Getting Old Players Back
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I tend to do that, but with so many alt accounts, most of the people I message are veterans, so I stopped when I realised no one was new. Also, just came back from a hiatus and don't know who is still 'new'
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Doesn’t matter, hence my point of if you THINK they are new!
Thank people for fun RP after the event etc, practicing being a nice chap goes a long way and is fun to do!
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I'll be starting again after new year and I'll just give my own explanation of why I first got into it and why I want to come back.
- Questing - I've played MMO's out my a** and used to even play WOW and stuff. You know going through a raid is where you work as a team and depend on each other. Now Arabel when I first came here was the beez knees. You would eventually get large quests, going in dungeons or large expeditions and such, the best part is the party would be half way through and running out of supplies and we'd end up quickly camping or resting and deciding how to get out/finish the quest. The role play doing this and you feel like you're actually there just blew my mind, not to mention death of this server is PAINFUL so you will be working together and actually scared (rl) to die.
^ The stonelands quest was the f**king BOMB, this always ended up having some DM come in to spice it up if they were bored and nearly kill us all, or we'd encounter so many traps/undead that we got stuck between finishing the quest or retreating.
1b. When questing I do know on this server if you've played it a lot, going through frins basement for the 10000th time, you can't expect the person to be so hyped and will rp the crap out of it. I guess most of us are also working 24/7 with a family or some other time consuming thing so we don't all have time to go through quests rping the same thing. BUT, the best part was last time people rped just a little bit, and kept it like I was on an rp server not a farming/action server, this just added the brilliance to Arabel.
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I once had a huge argument with another in the same faction (IC) and the relationship nearly broke and became and huge rivalry. Now after this the player approached me (OOC) On DM and said 'I apologize I actually got mad over this myself and started to get angry at you' After this we laughed and talked. Basically I found more people on this server mature and grown up, to not have grudges or make things personal, I've never found one person who was NOT helpful, polite, personal, sensitive. (Only my experience obviously)
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Arabel was SIMPLE, it was big then, but not SO big that you would bump into other people sometimes doing to quests, walking around being rp gods as always. Was great to see, without having to DM people or anything to meet up. The areas look good and scary sometimes and makes you want to explore. Quests were not ALWAYS in the city which allowed you to go somewhere.
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DM plots of course are just what makes it great again. Even if you're never IN the DM plot you will then find everyone talking about it and somehow get involved. They can even mess up you're well established character but it just adds onto the fun. Got to give a round of applause for the DMs on this server for the time and effort they put in and making things interesting for us normies!
^These are things that I liked about it, sometimes I would use a side char and only quest while rping some mercenary half orc (creative I know) but just doing that and the role play with people on quests was just so great.
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I did not mean to sound like a grumpy hat or be all negative. Someone said "Old players tell us what made you leave" and I did just that. That said, I am all for saying do, rather than dont, so here are some.
- Strengthen the focus on roleplay, by limiting the influence of levels and mechanical power to succeeding in plots. It is a careful balance, and in the last 2 years I played, I felt it shifted too much towards built vs roleplay.
- Introduce more tools for roleplay, such as cleric conversion tools, practice swords (no damage).
- Update the old rules for expectations of higher level characters, and encourage apprenticeships, squires etc. with loot and exp.
- Be far more generous with RP EXP. It is always nice to get 50 or 150 exp, but if you earn 10 times more doing a scripted quest, or 20 times more doing dm quests, then you set a tone. If you see a level 4 roleplaying their asses off in the spire, throw them an entire level.
That was the smaller stuff, this is more vital to getting old players back.
Many left, myself included, because it took FAR too much time to do anything. If it takes 2 months to earn a promotion from private to sergeant, or it takes 6 months to conclude a small plot, we lose many players who may only be casual.
5) Lower time investment requirements, before earning bases, NPC support, promotions or seeing plots progress. You may not become a king in a month, but you may be a knight :) -
I don't know what kind of experiences you've had O'louth (I've been gone 2 years, just got back), but I can only speak for what I do- to me, it's quality over quantity. If you do amazing shit in 2 days after creation, I will give you knighthood in two days (That's a hyperbole, don't make a PC and ask for knight in two days :D). My focus is on WHAT you did and how MANY people CARE, not how long you've been doing it.
Rules 1-4, are something we can act on; And honestly, I thought people were doing that already. If not, it's something we should.
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It isnt as much of what I experienced myself, but what I have seen, and heard. But then again, I also played in the EU time zone, which went quiet for large periods at a time. And let us just be honest, I left because RL came in the way, not because CoA sucked, so these are suggestions for improvements, not attacks at what MUST be changed.
