New Player Experience after launch

ArchivedUser

The idea that players are dropped into a world that is completely barren and their actions influence how the world is developed is truly unique. It is one of the biggest draws to this game for me and probably for many others. As exciting as the end game features sound, I have typically enjoyed the leveling and exploring process more than the end game in every MMO I have played. I find myself frequently being drawn back to older games that have opened progression servers so that I can relive that new server experience.

I am curious if Intrepid Studios has given any thought to capturing the New Player Experience after launch. At launch if 20 servers are opened everyone who participates will experience a unique server development experience. However any player who joins the game several months or years after launch will find an established server with established cities. Sure they could level up and siege a city to fight for some new zone to rise up, but that experience is not the same as joining a server where there are no cities.

Would Intrepid Studios consider launching a new server every 3 - 6 months? This would give new and existing players a chance to relive that new server experience. It could draw in players as well ,as many people won't pick up a game if they miss the initial rush. The risks here are that populated servers would become abandoned in favor of new servers or not enough players would join the new servers to establish a decent player base, but this could probably be monitored and the interval of new server releases adjusted accordingly.

Thoughts?
Cregor Van'Drake

ArchivedUser

Personally, I think it might be safe to look at it from the perspective of "the game starts after nodes are developed" sort of thing. Ideally, this game wont play like a grand strategy game like Civilization or something that has a definite end to each session. Ideally the world should be dynamic enough that individual players should feel the impact of sieges. Hopefully sieges will serve to replicate the "fresh new start" for the citizens destroyed by the siege. Its an interesting question that I think needs addressing "will the meat of the game surround the initial founding of wilderness." We have to remind ourselves that not everybody in 1 server will always feel developed at a time. Ideally a player should be able to find a node that still needs growth and is just now spreading its roots.

Tl;dr good question and I'd like to see the devs address this as well.

ArchivedUser

My first forum post here, and boy is it a doozy! TL;DR at the end, but if that's all you read then you won't find the unicorn!

I understand and agree that you need to reward players for doing well and for consistently playing the game and those rewards need to feel proportional to the time and effort the player has put into achieving them. You put more in, you expect more out, it goes without saying. However in MMO-RPGs these rewards often have a direct and significant influence on players' in-game economic and combat potential, and this leaves the genre with a very core dilemma.
How do you make new and casual players feel like they can at least be relevant in the grand scheme of things, without cheapening the more significant investments that the devoted players have made... It's a tough balance to strike. While myself and many others have plenty of time to invest in these games, many others do not and they are just as important to the health and longevity of the game.
The upper echelons of the player base also need a reason to play, just as much as those below them, and if they feel like they don't have anything more to achieve then they won't have much reason to continue playing the game. If you keep adding new end-game content á la World of Warcraft then that will increase the power cap, further widening the gap that everyone else has to overcome, and we all know how that story goes!
What Intrepid's Devs are proposing is to allow anyone to contribute towards changing or influencing the world through the nodes, and to make the achievements of the established players open to capture. The hope seems to be that this and the multitude of available nodes will solve both problems. It gives the new and casual players some influence in the world AND give the older players a reason to stick around, since the world will be dynamic and their place in the status quo isn't a permanent thing. I think this idea definitely has potential, and I love the proposed ways that all these things will influence the world at large, but within the current system of "vertical progression", the more time and effort someone has put into their city or gear the harder it will be to take from them... So, we're left facing stagnation again. Besides, what happens when all of the nodes have been levelled to maximum and all the metropolises have been built? How will new encounters be made when there's no more space for the nodes to expand into?

I like what OP was thinking with opening new servers to keep it fresh, but that would spread the population too thinly if the older servers remained online. Adamufree also makes a good point that the game is meant to be dynamic enough that like these can be fixed, but I'm sceptical given the vertical progression that's common among MMO-RPGs and the inclusion of RTS elements... I foresee one or two guilds per server getting ahead and reaching critical snowball mass, where their accrued advantages allow them to gain even more advantages until no-one else on the server is even relevant anymore. I can see a way to salvage this, but only with a couple of serious overhauls:

<strong>-> Scrap combat levels:</strong> This is gonna be pretty controversial, but character/class levels compound the problem of vertical progression and really aren't necessary at all. I know that levels are an essential tool to quantify how skilled your character is at performing tasks - and it should definitely stick around for non-combat pursuits - but combat proficiency should be representative of the player's personal skill. If you personally play your character more and play it well then you will out-perform your peers without needing the inflated stats. If fresh recruit Jimmy wants to help tackle the Ancient One he should feel free to do so, but if he doesn't know how to use his combos and always stands in the fire then he probably won't be invited back to the raid! Achievements and ability combos should be gated by their inherent difficulty, not because the developers feel like you haven't been playing long enough... This also encourages a focus on making encounters legitimately difficult and not just a DPS/gear check - and it feels so, SO much better if you had to put in a active and concerted effort to overcome a challenge, compared to spending passive hours of grinding. This is all coming from a guy whose main profession in MMO-RPGs is harvesting, I'm married to the mother-loving grind! (See <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6UV2gXwFPw">Shadiversity's video</a> for more on character levels if you aren't yet convinced.)
<strong>-> Give items and worlds a limited shelf life:</strong> This gives people at the top a reason to keep playing since their legendary swords and mighty empires won't last forever, it means you can make the real content of the game available to new players faster, and it means you don't end up with stagnant worlds where only one or two guilds are really able to play the game as it was intended. See <a href="https://youtu.be/uFIjHrwTe0w?t=54">Crowfall's "Uncle Bob" analogy,</a> and how they're using the system of temporary worlds and items to solve this problem. The way this would work is that instanced housing would become yours or your guilds "home base", and the servers would essentially be super-long RTS games on a far-off world. Import and export of items and materials from these worlds will be restricted and the degree/severity of these can be varied according to taste This means that while the more successful will accrue more wealth over time they won't be able to use <em>all</em> that wealth to exert excessive influence over a server. You could instead allow people to spend most of their wealth to build up huge houses, even whole communities and cities, in their instanced housing. Give us crazy potential for development and customisation in these zones and those who consistently win will feel appropriately rewarded without having to make everyone else feel like spectators to the real action!

<ul>TL;DR/Conclusion:</ul>
As a prospective player (who's looking for an MMO-RPG to play for closer to one decade than one year!) I love A LOT of things about this game... However I'm worried that due to "vertical progression" and the relative permanence of the worlds that people will be fighting over that AoC servers will become stagnant, even in spite of all the other countermeasures... Scrap combat/character levels, give items limited durability and give the worlds a limited time frame/win condition, and I'd be delighted to play this game till I die. :D
Maybe Intrepid can make it work as it is, who knows? Will they strike the perfect balance - making the most desirable in-game achievements proportional to the effort required, yet still accessible to most? I hope they at least read the TL;DR and consider what I said, and remember that it's not always bad to copy someone else's notes - imagine what would happen if we ignored all good ideas just because someone else came up with it first! For bonus points alleviate my concerns with your most soothing Morgan Freeman impression ;)

ArchivedUser

So, uh, do I not get to see my own post on these forums? The site is saying that my post is here, but I don't see it :/

Edit: IDK what happened to it and I wasn't allowed to repost it here so I made my own thread in the same forum