Retention Revisited

[Indirik]

And ideas how to achieve that?

• Make it possible to maintain realms at a functional level without extensive buro/police/court work.
• Make it possible for realms to expand easier.
• Make founding of new realms easier.
• Provide incentives to reward realms for the creation of new realms.
• Make it easier for newly created realms to survive.
• Make working as a team more rewarding.

[Bluelake]

However, this gives me an idea. One of the problems for new players may be simply that they log in once, see nothing happen, and just forget to log in the next day. What if new characters, when being created, could see all the realm-wide messages that were sent in the last 72 hrs? This way they would see that the game is not empty; and it would give them something to respond to other than the boilerplate introduction message.

This sounds good, although a bit prone to abuse.

Actually, I always thought that BM *had* to have some sort of way to store the important messages, keep archives, some kind of ingame library (it would be cool to have an ingame librarian ;) ). We do have the wiki, but people don't use that too much for day-to-day events, only to depict the larger events that are going on or have already passed.

But after I saw the screenshots of the ingame forum posted above... well, I don't really like it. :p How to make it work without losing the feel of letters? The send-to-region, send-to-realm, send-private feel? The formality built by it, the atmosphere? The ICness?

Nowadays, BM messaging works more like a chat room, where the history gets erased as more chatting comes up, and only if you manually copy it and save it somewhere else you're able to keep records. And as a chat room, everytime you go off topic or OOC, you're disrupting the chat: it's hard to keep many discussions going at one time, because people lose track of the subject and of which answer is regarding which topic. It's a built-in strategy to keep the atmosphere inside a realm, at any time: if you want to talk OOC, you go outside of the game (forums or IRC).

What I'd much rather see (and have been dreaming about in the past) would be an in-game actual chat room (restricted to people in the same region as you are). But this is probably for another thread.

And this is exactly why we're having retention problems.    We need to bring that feeling of meaningful actions and fun times back.

I think this is why we're losing players on the whole. New player retention has more to do with specific new-player treatment than overall gameplay. Of course, if the game is bad for players, it's bad for new players. So yes, we do need to address this issue, but we also need to do stuff specifically for new players.

[Phellan]

• Provide Realms incentives for war
• Provide Realms incentives to limit number of alliances and peaceful relations
• Give character's more bonuses/rewards for combat
• Provide greater incentives for smaller Realms, making them more viable
• Grant more character-specific achievements / abilities, providing players incentive to partake in new actions and abilities

There are a lot of things we can add - right now a great deal of character development and the like are heavily RP'd.   We could add in additional benefits and perks that characters recieve for their actions and choices in class and ways of life.   This gives things to make people want to go to war to achieve those markers of fame and prestige.

Wars right now are tough to get going - Realms have to manage their regions and many are tied up in multiple and heavily connected alliances that can spiral into Realms opting out of wars for reasons like "it's my allies, ally, ally!"    Provide incentives to limit the number of alliances or peaceful relations a Realm has - perhaps bonuses to Realm loyalty, stability, production as they identify more closely with their home nation (we're different from THEM, that's why we're not allied with those stinking D'Harans!).   War may reduce production loss or discontent amongst the population because they are too focused on the "fight", with increased recruitment levels due to men wanting to defend their homeland - or achieve honour.

There are lots of game changes that can be made to provide incentives to fighting, and reduce the regional hit that can occur because the ability to look after your regions is taken away whilst at war.   It makes sense to have reduced relations and war states help counter those effects - making it more preferable and achieveable to sustain war time states without the huge region hits that occur.

[Bluelake]

The first thing I looked for was contacts when I started up.  If, during the first week or so, an e-mail went to the individual when a message was sent to them or activity happened like looting, this could quickly give the new player a better sense of the timeing of what was going on as well as acting as a catalyst to remind them of the game.  Of course this assumes they check their e-mails more often than they check the game.  Perhaps twitter or facebook posts might be better for some.

Yup, there could be something here. I'd say potential things to e-mail about would be: private messages, mentoring messages, oath offers, army assignment, messages from your liege (even realm-wide ones, maybe, because lieges matter), orders, turn warnings (the sun will set in 1 hour), turn reports (during the day/last night, this happened:). I would rather them not to have the message contents in them (except maybe oath offers and army assignments, with a link to go check it out), for people to go read them in game.

