Xendran
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Just from the post above you:
quote:
You claim these things will bring new players, but you have not once said why.
Why are players going to socialize instead of doing what they were already doing, but now doing it while being AFK on epicduel? Sure this could potentially boost online players if you spam this stuff all the time, it's not giong to boost battling players though.
Why would anything that requires you to actually have input that requires combat to get the rewards after being AFK for a while be any more of a draw than simply doing real fights unless it was more efficient? And if it's more efficient to AFK than to battle, you have a SERIOUS problem.
Great, every single person drawn by this is now not battling anywhere near as frequently.
Some people who used to battle for rewards are now doing this.
These are issues with it.
This idea is a bandaid fix which is a problem in itself, but the real problem and reason i don't support it is because there is no evidence to suggest that it would increase the overall amount of battles and players playing.
The problem the idea claims to fix does not at all tackle the reason players stop playing, so there's no reason to believe it would have this effect.
Also, the goal is not to simply have more players online. That doesn't do anything, you need more players participating.
Also, you appear to be cherrypicking pretty heavily from my posts. You claim i did not explain anything, but not only did I, but you also ask me to disprove a negative.
Those "why" questions are questions that if cannot be answered adequately, shows a massive flaw in the idea. If nobody can think of why or now it's going to fix the problem, why would it be able to fix the problem?
Those questions are meant to point out the illogical connection behind the suggestion and the intended result. There is no reason to believe to that this would work at all, and only encourages people to stay out of battle which is the opposite what we want. Combine this with the resources spent and you have multiple negative aspects.
You then say that I say small suggestions are not worth it, despite me explicitly stating this is not true. Small and Bandaid are not the same thing, and some bandaid fixes can be huge changes.
Examples of small changes i am massively in favour of include all faction quality of life benefits like Co-Founder, and anything that allows more interaction between faction members and more reason to be in a faction. These are the kinds of things that help player retention because it's not the game begging to be played with a splash screen, but the game pulling you in with additions to a system that you really enjoy.
Bandaid fixes are things that are specifically not going to fix a problem, but only hide or delay it. Bandaid fixes notoriously have a tendency to then make things worse later because the original problem is not being hidden anymore, and then any unintended balance introduced from the bandaid fix stacks on top of that.
I am not against this suggestion because I think it's pointless, I am against it because I think it would hurt the game. I've gone into such great detail because were are at a time in EpicDuel where we need to be as wary as possible of losing more players, or implementing systems that the general player base will dislike once ED moves onto Steam.
You need to take everything I say in full consideration because many of the feelings you got from my post are not what I actually believe or said.
I believe strongly in more things to do while semi-idle and not automatically triggered. This again can play into factions, faction minigames that don't require a bit of attention but maybe just a small amount of communication with a couple faction members on some screen or something. Involve it with the war or whatever. Various other minigames like the arcade. Once flash is abandoned, the game will really have a ton of possibilities open up ESPECIALLY with factions and how intensive and different from the standard gameplay their minigames and other things could be. I don't have a problem with finding other ways to reward peoples time at all, but literally sitting AFK and getting an automatic thing should not be the way to do it.
We need to engage players to want to seek out these activities themselves. Like going to godwars in runescape, or go play some pest control. Or some conquest if you want, or fight in soul wars, or do some trawler, or fish flinghers, or any of the skills.
We could have all kinds of interesting stuff like this to make the player want to do something else in game when they take a break from battling, rather than take a break and get reminded by the game to come back.
@the berserker killer: One thing I'll say is i would expect more stuff to do while you aren't battling in the form of primarily faction things. I also expect to see a LOT of the quality of life suggestions you have posted make it in because they are good. This is because of the death of flash, and I honestly have been wanting flash to die for a long time now specifically in hopes that ED will realize they need to get off flash. Flash being SO limited is absolutely the reason a lot of things haven't been added that seem like they should.
Faction co-founder for example i'm absolutely certain is limited by Flash using ActionScript 3. I don't care what anyone says about it being way better than AS2, AS3 was still absolutely not designed with the future in mind and there is no surprise that it didn't last.
