BattleMaster Community
BattleMaster => BM General Discussion => Topic started by: JeVondair on July 24, 2017, 09:39:06 PM
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Anaris has mentioned a number of times that he was interested in getting more data regarding new-player experience so the game could be improved to retain more new players. I wanted to start this topic so that everyone could chime in one place. Please comment about your experience as a new person or working with new players to assimilate them to the game.
In my experience recruiting for this game, I have gotten three big questions:
- What do I do next/now?
- How do I do _____?
- I'm overwhelmed, what's going on?
It's my experience that most people, and virtually all new players, to not utilize the wiki to its capacity, if at all. Even if they are sent links in-game. New players also seem very reluctant to send messages. New players are always confused by the real-time vs turn-based aspects of the game. I guess the biggest thing is that they want all the information they need to be more convenient to access.
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My experience with new players is that they seem interested in the game, send a few messages, get discouraged when only 1 or 2 people answer, and leave within a few weeks because 90% of the realm does nothing but collect money and try to "win" an unwinnable game.
This is also my experience with veteran players.
This is my experience. It's frustrating.
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I've been sending a big OOC introduction message to every new player (in BM) that joins one of the realm I am, for a while now. I must say that not a lot of them actually reply.
I've been getting the feeling that many, as already said, log in a few times to get a feel of the game and then just never return.
A more convenient way to get all relevant data new players need in their first day or week is exactly what we need. And that's exactly what this topic was created for:
https://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,7627.0.html
We have Tutorials (2 actually), but they are horribly outdated. Gildre did an amazing job in starting with spoken video tutorials, but since he does not have the time for BM right now, that project is stopped. Actually, I've been thinking about what kind of other format we could use to update the tutorials.. Click through? Topic based? ..? Feel free to chime in.
I've also been looking at the wiki (the Manual: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Manual ). But it's just one big mess/chaos and I don't know how to start structuring it. It's text based, so always difficult to visualize things. But if you have an idea how to sort these topics better, make it more attractive to people, please let us know (or just do it? Not sure who has access to edit those pages).
It's a great initiative, JeVondair. There's only a handful of new players that actually stayed and now turn out to be loving the game. I understand that it's not for everyone, but we can surely help improve the means to learn the game in a more enjoyable way.
Feel free to discuss, give feedback, whatever. I'm more than willing to invest on this.
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As a new player, Purrcious was surprised that the best course of action as a newb was to throw oneself on the frontlines... ::)
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I also contact new players in game immediately, but perhaps not always ooc.
However in my IC messages I do offer help and explain that the noble life is dificult at first and needs time to get used to, I also often do my best to give them immediate goals and things to look out for.
In Gotland I also started a mentor message group (the Goatling Shed), where new members are added to get special tasks (sort of training missions) and also ask questions about the game or the strange realm of Gotland.
In reality it is mostly ignored by the new players.
I agree that some realms are silent and perhaps a terrible start for new players, however i must agree with Wimpie that most players just don't communicate much.
I didnt see any of the new players leave, but i rarely see them communicate.
However some do become ' real BM' players, and Gotland is a great example of a realm saved by new players, the majority of active players are now all relatively new players (past year).
They arent great roleplayers and their characters quite standard but they do go along with the local theme and appear to be ambitious.
The frustrations they have expressed aren't really mechanics related but more invasion related (I am not sure if they really get the concept of invasions in BT, or if they just don't like the ways its currently going, things are very stagnant because of it and their and Gotlands new efforts all beaten down time after time)
Certain environments might be better for new players, however there is no way to know that for a new player.
Some realm descriptions do state that the realm is a place for young and old or something similair, but thats just written by one person during a certain moment.
It might not be true or no longer be true.
Perhaps we can implement some kind of statistic on amount of new players in a certain realm, if they stay and their chance of getting any positions or wealth soon.
A query for new players after 3 days, a week, a month and or a half year asking if they need help and how well their realm has helped them could gather more statistics and also raise an immediate red flag for other players to help the new player. (ideally their lords should help them)
If the player answers yes i need more help, it could become visible for all.
If the player awnsers yes or no on their current realm beeing helpful, it could show up on the choose your realm page.
These two simple questions are more then enough and won't take much more time then 10 seconds.
