how to bring players back
- Thread starter Salmonea
- Start date
Previously, there were invasion zones, but now you have to gather a group yourself. We need 3-4 points of interest where people will gather for a dogfight with the Thargoids.
On the forum, of course. Loads of people here claim they no longer play the game.
Moreover, I took part in battles with the Thargoids very actively. But after the invasion disappeared, I flew on the carrier to the roof of the galaxy. Now I really want to go back, but I'm stuck there for a long time. And there are many like me.
I think the small invasions should have been made continuous, because titans weren't for everyone.
But forum traffic is also way down. But either way, forums are typically the medium for the most hardcore users of anything. The One-percenters, so to say.
Let me put it that way, 3000 people have not left the forum in the last six months.
Much as I like the reduction in trolling and tantrums on the forum, it's probably a bad sign for the forum activity to decrease. Though I also have the impression that the moderators have become more proactive in cleaning it up and keeping the discourse more civil and on topic?
This has been a common thing across a lot of games, if not most - the number of people who actually actively participate in any given game's community (forums, subreddits, etc) tends to around 10-15% of the actual playerbase tops, with explicitly multiplayer games being at the higher end.
It's similar to how something like 50% of the population play games in general on a regular basis but less than 10% would describe themselves as "gamers", alongside other phenomena like how those who do consider themselves gamers dismissing certain genres as "not real games" even though they occupy a massive slice of the market.
The funniest expression of this was when Tetris 99 came out and several big name capital-G Gamer streamers went on stream expecting to clean house in the silly nintendo puzzle game for casual gamers, and proceeded to get absolutely dogwalked by retiree housewives with usernames like "marian" and "catlover73" who have been playing tetris since the 80s.
Devs, fix all the small maddening bugs, don't rely on the issue tracker, play the actual game for a few weeks and experience first hand for yourselves.
Ramp up the difficulty in low sec and anarchy space. You want to transit these regions, you should be getting through on the skin of your teeth. Transiting these areas is like being hit by a wet lettuce leaf, there is no sense of danger. Low sec should have spec ops level opposition trying to ruin your day.
Pirate attacks should have systems crawling with ships ready to make your day sad. Terrorist attacks should have a sense of complete pandemonium at an "epicenter" of an attack, with missions themed as a result and follow up attacks as an event.
Mission threats should spawn actual threats that make player have a proper risk vs reward think. The fact I can take 18 source and return missions at lvl 8 difficulty in a row for nil enemies spawning (and of low quality and easily disposed of) is a joke.
Give PF's a sense of agency, collective resources (themed on their government and ethos types) with positive and negative attributes. Allow PF's to then use these collective resources for missions, for conquest support etc, whatever.
Allow NPC's to actually fly your own ships, even if its just one. Make those NPC pilots actual pilots for the price they demand.
Increase the ship counts in highs and medium CZ's. Highs espeically should be an absolute scrum. Have some CZ's spawn in rings.
Do atmospheric effects, nothing complex, simple cloud systems, different coloured lighting in denser atmospheres or atmospheres made of of different gasses, basic rain/snow effects coloured due to the atmossphere - doesnt have to be accurate to the nth degree. This opens up more worlds to land on. Oh and do basic water worlds, again doesn't have to particularly accurate but coupled with atmospheric effects could be quite nice.
And Gas giants, make them flyable but you could add a sliding gravity effect - fly up top and its pretty, but go lower the gravity increases but the denser gass reduces visual and sensor perofrmance - good for evading enemies and so on. But fly too low and get crushed.
Make weapon effects actually good again. Stop nerfing effects becuase players use it like you have in the past, give the player base experimental effects and engineered outcomes that offer us an actual dilema in choosing what to engineer.
Just a few things of the multitude of low hanging fruits on offer. Hell ignore the graphical stuff, just balance the game better and get better player agency.
Ramp up the difficulty in low sec and anarchy space. You want to transit these regions, you should be getting through on the skin of your teeth. Transiting these areas is like being hit by a wet lettuce leaf, there is no sense of danger. Low sec should have spec ops level opposition trying to ruin your day.