Things like that should be dead easy with a C++ (Or C# or some various other options) client.
Literally everything related to the networking of the game will be infinitely more lenient in another language.
I'm not exaggerating when i say the difference will be like trying to design this entire game and write every piece of info about it on a single piece of paper versus writing a series of textbooks documenting the game.
The main thing is, the things I say about where EpicDuel is, that's not because i want to make this thread about that. I bring it up because it is applicable in multiple ways to why I think the concept behind this idea is flawed, and also helps illustrate just how connected all of this stuff is.
I also want to say that just because I heavily disagree with this idea does not think that I think TBK makes bad suggestions or is incapable of making good ones. TBK happens to be one of the people who has made the most suggestions that I agree with. A lot of these suggestions are very much based off of intuition though, and I can tell you that from my experience both as someone who plays and designs this is a perfect example of something that seems intuitive to most people but doesn't critically hold up when you take all the factors into consideration, including the opinions of the gaming populace, examples set by previously successful games, and the psychology of players. Sometimes intuition can get the better of you, and this kind of suggestion is something I would have thought was intuitive and obvious back 5 years ago for sure. As you gain more experience, more insight to the industry, learn from new teachers and talk with other developers, you become much more able to use your intuition alongside with your external knowledge and then apply your logic to both. Simply applying logic to intuition can be very misleading at times which is part of the reason game designers exist.
This is literally what a design trap is. Things that seem like good ideas, but are actually damaging to the game.
It's not a coincidence that the best games avoid the majority of design traps, and it's not a coincidence that many games that failed do so because of ideas that backfired despite intuitively seeming like it would fix the problem. Just like EpicDuel.
I'm not trying to insult anyone's intelligence here either by saying that they're falling for a design trap. It's immensely rare that someone who is not trained in game design successfully avoids falling into design traps. This kind of stuff is exactly why we have to spend years training, researching, breaking down games to their most fundamental parts, and building prototypes frequently to do the job.
Another thing that I failed to address earlier and I apologize for this as I usually encourage other people to do this, I did not address what i believed to be the core issue and suggestions to fix what i believe to be the core issue, player engagement (as opposed to raw player count, which this post focuses on) until this post.
I don't think you truly want to be rewarded for being AFK, but I absolutely believe you guys want more things to engage with the game. I think you all would be much happier with things that are not fully idle and just the game saying "Yo go do this", but rather a place you go to or a thing you do. Preferably with other people to make it more social. It can even be semi-idle like i said before, where you can reasonably do it while watching TV or a movie. What i don't want however is for people to start rallying behind an idea that is a lot worse for the game than people might thing. It seems so small that it's like "what's the worst that could happen", but the worst is a lot more damage than people realize.
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P.S. To be honest TBK, you seem creative enough that you HAVE ideas for even more minigames and faction things, and based on your posts you appear to limit your creativity based on what you know about the limitations of flash. This is a fair way to do things but considering our situation...
I would say throw some more complex ideas around in these threads. Not like overly complex for the sake of it, but things that are simple and fun but would require coding that is probably too complex for flash.
The reason i say this is because it's absolutely inevitable that ED is released on steam (or somewhere online). It absolutely cannot continue with flash. It's going client or it's going going gone.
Because of this, you probably have more freedom with the coding intensity of your suggestions because it's safe to assume that if EpicDuel still exists to a late enough date for them to be implementing these kinds of suggestions, it's because it has a client.
I'm really interested to see what kind of ideas you want to see in this game, especially since I notice you like taking inspiration from other games but modifying them to bend rules.
This is a really good habit to get into, because learning how to bend other systems and modify them to work within other rulesets is absolutely fantastic practice for making your own rulesets (and you seem like the kind of guy who's into that kind of thing just like me).
Keep at it. I mean it. You're doing the right things to be on the path to becoming a great designer.
< Message edited by Xendran -- 4/28/2016 0:07:27 >
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