Retaining new players

[Bigbelly]

Hi,

I would like to suggest that the devs look at ways to retain NEW players.

IMO there is a huge problem with character advancement around level 30 which causes many players to quit.

When you start this game it is great. You build up your buildings and your army and you go about clearing the island and all is good.

Once that has been achieved however it goes down hill very fast and my guess is that 9 out of every 10 players quit.
I would have but for two reasons. 1) I got a gold tower at xmas which allowed me to progress upgrades. 2) I got into a great guild that helped me a lot.

The problems as I see it include:
- You cant advance any of your buildings because they all demand gold and you have none. At that level it was a push to get just one gold mine running. To get the 500 gold coins to upgrade just one building took weeks. Nobody wants to play an empire building game that allows them to upgrade buildings at that frequency.
- You cant go on many adventures because you have no resources. It took me a whole week to gather the troops and resources to go on a single adventure. Why log in if you cant do anything?
- Game mechanics are not clear. For example it had to be explained to me that I needed to set up a bread making production line to be able to gain settlers. I was waiting for them to come in naturally.
- No level advancement. Even though I completed loads of quests I had no advancement because the only way to gain exp is through adventures. (and you arent doing any of them because you cant afford to) This was very frustrating.
- Receiving quests well beyond your level. There are many quests that are presented to low level players that they cant possibly or wont feasibly complete. These ill-thought-out quests serve only to discourage and remind the player that they are not advancing.

My suggestions:
- Apply small amounts of exp to EVERY quest completed. Even if it is 50 exp for completing the find the collectables quest, it keeps people active and makes them feel like they are progressing.
- Make the Bounty Hunter adventure a free adventure that doesn't disappear from your inventory when used. Up the exp it gives to 500. This will get people into the habit of doing adventures and will teach them the mechanics.
- Re-examine the quests around this level.
- Improve the GUI to be clearer for new players. For example the first time I sent a general to an adventure I thought the game was broken. I didn't know that he took 30 mins to get there or that I could see how far away he was by looking at the specialists tab. Make thing like this clearer for novice players and put a window up on the screen for them to see.

Once a player is hooked by this game, they stay hooked. It is great fun and I have not played an online game with such great seasonal events.
The problem is getting them hooked.

I hope this suggestion helps improve the game.

[chicken35]

they have also a problem to keep the lvl 50 players, many of them are fade up with the barracks system , b rebuilding an army of 4k troops by lot of 25 at the time, isn t fun at all, messy business really

[Peajay]

There is obviously a problem that causes new players to lose interest, probably due to the time it takes for resources to be produced and the pace of the tutorial and early part of the game doesn't continue. I can't agree with your suggestions being helpful retaining players;
- the bounty hunter adventure is just a tutorial adventure
- giving exp for every quest will just mean players are at higher levels without any sacrifice of troops or time
- before the new quest system was introduced in 2012, our only quest was to reach the next level by doing adventures and this was enough for encouraging players to do adventures how they wanted and working together as friends and guilds

I think more quests are helpful for some, giving us more to play for if there are nice rewards involved.
It would also be nice if quests queued past 24 hours rather than allowing only 1 waiting quest so we can complete the adventures when we are ready without losing the next daily quests.
New players are at a big disadvantage too, and instead of asking them to buy gems from the start, offer the chance to earn rare or limited items they missed.

[Bigbelly]

chicken35 : yes that is a problem but not what this thread is about.
Peajay : in reply to your points.
- It doesnt need to be that adventure particularly. Just an adventure that is simple and easy to complete that will allow a sense of advancement. This is the point. To give them something to do. At that level you have no gold to spend on explorers who might out and find nothing. This notion of spending ALL of your resources and to then fail at getting an adventure is demoralising to new players. Give them something to do and they will log in.
- I am not talking about an easy path. I am talking about providing a sense of advancement. Also, if someone does get to lvl 40+ it means they are still playing and are thus more likely to make purchases from the shop. People who quit buy nothing.
- I agree with all your other points.

[Dorotheus]

Extra XP from quests for faster levelling is not the answer. It's no good being on the fast track to level 42 if you have only had time to build up a Level 32 economy.

