[FoxFire]

Player Retention and Developing a Game Community

We seem to lose a lot of new players to the AFK syndrome. How could we retain our player base and get new players interested in the game?

I think the best way to get new players into the game is by developing a gaming community through alliances. If alliances actively recruited new players and mentored them and teach them how to play the game - more people would stay. Also, alliances help get people involved by developing a gaming community through chat rooms, Skype and forums.

These are a few of my ideas. Anyone else have ideas on how we could retrain new players?

This post has been edited by FoxFire: 19 February 2011 - 03:29 AM

[hell]

Create some sort of OR university?

[FoxFire]

hell, on 18 February 2011 - 08:39 PM, said:

Create some sort of OR university?

That is a good idea. Not sure how it could be applied. Could be applied in individual alliances. When I think of university or school I think of tests.

But what will keep people from leaving this game? I think what is needed is more player interaction with other players. We could invited new players to our alliances. If they go inactive we could boot them.

We've been recruiting players from other games into our alliance. These players have a lot of questions and we're there to help them. Also, when we are at war we work together and that builds friendship and gives them a reason to stay.

This post has been edited by FoxFire: 20 February 2011 - 05:33 AM

[Igng]

Having a way to sort players by account age would help so alliances can easily find new players and invite them as soon as possible. People play this type of game for the community and their alliance usually pays a large role in that. The sooner they get into an alliance the less time they have to say screw it and quit.

[Varus]

FoxFire is right. The biggest advantage a browsergame has over other game mediums is the player interaction - both in-game and out-of-game. In most games you play the content the developer provides; in some you play the content the players generate; rarely do you get the chance to play the drama the players generate that has meaningful in-game repercussions. For a browser game: drama is king.

Focus game development on enabling players to interact with one another freely (war, economics, politically) and I think you have a much higher chance of attracting an active and donative community.

That said, I do have a few more immediate, but abstract, suggestions:

I) Create an achievement system similar to the ones used for X-Box live. Creating an in-game reward (prestige) for the player to strive toward would go a good ways towards player retention.

II) Allow a player to develop their planets and/or empire in distinct way with various benefits and trade-offs. Allow the players to 'interact' freely with one another so they may compliment or exacerbate their respective strengths and weaknesses (a small player waging a guerilla war against a large industrial player; starving him of resources by disrupting flow of resources from his colonies to his industrial worlds). Make the game more dynamic and interesting.

III) Allow them to fight an AI of sort for their first week without any negative effects. Give them a taste of what is to come if they keep playing.

This post has been edited by Varius: 21 March 2011 - 10:33 PM

[Corporal Aston]

New added update: new players start off with 800 Iron and 500 Gold. (instead of 600 Iron and 400 Gold). This should help them get more mines on the go. However colonies start off with the usual 600,400.

[Smoke]

Limit attacks to double your total score.We seem to already be down to 92 or so active players.Would you join and play a game where you start out against 3 times your amry.Play until you reach 150,000 points only to face people with 100 times your troops and army?Anyone who joins and plays may enjoy it until they hit 150k,then they just become a farm.

[Smoke]

Smoke, on 08 April 2011 - 06:28 AM, said:

Limit attacks to double your total score.We seem to already be down to 92 or so active players.Would you join and play a game where you start out against 3 times your amry.Play until you reach 150,000 points only to face people with 100 times your troops and army?Anyone who joins and plays may enjoy it until they hit 150k,then they just become a farm.

And yes you learn to hide your resources,but when faced with hidding resources when ever you are not online and never being able to compete against armies so much larger than yours the game loses the "fun".It does not matter really how much time you have or how good you are.You start out behind and will never be able to catch up.Not against armies 100+ as large as yours.

[Locke]

Smoke, on 08 April 2011 - 06:28 AM, said:

Limit attacks to double your total score.We seem to already be down to 92 or so active players.Would you join and play a game where you start out against 3 times your amry.Play until you reach 150,000 points only to face people with 100 times your troops and army?Anyone who joins and plays may enjoy it until they hit 150k,then they just become a farm.

Smoke, on 08 April 2011 - 06:33 AM, said:

And yes you learn to hide your resources,but when faced with hidding resources when ever you are not online and never being able to compete against armies so much larger than yours the game loses the "fun".It does not matter really how much time you have or how good you are.You start out behind and will never be able to catch up.Not against armies 100+ as large as yours.

If you reach 150K points, I should hope you have an alliance. Going at it alone is pretty much guaranteed to get your planets raided straight to hell. Alliances provide protection and support. Being part of an alliance gives you access to far greater resources (military, economic, and diplomatic, to name a few) than you could ever have on you own, and helps to keep from being a farm, as you put it.

As for being perpetually behind, that's unavoidable unless you want to implement scheduled resets. If you join the game later, you will not be able to catch up to those who have played it longer because everyone has equal opportunity to do the exact same things you can do to get ahead. There is a balance to this though because as time goes on, people find more efficient methods of doing things that allow newer nations to grow faster than older nations used to be able to. They'll be able to implement the same strategies, but they'll have lost the benefit of doing it over time, thus not gaining as much in growth. In Cyber Nations, where the New Pacific Order hails from, it took years for people to learn the game well enough to play it as efficiently as they do today, and the oldest nations will often be smaller than the ones that came about when the new growth strategies were discovered.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit so I'll close this off; you cannot ensure that every player will be of equal strength, only that they have equal opportunity to gain that strength. As time goes on we'll learn how to build our empires better, and we'll see smaller ones growing faster. The best way to ensure that players learn is to get them into alliances that know how to play so they can receive training and aid. Alliances and inter-alliance relations are what keep these kinds of games alive more than any in-game systems, and that's what we should be focusing on.

[Smoke]

Locke, on 08 April 2011 - 07:03 AM, said:

If you reach 150K points, I should hope you have an alliance. Going at it alone is pretty much guaranteed to get your planets raided straight to hell. Alliances provide protection and support. Being part of an alliance gives you access to far greater resources (military, economic, and diplomatic, to name a few) than you could ever have on you own, and helps to keep from being a farm, as you put it.

As for being perpetually behind, that's unavoidable unless you want to implement scheduled resets. If you join the game later, you will not be able to catch up to those who have played it longer because everyone has equal opportunity to do the exact same things you can do to get ahead. There is a balance to this though because as time goes on, people find more efficient methods of doing things that allow newer nations to grow faster than older nations used to be able to. They'll be able to implement the same strategies, but they'll have lost the benefit of doing it over time, thus not gaining as much in growth. In Cyber Nations, where the New Pacific Order hails from, it took years for people to learn the game well enough to play it as efficiently as they do today, and the oldest nations will often be smaller than the ones that came about when the new growth strategies were discovered.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit so I'll close this off; you cannot ensure that every player will be of equal strength, only that they have equal opportunity to gain that strength. As time goes on we'll learn how to build our empires better, and we'll see smaller ones growing faster. The best way to ensure that players learn is to get them into alliances that know how to play so they can receive training and aid. Alliances and inter-alliance relations are what keep these kinds of games alive more than any in-game systems, and that's what we should be focusing on.

I agree with some of what you said.An alliance is important.Yes there will always be more powerful players who have played longer and you may never be able to catch them.But take the beta server for example.I joined months and months late.But there the limit is triple your score.I have managed to fight up to 24th in general rank,7 in defense,and 10th in fleet.There is no way anyone could repeat that on the Alpha server with the 150k making you open to armies of any size.The 150k score opening you to attack from anyone is a game killer in my opinion.I guess we will be able to watch and see though as people hit 150k and play for a few weeks and then quit because they can not open a portal to farm and they have to always keep there fleet on the move.