Some of them, I'd signup for myself even today (PMs, orders). Looting and other activities that can happen too many times during a turn would potentially spam someone's inbox, and would probably annoy more than do good.

[Indirik]

Provide incentives to limit the number of alliances or peaceful relations a Realm has - perhaps bonuses to Realm loyalty, stability, production as they identify more closely with their home nation (we're different from THEM, that's why we're not allied with those stinking D'Harans!).

Treaty friction was supposed to add an incentive to not have all those extra treaties, by making you work to maintain them. I think the general consensus, though. has been that people *want* to have all those treaties. They don't like it when they can't have them.

War may reduce production loss or discontent amongst the population because they are too focused on the "fight", with increased recruitment levels due to men wanting to defend their homeland - or achieve honour.

Some of these effects are already present. Too Much Peace lowers the acceptable tax rate a realm can have. I believe it also reduces the number of recruits that your RCs produce. (Although that may be tied to low glory. I forget which it is, but it's there. Regardless, it's there, and hits high-quality RCs the hardest.)

There are lots of game changes that can be made to provide incentives to fighting, and reduce the regional hit that can occur because the ability to look after your regions is taken away whilst at war.   It makes sense to have reduced relations and war states help counter those effects - making it more preferable and achieveable to sustain war time states without the huge region hits that occur.

A key thing to keep in mind is that merely being at the diplomatic state of "War" should not be enough to get you a bonus. If it is, then you'll get a series of continual cold wars, and war declarations like "Madina vs. Astrum", where no fighting ever *can* occur.

[Silverfire]

Some of these effects are already present. Too Much Peace lowers the acceptable tax rate a realm can have. I believe it also reduces the number of recruits that your RCs produce. (Although that may be tied to low glory. I forget which it is, but it's there. Regardless, it's there, and hits high-quality RCs the hardest.)

I think one problem is that our "incentives" are to avoid "bad things happening". We should focus more on rewards instead of punishments I think. Too much peace punishes realms that can't get into a war, while making it even harder for them to fight a war in the future. For small realms this is especially a problem. (and I realize this is suppossed to be exempted for small realms, but since small realms are quite relative and differ greatly on different continents, it is still affecting a small realm like Coria, on Atamara, and there is nothign we can do about it because we're too small to fight in the massive war that is taking place.)

A declaration of war will destroy our realm, and without one, our realm is being destroyed by Too Much Peace. We'd like to go to war, but can't without changes anyway.

[Sacha]

I think another factor that reduces willingness to go to war is the extensive looting that seems to be the norm these days. Looting is fun when you're the one looting, not so much when it's being done to you. If your realm is on the frontline, then your border regions are almost guaranteed to suffer greatly. It's an effective way of depopulating regions, which then take weeks or months to recover, if they don't simply revolt.

And if you're a newbie and you're aligned to one of those regions, your income dwindles away... I can imagine it's no fun having to beg to be able to recruit 15-20 men, when you see members of your realm walk around with units 3-4 times that size. I wonder how many have given up on the game because of this.

I'm a fan of looting myself, but I do feel that it's being overused, as well as being too powerful. Every war that's going on in the game right now revolves around looting. The border between CE and Carelia: devastated. The central mountains and outlying regions on AT: devastated. The border between SoA and Sirion: devastated. The warzone between Caligus/Perdan/Ibladesh: devastated. The warzone between Caerwyn and Astrum: devastated. The population in these regions has been mostly slaughtered or starved, production is next to zero, infrastructure is destroyed. These areas either go rogue, or become pretty much useless to whoever owns them. Yet they still need estates if they want to be kept in the realm, which means people have to become knights of those regions, and more often than not, it's the new guys who are pushed into the role.

All of this doesn't help keeping the new guys interested in playing, I believe. They're starting to resemble pack mules who get to do the dirty, thankless jobs that the 'veterans' are too good for...

[Phellan]

Again, TMP and Treaty Friction both are punishments for failure to adhere to desired gameplay mechanics.    This is the kind of coding we need to get away from - and it's the kind of coding that's killing the game, by making it less fun.   There are no BENEFITS to these actions (just normalization of game play.  Which, despite what everyone might think is not a benefit.   You should have normalization with minimal efforts involved)

I'm in C'Thonia right now - my unit dropped to 11% training from TMP (from around 50-55%), making it effectively useless in battle.   I can't even go fight rogues with that - never mind go take on Zonasa or Cathay or Arcaea.   We're desperately trying to get into war, but region maintenance and TMP combined have effectively crippled our military.   We can't war, we cant fight, and we can't leave our Realm.    Basically, we are !@#$ed.