My main concern, is that the server is very hard to be part of, if you cannot invest rather large amounts of time, and progression can be VERY slow, if you want to focus more on RP than doing scripted quests. I was level 8 for most of my time last I played, and I could log out on a friday, and find that someone had joined my faction, and was higher level and had more "Power prestige" than me when I logged back on monday. I would value the time I had during the week to push plots and RP, but the downside, at least at the time, was that Mechanical Power just had more value than RP power.
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Mechanical Power doesn't necessarily always hold that. One thing that will always hold true for CoA however @O-louth is the more time you can invest the more you will find your PCs busy and active, achieving exciting things. This isn't really something that can be helped, changed, or mediated.
Player rewards are based off their in game hours, so despite the fact that you may be a month old, if you only play 5 hours a week and someone else is at a pace of 7 hours a day, it might be difficult to maintain a position as weighty as them if they are doing the right things. This is just the nature of the beast.
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Obviously, if two creative people are doing fun things, but one is doing more than the other- he's going to get more attention (not that the other won't at all, of course)
But that's just how it is. We can hardly tell someone "I'm sorry, but that guy is only on 2 hours, so I am voiding all this fun stuff you did all day today".
As I've said, it's quality. Quantity to me, comes into play only when quality of two PCs is roughly equivalent, in which case the amount of awesome they generate becomes a factor.
If the 2 hour a week PC makes those 2 hours count more than the guy playing 24/7, that 2 hour a week PC is going to get my attention.
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We've got a new player joining today, where do I direct him to download the HAKs? Does the HAK downloader still work, or is there a preferred source for it these days? Ta.
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https://nodebb.cityofarabel.com/topic/8111/automatic-hak-downloader-for-city-of-arabel
Make sure they get the manual download for the missing HAKs
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Beautiful, cheers.
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@Mr-Moloch So I've been reading the forums today for hours, holidays didn't get me any time to breath.
I really don't appreciate being told how to speak. The meaning of this sentence doesn't change too much even if I rephrase it: I appreciate if I can use any wording I like.
I value your point about being positive, I try to be even though we have some bad habits regarding this in my family, but I had the pleasure to read like five times today how different people owed you money for failing to avoid a very basic way to build an english sentence.
I don't think it is a good avenue to raise player numbers to put more stress on them based on modes of speak.
Positively speaking, perhaps you should consider warning those in private who really overdo negative comments and to put at maximum one short announcement that positive sentences will help DMs a great deal to avoid being burnt out. -
@thune said in Getting Old Players Back:
Pulling something from Facebook:
- We need to maintain a good rumor and a good current plot/event page so that new players do not feel lost
What I would like to see with this, is an NPC, or, bulletin board, something IN GAME, which checks this thread, and gives you the latest information from it.
It'd be really sweet.
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@aronff I appreciate positive comments, I also appreciate how you phrased even this positively. Thank you, that's the kind of way we should all be talking as members of a community that is trying to grow and be positive.
I know English isn't your first language, so here is what you may be missing.
If you say "this is stupid, I hate it". That is not at all helpful. If you rephrase it to say "The Goblin Warrior has +20 attack bonus, but appears on a level 2-6 quest. It slaughters player characters with its vorpal blade. I suggest that you lower the AB down to +4 and remove the vorpal blade and give it a normal dagger so its more balanced for that level range"--you in fact, have GREATLY changed the meaning of what you said.
The one comment tells us how to positively change the server, the second just brings down the motivation of everyone and focuses on the problem and not the solution.
So, while I appreciate you do not like being told how to speak, my job here is to maintain the motivation of the DM team and the positivity of the community. So I will continue to ask people to speak positively and call them out openly when they do not because its good for this community to remove some of the toxicity with which we communicate; its also a custom in the US and English speaking world to jokingly reference someone owes 25 cents or other small change currency to the "swear jar" every time they curse-so the comment about owing money to Patreon is a clear joke to native English speakers.
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I sort of got the joke, it was somewhat unfair to include that part in my comment, sorry.
The thing you mention is real difference, and I often get this slapped in my face IRL, that either I name a way to solve it or I should shut up. Hells, all of my teenage years were about this.
Problem is that it is possible to notice a problem while not having a solution ready.Funny thing we are mostly on common ground here, I try to be very cautious with my wording on the internet for (amongst others) the very same reason. Spending the day reading the same request was a bit much for me.
Sorry if I happened to be a bit much myself. :)