[Bigbelly]

Dorotheus : Why ? In other MMO type games I would agree with you, but not in this one. And you have taken my suggestion to the extreme. I don't want to rush everyone to 50, I just think that there is a real gap in the way we advance and it can be improved upon significantly. I have some ideas and I am sure other people have their ideas too.
I was trying to suggest that more can be done to encourage new players to hang around longer because all of the people that I started out with have quit. I haven't seen such a dramatic drop off in any other game I have played.
Without new blood, the game will die out.

[Steve1077]

Getting XP is easy enough, dark Priests will soon move you to a higher level, I started doing that before I'd even cleared my island and it's cheap.
As for gold coins, they clearly want you to spend money on this game, they have little interest in keeping free players as it's not making them any money

[MonkeyDooD]

I was one of those that "dropped" so to speak, at around lvl 33 or 34, can't remember exactly. Didn't have a good production - admittedly, I'd never paid any attention to production chains till that point - and most of all, didn't have gold coins. The opportunity cost of making even one, with the production of everything else I had going on being so bad, was huge. So I just quit the game for about 6 to 7 months. Came back, got into a guild and got plenty of help. So, pretty much the same story as bigbelly so far.

Knowing that the biggest setback I had back then was the gold coins, I and a few of my guildmates eventually "created" our own guild bank. The pros: we got a lot of people that were not that engaged in the game as others, incredibly interested in posting a few trades at the TO. The way the bank operated was by advancing the required amount of gold coins - usually 500 - in exchange of anything they had that would make up the value at TO at that current time. It simplified the lives of everyone immensely: they dropped whatever they had in way of resources that combined would equate to roughly the amount of gold coins required and, in exchange, they had the amount they needed delivered to them in a lump sum.

We also worked on a credit basis. Meaning that we would advance the gold coins immediately and the bank would have a credit against the player in a week or two, to give them ample time to build up the required resources. It ended up helping them learn about building placement, production chains and whatnot.

The cons: for those administering the bank it was brutal. Managing all loans, payments, debts and whatnot, with a sizeable amount of transactions being conducted every single day, ended up consuming much of our time - so much so that many simply played with TO and didn't care about anything game-related that wasn't trading. Those that did want to do something else other than managing the bank eventually quit their positions - I was one of them.

In any case, it was a good fun while it lasted and I have no regrets. I wasn't part of the bank team when it ended, but I do know that we ended up with a net balance of over 100k coins after just a few months of trading, with no start-up capital in gold coins - just trading goods. Of course, there are many individuals that can claim to have that amount on their own, but as a guild-wide effort it was good fun.

Knowing that BB won't really do the changes we ask them to, we tried to just make do and "invent" ourselves an added functionality on top of what we have here. It means that a good portion of your guildmates will have to try hard and work even harder to make up for the deficiencies inherent to BB game design.

It's all a long-winded way of saying that we have a game whose design is flawed in many aspects. We just chose to not accept some of them and provide a solution to it - for however briefly we managed to keep it.

[Bluesavanah]

Was going to do a long post but can't be bothered, in short the game is specifically designed to get you to spend gems, think the principals the designers used are the 7 deadly sins.

In an age where people can find a multitude of things to do in an hour, precious few are going to spend that hour finding copper mines and planting fields and wells. That's generally the biggest reason I hear people citing as a reason they are giving up and usually somewhere around level 32.

[Sharpielein]

- You cant advance any of your buildings because they all demand gold and you have none. At that level it was a push to get just one gold mine running. To get the 500 gold coins to upgrade just one building took weeks. Nobody wants to play an empire building game that allows them to upgrade buildings at that frequency.

During the Summer Event, we could get for free - 500 Beans and an Improved Storehouse not to mention all the other yadaradada.
Selling both [at least, on Northisle] will net you roughly 30000 coins, sufficient to upgrade 60(!) buildings from Level 3 to level 4.
And any lv20 player can get that.

I remember that I was well into Level 49 before I had enough coins to even start upgrading my Farms to level 4. At that time; I'd been playing for well over a year.

Things have already gotten sufficiently better.