And this is not because we don't want to do these things - it's because the punishment based system of coding has destroyed our ability to do them.


We need to restructure the game mechanics to provide INCENTIVES.   Making bad things happen to players or Realms because things aren't happening is a very, very bad way of trying to make game play happen.   This is the single, biggest change that needs to be made to the way coding and game changes are made.

You want to avoid cold wars?  Then have take overs, large battles, conquests, looting, pillaging etc all add to the "bonus" War provides (whether you're doing it or the other person is besides the point, so long as it happens - the peasants are joyous when they are winning, but get fearful and sign up when they are losing).   At an initial declare, have a small positive effect - it can grow (helping the Realm stay at war) as "combat" related actions occur.   If like the Astrum-Madina war there is no combat, then it should drop towards zero bonus.  If the war isn't happening, the peasants lose their fear/enthusiasm for the war and eventually it becomes meaningless to them.   It's the reverse of the TMP code - good things happen when you fight, as opposed to !@#$ty things happen when you don't.   Fight because it's good for you - not because you'll suffer if you don't.

People like to have lots of treaties because it keeps them safe (and helps keep the realm safe) - but there's also no advantage to NOT being in mass alliances and peace fests.   There is a distinct DISADVANTAGE to it however.    Treaty Friction is another punishment way of trying to destroy these mass alliances.   

Provide bonuses to Realms who *don't* have lots of mass alliances and peace - a measure maybe where having an ally or two and a peaceful relation or two is normal, or where being part of a small federation (but with no allies) is considered "normal" - being above that incurs negatives on your realm morale/loyalty/glory (a realm that never fights and is at peace/allied with everyone is hardly "glorious", more like a cowardly nation that can't stand up to anyone and never shows any military might).   If you have less than the "normal" level of allies/peace you gain bonuses to your realm stats and glory.     Bigger realms suffer higher negatives (but normal positives) since they shouldn't need allies to be safe, smaller Realms gain more positive benefits (but suffer the normal negatives) since they probably could use more allies but not having them should be rewarded.


This "balance" act works in the favour of everyone - it makes it possible to do ALL these things, but harder to have lots of alliances (but if you're at war, you may not notice them).  Where as if you are smaller without a lot of allies (but at peace often) you'll still get some benefits.

The play styles and actions can balance out these differences.   And the best part is that Realms with low-ally counts who fight a lot receive the best bonus combination - and that kind of small-realm constant warfare is what we are TRYING to encourage hopefully. 

[D`Este]

The thing with looting is... realms need to use it in order to actually win a war. Most of the realms you talked about Sacha can easily recover from a lost battle, only by destroying their regions you can do meaningfull damage.

[Peri]

I wouldn't go as far as to say that looting damages player retention. If a realm points newbies to destroyed regions that is a mistake and they are going to pay it losing the guy. Unfortunately, the game loses the potential new player as well. You can't blame looting for that though. I think it's quite appropriate that war torn areas are devastated.

[vanKaya]

However, this gives me an idea. One of the problems for new players may be simply that they log in once, see nothing happen, and just forget to log in the next day. What if new characters, when being created, could see all the realm-wide messages that were sent in the last 72 hrs? This way they would see that the game is not empty; and it would give them something to respond to other than the boilerplate introduction message.

This is a very good idea. It establishes context and gets the player looking forward to the next turn. I can also act like a built in tutorial on what it means to act midevally.

[LilWolf]

I wouldn't go as far as to say that looting damages player retention. If a realm points newbies to destroyed regions that is a mistake and they are going to pay it losing the guy. Unfortunately, the game loses the potential new player as well. You can't blame looting for that though. I think it's quite appropriate that war torn areas are devastated.

Looting became the monster it is today back when peasant count started to affect production. Back in the day you could have 10 peasants in the region, but still get 100% production. Back then looting was a fun way of stealing gold from your enemy, burning some food, maybe even making the region rogue. But all it took to recover was a bureaucrat and some civil work for a week or so and the region was good to go again and provided all the benefits it had before. No knight lost income because gold was distributed realm wide instead of per region basis. These days you have to wait months for the population to come back and the knights of the region struggle.