Meanwhile I will ask the relatively new players IG to respond to this topic.
Perhaps can do so too.
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I've been sending a big OOC introduction message to every new player (in BM) that joins one of the realm I am, for a while now. I must say that not a lot of them actually reply.
I've been getting the feeling that many, as already said, log in a few times to get a feel of the game and then just never return.
A more convenient way to get all relevant data new players need in their first day or week is exactly what we need. And that's exactly what this topic was created for:
https://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,7627.0.html
We have Tutorials (2 actually), but they are horribly outdated. Gildre did an amazing job in starting with spoken video tutorials, but since he does not have the time for BM right now, that project is stopped. Actually, I've been thinking about what kind of other format we could use to update the tutorials.. Click through? Topic based? ..? Feel free to chime in.
I've also been looking at the wiki (the Manual: http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Manual ). But it's just one big mess/chaos and I don't know how to start structuring it. It's text based, so always difficult to visualize things. But if you have an idea how to sort these topics better, make it more attractive to people, please let us know (or just do it? Not sure who has access to edit those pages).
It's a great initiative, JeVondair. There's only a handful of new players that actually stayed and now turn out to be loving the game. I understand that it's not for everyone, but we can surely help improve the means to learn the game in a more enjoyable way.
Feel free to discuss, give feedback, whatever. I'm more than willing to invest on this.
Indeed, many people, myself included, have made it a point to contact every newbie, whether IC or OOC or both, for at least some period of time. It might help, but to me, it didn't really feel like it had much of an effect on retention.
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Indeed, many people, myself included, have made it a point to contact every newbie, whether IC or OOC or both, for at least some period of time. It might help, but to me, it didn't really feel like it had much of an effect on retention.
I agree. Xavax was a great experiment. Every single new person that arrived was engaged with an IC welcome message. Most of them did not write back. Since that realm started, we gained and lost something like 60 accounts. I wish now that I had been tracking that data. It often felt like there was simply nothing we could do. Bm is simply niche that way.
I've played games that, instead of dragging newbies through tutorials, instead utilizes a simple rewards program to incentivize new players into discovering aspects of the game. Perhaps we could discuss something similar? Like "Congratulations for sending your first RP. Here's 100 gold to your family coffers" or something.
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Bm is simply niche that way.
This might be more true then we want, meaning we can't do much to avoid people stopping.
Friends of mine who tried BM either loved it(they eventually stopped playing too because they found it to demanding/addictive) or somehow never got it and quit fairly early.
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My experience with new players is that they seem interested in the game, send a few messages, get discouraged when only 1 or 2 people answer, and leave within a few weeks
Those are the easy ones to snag.
I was talking about the ones who create an account, create a character, play once, send no messages, and never touch it again. There are a depressing number of those.
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BM is increasingly niche. And honestly I think a lot of its appeal is legacy, all that history that was developed over the years that people who've been here for a certain amount of time can appreciate, while others who are just joining now either don't get it or feel it overwhelming. It's like starting to watch a popular series renown for its twists, but only joining in on season 7, it's easy to feel left out all the time.
Plus, BM is increasingly post-colonial. We used to have so many nobles, that realm creations and destructions were fairly common, and more importantly, fairly feasible. Now, most realms are so spread thin that it's unthinkable to split them further to create new entities. I know it was largely appealing, when I joined, that if we worked hard enough, we'd have good chances of changing history, making new and original projects come true. I'm not saying it can't happen at all anymore, but it used to be possible just about anywhere (assuming one could convince the oligarchies of elite player clubs to pitch in, and barring some continents that were peace-locked for some periods of time). Back then? If you had 5 buddies, each with 2 characters, you already had a base of 12 characters to work with, stack on top the total realm count of say 50, you'd probably get a handful of others join you, either because they were de facto part of your duchy or they didn't feel compelled to switch back, so you could end up with a nice core of 20 nobles when seceding (or doing a colony takeover, or whatever), and end up with two viable realms to pursue your projects. Now, it's like the realm has 15 nobles on average, most of your friends left the game so you've got maybe 3 buddies, and each can only contribute one character, so you end up with a 5 noble worthless realm and a 10 noble crippled host realm. When Dwi was colonized, the host realms didn't really suffer at all from all that noble losses. Many colonist groups formed themselves and had their chance at trying things out. And even earlier than that, on BT, geopolitics were shifty enough in between invasions, and invasions helped clear huge swaths of land for new entities all the time. New realms popped up here and there and I don't ever remember people saying "oh no, we won't have enough nobles left if you leave!" until very late (by the time Enweil died it had become an issue though).
