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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Keeping people online.
consultant
Member
Well I guess the most likely answer to that is making the game grindy but one grind in one mmorpg is not different than another grind in another game so here are some suggestions
Having a high skill cap for classes(could vary and could be rated 1to5). In game we have numerical progression with levels experience sckills and so on. But learning your roation cycle and when to use your abilities and playing your class correcttly and knowing when to change your set up is also progressive is if you make the game too simple people will get bored with their class and move on.
Making the game alt freindly will also keep players online people some times just get tired of the same class even if they do not hit the skill cap. So making it easy to play other classes to keep people interested is a real good idea. But if they have to go through a huge grind all over agains that to alt freindly. Some grinding is necessary cause people need to learn how to play class so selling max or close to max characters is a bad idea cause you get palyers at max level that do not knwo how to paly their class at all. But should make the game as alt freindly as you can with out hurting the game.
The class itself has ti have a really high fun factor and fullfill the roleplaying experience for that class. I know this sounds redundant. But what I am saying is this let say you make a dungeoun that is slightly flawed, Well people could still the have fun playing that dungeoun becuase they are having fun learning and playing their class. That actually encampasses the entire game. From question to pvp to farming to dungeouns to raids. So that should be one of your main things to focus on.
Believe it or not people do not play MMORPS cause of the grind or the dailies or the weeklies or leveling long grindy professions. People do need something to do. But people do not play this games because dev are smart and make a system in which they have to grind a certain resource or currency every week or daily that is what drives people away. It is a monthly subscription not a daily subscription.
I already posted on this do I will just say that theri should be some anti-toxic measures in place to make a positive place for toons to play in.
If you were to make some metrics that guaged performance in dungeouns which includes if you stood in the fire or not, over damage, if it was a full clear, number of times that you used crowd control and so that will give people somethign to shoot for. Very similar to challenge dungeouns just not as much pressure. It will also show what area the toon needs to improve on. This would be a personal thing so it would only be shared if the toon wated to.
Make a basic insturction manual. I know that as developers you want people to ahve a sense of discovery but let me you an example. I started playing runescape just to try it out not so bad for 20 years old but one of the things that they fail to mention is that by pushing down on the mouse wheel and moving the mouse you can turn the camera. I learned that from some website. Well does not seem like a big deal but in pvp it is a huge deal. That piece of knowledge actually freees up your left hand from wasd or the arrow keys huge advantage in pvp.
So how to move your toon should be in their, how to switch camera angles, what type of things can be keybinded, for example food, potions, weapons gear, emotes, target icons, even camera angles can be keybinded in most games.
For example a player could use a target icon an npc head to denote they are about to stunn them there for use any attack that is does extra damage while stunned. Emotes can be used to denote certains things like low in health. I know it is real basic things but by makeing an instruction manual then it would bring the quality of the toons to a certain level and if a player had a certian basic question well they could always refered to intruction manual cause people would know what is in there.
What this does is set a bar in the game so people are not completly lost increasing the quality of the game. Learning to play the game has its own but I have been in situations were many people did not know how to move their toon properly in pvp. Not going to go ove details but their are a fair number of things toons should know right from the get go.
Having a high skill cap for classes(could vary and could be rated 1to5). In game we have numerical progression with levels experience sckills and so on. But learning your roation cycle and when to use your abilities and playing your class correcttly and knowing when to change your set up is also progressive is if you make the game too simple people will get bored with their class and move on.
Making the game alt freindly will also keep players online people some times just get tired of the same class even if they do not hit the skill cap. So making it easy to play other classes to keep people interested is a real good idea. But if they have to go through a huge grind all over agains that to alt freindly. Some grinding is necessary cause people need to learn how to play class so selling max or close to max characters is a bad idea cause you get palyers at max level that do not knwo how to paly their class at all. But should make the game as alt freindly as you can with out hurting the game.
The class itself has ti have a really high fun factor and fullfill the roleplaying experience for that class. I know this sounds redundant. But what I am saying is this let say you make a dungeoun that is slightly flawed, Well people could still the have fun playing that dungeoun becuase they are having fun learning and playing their class. That actually encampasses the entire game. From question to pvp to farming to dungeouns to raids. So that should be one of your main things to focus on.
Believe it or not people do not play MMORPS cause of the grind or the dailies or the weeklies or leveling long grindy professions. People do need something to do. But people do not play this games because dev are smart and make a system in which they have to grind a certain resource or currency every week or daily that is what drives people away. It is a monthly subscription not a daily subscription.
I already posted on this do I will just say that theri should be some anti-toxic measures in place to make a positive place for toons to play in.
