, even though I was letting him hit me. It was because he didn’t know that it damaged yourself first.

Right after that he quit – a grand total of 5 minutes playing under the best conditions.

So I changed it so you can’t kill yourself, and energy mines, being newbie weapons, don’t damage yourself. But this is indicative of a problem I’m consistently having, which is retention. A lot of guys quit within 10-15 minutes of playing. Even the guys that compliment the game, and I do get a lot of compliments, might only play 20 minutes and say they’ll come back later.

What’s funny is this is all true with the zone I setup right now, which is specifically easier for newbies. It’s easier to kill, slower, is team based, and has a simple objective.

I’m going to have to get some inspiration here in a hurry on some way to make the game super accessible so even the most impatient guy will stick around.