I think the game has lost a lot of its fun and lightness due to such realism additions and drive away new players.

[Sacha]

Well, maybe we should reduce the peasant casualties from looting, or at the very least make it impossible to slaughter hundreds of peasants every day with impunity. I've always found it quite unbelievable that peasant mobs would take on professional armies that are 10x stronger or more, repeatedly, when 99.5% of those who did it before them died a pointless death. It would make much more sense for the mobs to attack the individual units that trigger them. 100 peasants attacking 500 professional soldiers is never believable. 100 peasants attacking a unit of 50 men is. There would be casualties on both sides. If the unit wins, the peasants all die. If the peasant wins, the unit is destroyed or routed (much like in actual battle) and the surviving peasants remain as a mob until TC. This would make looting more risky for the attackers, making them more reluctant to risk their units for a bit of production damage, and it would still cost peasant lives, but not on a ridiculous scale.

Also, this should probably be made into a separate topic :P

[Chenier]

I think one problem is that our "incentives" are to avoid "bad things happening". We should focus more on rewards instead of punishments I think. Too much peace punishes realms that can't get into a war, while making it even harder for them to fight a war in the future. For small realms this is especially a problem. (and I realize this is suppossed to be exempted for small realms, but since small realms are quite relative and differ greatly on different continents, it is still affecting a small realm like Coria, on Atamara, and there is nothign we can do about it because we're too small to fight in the massive war that is taking place.)

A declaration of war will destroy our realm, and without one, our realm is being destroyed by Too Much Peace. We'd like to go to war, but can't without changes anyway.

Absolutely, all "incentives" so far have been along the lines of "do what we want or your life will become hell".

Rather than having penalties for peace (though I don't really object the current ones, though I'd like for some tweaks regarding the acceptable taxes to consider food shortages), we could just as easily boost control in realms who are at war, the bonus increasing for how many realms it is at war with. It'd also help realms that are being gang banged a little.

Treaty friction was supposed to add an incentive to not have all those extra treaties, by making you work to maintain them. I think the general consensus, though. has been that people *want* to have all those treaties. They don't like it when they can't have them.

Partly, but it's mostly the fact that it wants to make us put great work just to maintain the status quo.

Well, maybe we should reduce the peasant casualties from looting, or at the very least make it impossible to slaughter hundreds of peasants every day with impunity. I've always found it quite unbelievable that peasant mobs would take on professional armies that are 10x stronger or more, repeatedly, when 99.5% of those who did it before them died a pointless death. It would make much more sense for the mobs to attack the individual units that trigger them. 100 peasants attacking 500 professional soldiers is never believable. 100 peasants attacking a unit of 50 men is. There would be casualties on both sides. If the unit wins, the peasants all die. If the peasant wins, the unit is destroyed or routed (much like in actual battle) and the surviving peasants remain as a mob until TC. This would make looting more risky for the attackers, making them more reluctant to risk their units for a bit of production damage, and it would still cost peasant lives, but not on a ridiculous scale.

Also, this should probably be made into a separate topic :P

The big reason looting has become more popular is because of estates. Before, looting was rare because a TO was never out of the question. Now, with lack of nobles, we can be fairly certain that many regions will not be TOed, so one no longer cares for sympathy and one tries to deny his opponents in the only way other than TOs: revolt.

[Adriddae]

Well, maybe we should reduce the peasant casualties from looting, or at the very least make it impossible to slaughter hundreds of peasants every day with impunity. I've always found it quite unbelievable that peasant mobs would take on professional armies that are 10x stronger or more, repeatedly, when 99.5% of those who did it before them died a pointless death. It would make much more sense for the mobs to attack the individual units that trigger them. 100 peasants attacking 500 professional soldiers is never believable. 100 peasants attacking a unit of 50 men is. There would be casualties on both sides. If the unit wins, the peasants all die. If the peasant wins, the unit is destroyed or routed (much like in actual battle) and the surviving peasants remain as a mob until TC. This would make looting more risky for the attackers, making them more reluctant to risk their units for a bit of production damage, and it would still cost peasant lives, but not on a ridiculous scale.

Also, this should probably be made into a separate topic :P

How about peasant militia forming when a friendly army arrives? Similar to how militia are "stirred up by your arrival or someone else". This way your army can make use of them on your own terms.