Opportunities for newbies to leave their mark, in my opinion, has greatly waned. Had I only discovered BM in 2017, I don't think I would have stayed long. Nostalgia has largely replaced thrill and opportunity. I'm still having fun, but I'm no longer staying up 'till midnight to get live turn change reports and writing 40 IG messages per day to push the agenda of the day. Partly because I don't have that kind of time and energy anymore, but also largely because I don't feel like there's any potential return on investment anymore. I'm proud of what I did on BT and Dwi, but even if I were to become a responsibility-free teenager again, I don't think I could pull much of that off anymore.
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Chenier have put into words what Purrcious mostly feels. Purrcious went into this game first as part of Vix Tiramora and in that continent Purrcious feels that the decision being made is more about 'Take care not to make more playerbase leave' and 'Let's be careful not to make people bored'
Purrcious not saying it's bad, but it says a lot about the state of the game when you can't destroy realms that did something bad to yours when Medieval times was all about colonization and conquering more lands.
In East Continent, all the realms and regions are locked and with the current stance of the playerbase, there will be no space for new group to jump on in and try to make their own realm. Good thing there's other continents where you can try it.
Purrcious is having fun on what the game offers but Purrcious feels like playing with a crystal ball that's going to break any moment.
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so glad I got my forum account working. Not glad that it was at the time when I should go to bed.
I have tons I want to say on this topic - I started last December and several characters have advanced significantly. I'll jump on again and say more stuff!
For me the worst part of the new player experience is the byzantine rules or bizarre functions. I read the hell out of that wiki, but I still didn't understand plenty. The gameplay is not intuitive and the way the game is designed has burned me many times with some nuance I didn't understand. For example, why can't I perform civil work or police work twice in the same turn?
One time we had a brand new player join and be captured in the same turn. Yeah... terrible for recruitment. Could you make brand new players - not characters - immune to arrest and capture for the first 5 days?
Advise new players to play on the island that has 1 turn a day, so they aren't overwhelmed by the _regular requirement of time_ the game is asking from them. 2 times a day requirement of time is the reason I've nearly stopped playing.
As for the invasion, I read up on it before joining that continent. Initially after reading about the complaints on it, I was not interested. I became interested after reading other comments on it. The invasion is not what I expected and I feel the teleportation and daimon spawning is what ruins it all. I expected portals that were opened would be where the daimons come out or a crack broke across the continent and they spew out of there. That allows the Realms to unite armies to attack/guard specific points. Create missions/goals to accomplish - ie there are daimon militias unleashed on the land, but everyone needs to unite to attack the army with the daimon lord - kill the daimon lord and the militias will turn on each other to determine who will be the next daimon lord.
The best thing for new players I think would be a continent for only new accounts less than 1 year old. People on that continent can make mistakes because everyone is making them, take positions, try running things, get some honor, prestige and family wealth and then HAVE to move to another island - that way the new player island doesn't become static with all the fat cats on top.
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Yea, the game can totally be byzantine. Some of it is to avoid abuses (doing 8x1 hour so that it rounds up 8 times to give more benefit than 1x8 hour, for example), some of it for less blatant reasons.
It's a game that was developed slowly over a very large time span, by different people at different times. I think Anaris has been on board since pretty early on, maybe the start? But Tom stopped being visible a few years back. And I know some coders from when I started, like Handkor, are no longer around. I think a game developped in such a way that would not be byzantine would be the exception more than the rule.
I'm not sure for the 1/day suggestion, though. Always felt like there was not enough going on to keep people interested, rather than the opposite. But different players look for different levels of engagement I guess. I can't see anything wrong with telling newbies "there's also a 1 turn per day continent, should the pace of the other continents leave you overwhelmed" though.
