Again we fail to reach maximum.
Next time we have an event like this you all will have to do it without me.
Smells like yesterdays garbage, this one, just like the last one.
At lvl50 myself, and im sure lots and lots of us lvl50 will feel do just like me.
BB = Fail again.
Agree, the fears that it would be one sided have been proved correct, shame on bb, what a sham..
Seems like some cant stop complaining, nothing to do without events , only complaints during events ......
Just saying , very annoying to read so negative posts all day every day.
Glad to see many of us have been enjoying this event and are helping out with this balloon making
we all had the same thoughts until theres a level field re gens ect we cant compete
did eotw one and have not done any others till this and when t o have trades of over 100k for things i wonder why i have empty storage and get the same as players that have done very little resource to balloons
until these a better way of them to do counts for goodies i will not be doing the next one just hope they put the delete x back in
"Fair chance to all"
(The amount of balloons required depends on the economic output of your server. The leader board will take into account the economic output of each server; relative to its amount of active players. This should guarantee a fair competition, no matter how old or young game worlds are.
http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/t...r-Anniversary!)
Really, BB, really?
In deed mate,I do feel the same.
BB knows very well where the germans servers,I do have nothing against the germans and it isn't their fault,they will be in a clear advantage no matter what.
BB did fail and it is failing and will keep failing every time they do a competition like this involving different servers with different conditions but they know it!
Well the next few lines show how it is:
In a polar opposite of the recent PopCap talk, Teut Weidemann, lead designer of Settlers Online for Ubisoft's Blue Byte studio, says that the key to free-to-play success is to exploit human weakness. Essentially, find those areas in which players can be monetized, and go after that aggressively.
As a caveat, Weidemann said that first and foremost, developers have to make a fun game in order to attract users. Then once those users are there, the mandate is to figure out ways to monetize them, or else the game can't go on. It was an unusually frank discussion of the ways in which human psychology can be exploited in order to make a buck.
Weidemann began by discussing the differences between the single player and MMO game worlds - Settlers Online is an MMO with PvE and PvP, bi-weekly and monthly updates as a retention strategy, plus a free to play business model. "You have complete control of the environment in a single player game, whereas of course in an online game you have not," he said. And you can't just think about fun, he asserts. "You have to think about making a fun game and monetizing it at the same time."
"That's a huge burden and a big change from what we've done before," he said, adding that "we have to bring them in and keep them addicted and make them keep playing. Selling advantages is seen as evil. That's over for free-to-play games."
Monetization has become the most crucial and integral part of game design, says Weidemann; developers have to think about it from the start. "In your game, progress has to be measurable." he says. "The most common thing is player level -- that's something everyone can now grasp," he says. You can monetize this with a speeding-up experience, but you have to make sure that paying players usually can't be identified. If you hide from the players what other players are actually paying for, you can get more money without making players angry."
Some of the kinds of things you can sell, according to Weidemann, are rare achievements, access to later stages earlier, early access to new maps, faster exploration or comfort, and all manner of socialization elements, such as avatar customization, emotes, and larger guild sizes.
Exploiting Human Sin
"We are monetizing all the weakness of people," Weidemann says, turning his talk toward the seven biblical sins, and how these can be turned into hard cash.
Vanity. "I'm the best. That's something they want to have," he says. But players need to be able to see their posing and posturing, which is usually difficult in a strategy game, where seeing what the other player has could be perceived as an advantage. In Settlers Online the game allows players to see their friends, but in a controlled environment. Here, they monetize avatars and guild creation.
Envy. "To make this succeed, the player has to see his neighbor's possessions," says Weidemann, noting that in China it's popular to steal items from other players. "I believe that in the next few years we'll see some game that does this well in the West," he said. "And then everybody will steal, and this will be a lot of fun."
Gluttony. Here, the aim is to get players to consume more. Make consumables (such as healing potions in a traditional MMORPG) available, and then sell them directly. "It's an indirect timesaver," he says. "If you upgrade a building to the next level, it takes time and resources, but you can buy an instant upgrade," he says.
Lust. In Settlers Online, this is measured by instant gratification. Instead of waiting, the player can unlock what they want immediately. "[This kind of player] is easy to monetize," Weidemann says, "because everything instant, that's what he wants." Examples include instantly recruiting troops, instead of having to wait for them.
Anger. "You hate your enemy, that's something we're gonna monetize," he says. This type of player is one of the simplest to exploit, because they will want all the best items right away, in order to defeat other players. Games can sell them this at the onset, and give them paid access to better battle reports, and more experienced units. It should be noted that Settlers Online does not force PvP, which is how weaker players who may not be interested in that can enjoy the game in this sort of environment.
Greed. This includes housing production increases or buffs. "The trader is someone who's sensible for unfairness. So if he wants to be wealthy, he doesn't want to buy [gold] directly," says Weidemann, because then it doesn't feel like an achievement. "Never directly sell gold to the player -- it must be indirect."