Pirate attacks should have systems crawling with ships ready to make your day sad. Terrorist attacks should have a sense of complete pandemonium at an "epicenter" of an attack, with missions themed as a result and follow up attacks as an event.
Mission threats should spawn actual threats that make player have a proper risk vs reward think. The fact I can take 18 source and return missions at lvl 8 difficulty in a row for nil enemies spawning (and of low quality and easily disposed of) is a joke.
Give PF's a sense of agency, collective resources (themed on their government and ethos types) with positive and negative attributes. Allow PF's to then use these collective resources for missions, for conquest support etc, whatever.
Allow NPC's to actually fly your own ships, even if its just one. Make those NPC pilots actual pilots for the price they demand.
Increase the ship counts in highs and medium CZ's. Highs espeically should be an absolute scrum. Have some CZ's spawn in rings.
Do atmospheric effects, nothing complex, simple cloud systems, different coloured lighting in denser atmospheres or atmospheres made of of different gasses, basic rain/snow effects coloured due to the atmossphere - doesnt have to be accurate to the nth degree. This opens up more worlds to land on. Oh and do basic water worlds, again doesn't have to particularly accurate but coupled with atmospheric effects could be quite nice.
And Gas giants, make them flyable but you could add a sliding gravity effect - fly up top and its pretty, but go lower the gravity increases but the denser gass reduces visual and sensor perofrmance - good for evading enemies and so on. But fly too low and get crushed.
Make weapon effects actually good again. Stop nerfing effects becuase players use it like you have in the past, give the player base experimental effects and engineered outcomes that offer us an actual dilema in choosing what to engineer.
Just a few things of the multitude of low hanging fruits on offer. Hell ignore the graphical stuff, just balance the game better and get better player agency.
Interesting that you class flyable gas giants as low hanging fruit.
Most of the rest has been discussed endlessly, the reason why 99.999999% of the galaxy is perfectly safe, despite being anarchy systems, is because that's the way players want them.
You've not landed on many atmospheric worlds then? There's just about every color and type of atmosphere out there.
A lot of what you are suggesting would drive a lot of the current players away, and there's no guarantee they would bring new players. Yes we all want more planets, and landable ELW and flyable Gas Giants, and no don't play with the gravity, I doubt if they even could because the game doesn't work that way in simulating gravity, but lets not make every excursion into the unknown a battle against a multitude of pirates just to stay alive. Many of these things are not low hanging fruit, they are not trivial undertakings or they would already be in game.
well, you can easily filter out "low sec" or "anarchy" So I don't see issue here. Perfectly safe bubble is just low effort made for people, which want ETS, but in space.
It would drive away people, which are unable to even use map filters. This kind of people, which, anyway, dont play this game for long time, because they soon are overhelmed by other difficulties.
It would drive away people, which are unable to even use map filters. This kind of people, which, anyway, dont play this game for long time, because they soon are overhelmed by other difficulties.
Anarchy is 99.99999% of the systems in the galaxy!
Or perhaps it’s now so patently obviously there’s no point in posting, CMDRS are not posting?
Who knows, like I said I don't think it's a good sign.
Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin‘s only forum presence is to point to a discord server. I fear that my preference for forums is not replicated in later generations of Frontier customers
Maybe we should look at Steam numbers? Joke aside, it HAS noticeably slowed down. We should write Sally and tell her it just isn't the same without her anymore.
I think the forum decline started long before Sally left (a few years ago).
But on the other hand it's nice that the signal to noise ratio has increased..
But on the other hand it's nice that the signal to noise ratio has increased..
Definitely primarily a web forums problem - new threads per week have been on a fairly consistent decline since at least 2015, pretty much independently of how Elite Dangerous or Frontier's other games are doing.
(And certainly with things like F1 or Age of Sigmar, Frontier haven't even tried advertising forums for it - though F1 does technically have one)
(And certainly with things like F1 or Age of Sigmar, Frontier haven't even tried advertising forums for it - though F1 does technically have one)
Yeah, it's been steadily going down. Maybe this was one of the last great forums to exist. Nowadays the audience dilutes itself over reddit, nollock, discord and whatever social media there is.