If you were to make some metrics that guaged performance in dungeouns which includes if you stood in the fire or not, over damage, if it was a full clear, number of times that you used crowd control and so that will give people somethign to shoot for. Very similar to challenge dungeouns just not as much pressure. It will also show what area the toon needs to improve on. This would be a personal thing so it would only be shared if the toon wated to.
Make a basic insturction manual. I know that as developers you want people to ahve a sense of discovery but let me you an example. I started playing runescape just to try it out not so bad for 20 years old but one of the things that they fail to mention is that by pushing down on the mouse wheel and moving the mouse you can turn the camera. I learned that from some website. Well does not seem like a big deal but in pvp it is a huge deal. That piece of knowledge actually freees up your left hand from wasd or the arrow keys huge advantage in pvp.
So how to move your toon should be in their, how to switch camera angles, what type of things can be keybinded, for example food, potions, weapons gear, emotes, target icons, even camera angles can be keybinded in most games.
For example a player could use a target icon an npc head to denote they are about to stunn them there for use any attack that is does extra damage while stunned. Emotes can be used to denote certains things like low in health. I know it is real basic things but by makeing an instruction manual then it would bring the quality of the toons to a certain level and if a player had a certian basic question well they could always refered to intruction manual cause people would know what is in there.
What this does is set a bar in the game so people are not completly lost increasing the quality of the game. Learning to play the game has its own but I have been in situations were many people did not know how to move their toon properly in pvp. Not going to go ove details but their are a fair number of things toons should know right from the get go.
0
Comments
With a castle event every week, plus a castle siege every month that will be what the major guilds work towards.
I can be a life devouring nightmare. - Grisu#1819
There's literally a 3 word solution to the problem addressed here and people love to write books about the topic.
Here's the solution.
Make it fun.
Period.
Unfortunately for us, it seems many devs don't seem to know how to make games fun anymore. Yes fun is subjective but I don't know a single person who finds grinding mobs for hours fun.
The sad thing is that a lot of games substitute fun gameplay with skinner box psychology techniques to keep their players playing. Things like daily login rewards, restrictions on how often you can do certain activities, slot machine mechanics, excessive amounts of rng, etc.
All of these things add up to games that aren't really fun, but people feel compelled to keep playing.
Two things that work better are: Alts, which let you do the same content but with different abilities and maybe a different role; and bonus objectives (like speedrunning, no-hit runs, pacifist runs, Bard-only runs
Black Desert Online made a gem of a combat system and now well they are going through the process of killing themselves by making the game system even more stupid. Even with the bad bussiness model the game was doing fairly good. In some games I have played I could probably make a mock trial sue the company for intentionally trying to lose money and win. Seems redundant but how many games are doing it.
It is hard for me to wrap my head around it. It is like there is a Mad Developer disease that just syphons all their game intelligence out their brains. I see games shoot themselves in the foot over and over again. And this guys are proffessionals in their fields. So maybe I am just a little concerned and justly so.
Corporate greed is a very real thing, unfortunately. Part of the problem is that most games developers are at the beck and call of their investors, who demand exponential growth of the companies they invest in. Every year they demand that a company make more money than they did last year, by any means necessary. The problem with this is that exponential growth is a total fallacy as there is a limit to how much money a game can make and there is a finite amount of money in the world to spend on video games.
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/click/black-ops-4-sales-disappoint-activision-investors/
As an example. Black Ops 4 made $500 million in 3 days, but that's apparently not good enough for the investors because it wasn't an increase on the previous CoD game......
"Fun" is subjective. Not only that but there are certain things that sound fun on paper but in practice are boring or tedious. And then to complicate things even more, sometimes you need to add in features that are less "fun" in order for other parts of the game to thrive. I doubt anyone actually enjoys having their armour break and having to pay gold to get it repaired, but this is a necessary function in order to maintain a balanced economy.
Adding mechanics like Nodes, where we have to defend the cities we've built against destructive attacks, should help provide that never-ending story.
AoC will have grindy things, but those are going to be set by players. Your city will always need materials, that inn you like to frequent will need ingredients, plus protecting your city from hordes, crafters will be constantly making things and always need people to go out and collect mats for them. So as far as your regular "daily" type quests it is going to depend on the community and how helpful people want to be plugged into their cities and nodes.
I'm tired of games that feel like they have to force players to log in on a development side. While I don't necessarily mind rep grinds and I'm sure some of the NPC factions will need some rep grinding, dailies have always felt bad to me. Your guild, city, and overall community should be providing plenty of events and things that you want to log in for, not feel forced to log in.
And that is not counting the regular castle sieges and pvp side of things or raiding and dungeons.
Sure if you don't want to interface with a city and the community to help out you might not have a reason to log in and you won't feel that need, but not every player is looking for the same thing. I hope AoC is more community driven and players that want NPC dailies/weeklies/grind can find a game that caters to that and AoC remains largely player driven for reasons to log in.