Sloth. This is represented by avoidance of work. Players are lazy, he says, so sell comfort. Sell extensions to buildings, and automizations for repair and overproduction handling. "You're saving clicks. That's all you do. And if he pays for that, why not?"
Settle For Nothing Less Than Cash
"Game design is not about game design anymore -- now it's about business," said Blue Byte executive producer Christopher Schmitz. "We do exploit them, but they should not feel like they're treated in a bad way," he added. If they do, then players will dislike the developer.
"If you think you have the same items for this year and next year, you're wrong. You have to change everything like in the Superstore," says Weidemann. He says designers should ask themselves how the major brands in the grocery store sell you new versions of detergent and the like, when it's basically the same stuff. Then use that to your advantage, since the psychology of consumerism is well documented.
As a designer of an online game, you must learn to balance within a chaotic environment when players have more control than ever before. That's difficult because they try to hack your game - Settlers Online had its first hacking attempt within five seconds of Open Beta. On the other hand, Weidemann reminds us, "sometimes players do things you didn't expect, but sometimes you can say 'hey, we didn't know the game could do that.'" And why should you care about this kind of emergent gameplay? Of course, because "you can monetize that."
Last edited by Ares-1; 21.07.13 at 15:23.
My feelings in a nutshell are:
BB moved the goalposts after reaching 100%. End of...
Anything after that, I feel it was never really achievable. Sad really, cos after phase 1, most felt it could be done.
We feel let down BB
Interesting Ares-1.. Do you got a link?
http://www.ukcolumn.org : http://www.freedomvegans.co.uk
http://www.facebook.com/freedomvegans.co.uk : http://www.tpuc.org/forum/
Todays google search: 'Chemtrails' - 'Bradbury pound' - 'Common purpose' - 'HAARP' - 'Legalese'
ttp://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29...asutra+News%29
I can't compare this event with the previous one, since I was not playing The Settlers Online back then. From what I can gather, it was badly organised and not particularly fair. This event also seems to have been badly organised and not particularly fair, albeit slightly better organised and slightly fairer than the last event. The funny thing is that it would have been so easy to make it a lot fairer.
1. Proper announcements of start time and date and end time and date to all servers at the same time prior to the event. It is not difficult to say that the event will start at 09.00 GMT + 1 on 26th June 2013 (after a short shutdown of all servers) and ends at (assuming here since I don't have the official time yet) 00.30 GMT + 1 on 24th June 2013 with a maintenance for all servers.
2. Clear information on what the qualifying phase would entail and that there would be a 'pause' in between phase 1 and phase 2. Again, a concrete number would have been easier to deal with than a nebulous 100%.
3. A more intelligent grouping of servers. This time round it seemed to be mainly language-based, rather than on size, strength etc.
4. Don't use percentages for handing out rewards unless you are prepared to give everyone that is on track to reach 200% the rewards. There was obviously some recalculation of the percentages which makes a mockery of the word percent. Also, it is difficult for people to stay motivated after 100% if they feel that there is no way that they will reach 150% and therefore won't get any further rewards.
5. If BB wants to give rewards for Gold (top 5?), Silver (top 10?) and Bronze (everyone who participated?), then use position. It is easy to see who is 10th and who is 11th. For top 10 rewards, 1st - 10th get them and 11th miss out. It would mean servers would compete to move up a place in the rankings instead of feeling that they can't achieve the next percentage target.
6. Concrete information on the amount of balloons, or other event-resource, donated. This means concrete figures for every server and a final leaderboard where all the figures are shown.
7. Information given to all servers at the same time. If this means that it takes some time to translate it all, get the translations back and get them put on all the frontpages, then it will require a bit of time. It is very annoying to see that the German servers get information and other servers have to wait hours for it to be translated.
8. It might help to understand what BB consider to be an active player. For guild quests there is a definition of an active player and also a percentage of active players required to do guild quests. If we knew that 70% of server players were taken into account for the server event on a daily / weekly / whole event basis, then we could work around the players that do not wish to participate but have logged in and count as active. Obviously if only 50% of a particular server were actively participating, those players would have to work pretty hard to achieve the same output as the 70% target figure.
9. Cancel button / opt-out. With any event there will be players that have no interest in participating. They would like the option to cancel the event quests from their quest book. If they could be given the choice to opt out of the event and wouldn't count as active event players, then this would decrease tension between the players that want to compete and the players that don't. This would make it easier for event and non-event players to co-exist on the same server.
10. Some attempt to group players by level and give challenges based on those groupings. For this event 'every player from the highest to the lowest' was supposed to be able to compete and donate balloons, however some players could donate 400k balloons a day and some players found 5k balloons a day to be a challenge. It panned out so that only large donations and higher level players seemed to be of importance, and lower level players became merely resource providers. Most of the thanks went to the players that donated the balloons and not so much to the whole team of people that allowed them to donate in this way.
Last edited by Sto_Helit; 21.07.13 at 19:35.
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