My experience with Colonies has been rather underwhelming. Far too little happens. It's not that there's just 1 turn per day, but it's that there's only 8 hours per day, and that the travel times are ridiculous due to the regions being far larger than what is commonly found elsewhere. Feel free to correct me if my memory is off. Colonies would seem far more playable, to me, if it got at least 12 hours per day and more normal travel times (also lots of mountains in the way all the time). Because as it is, it's not just that it lets people log in once per day, but that it takes forever to accomplish anything, and missed turns are even more hurtful for it. Not to mention that units get half as many hours per day and have twice the travel distances to cover per region, while still requiring the exact same pay as elsewhere.
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I like the idea of a "Noob" Island with an actual coherent storyline.
Make it a PVE island or something, have a storyline, let people get invested in the game, and then make a transition over to a PVP island.
Also, I honestly feel that monsters and demons detract from the game more than they aid.
Sure I understand on Dwilight the player base was too fractured, wanted to push them all together, but at a certain point all you're doing is making it so the realms are too busy fighting monsters than they are interacting with one another.
Make the eastern part of Dwilight just be swamped with them, and let the western part fight each other.
Belu has the same issue as well, right now we're trying to deal with a storyline of demons and rooting out demon worshippers, but most of the realms are too busy defending against 15k CS of undead and monsters to actually be able to leave.
Teleporting also sucks, get rid of that.
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Good points about The Colonies.
I understand how the development path has resulted in the current state. Instead of adding more content, I would suggest streamlining, simplify and helpful notes (next to the selection). In another thread someone mentioned that battlemaster is marketed as 5 minutes a day, but isn't really anymore.
When I read discussions about Beluaterra, I see people stating that information isn't shared. I've run large player games - larps - and that is definitely a problem. Critical information has to be widely available. There has to be multiple avenues to get that information. Secrets can't really be secret. Otherwise, storylines grind to halt due to inactivity, ignorance and apathy.
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Newbie-only island is on the Frequently Rejected list for the following reason by Tom:
This would shut newbies away from some of the most interesting aspects of the game—the players—and would, in the end, be counterproductive. Integrating them into the general population right off is the best way for them to learn the game.
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But, when the majority of people aren't staying anyway.....
Not saying it's wrong or even would help, but I think it could be considered at the very least.
Though I do think it's as simple as this.
People come across the game, they think "Hey, this seems neat" They make an account, log in. And once they log out they immediately forget it exists. Reminder emails generally don't work either.
I've never once seen the WOW emails I get sent and think. "You know, this email reminded me that I used to play the game, I should play it again" It just gets sent to the garbage.
It's gonna happen the same no matter what new things are tried, they'll just forget about it. The goal should be to make it harder to forget, somehow.
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Also, I honestly feel that monsters and demons detract from the game more than they aid.
Sure I understand on Dwilight the player base was too fractured, wanted to push them all together, but at a certain point all you're doing is making it so the realms are too busy fighting monsters than they are interacting with one another.
Make the eastern part of Dwilight just be swamped with them, and let the western part fight each other.
And the players who never interacted before, will interact this time! It'll be so different! All those players who are more interested in holding onto their titles and land (god forbid a realm lose some regions), rather than interacting with fellow players, ensuring new players leave out of boredom, will suddenly become active roleplayers and engage in warfare like never before! With battles daily! On unicorns! And golden dew every morning so we never run out of gold! And all the battles will go the way the participants want, pleasing both attacker and defender, making no one unhappy! We'll have new players swarming to join us! Just like that!
Seriously though, I see nothing that would make any difference in the pre-existing problem behaviors by getting rid of monsters/undead so they can go back to sleepily patting themselves on the back for how awesome they are for holding fancy titles with a character in a game.
I think there are players who don't want to interact with others, because they risk losing their shiny titles and regions, which are their god-given right, apparently, and have forgotten the joy of BM is the process, the journey, the story you build along the way. Not the various ranks and positions a character gains.
Also, it doesn't deal with the fundamental problem of there being smaller playerbase in a game with larger worlds. BM is not meant for realms to be *anywhere* close to every noble being a lord, but thats sure what some realms see to pursue. Lordship is supposed to be something to be worked for, not just handed out like plastic bags at the grocery store.
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We do email the existing playerbase. But, we are very conscious to respect people's emails by not pestering them often (I think we even tell them that when one registers), and so only do it in on a rare, ad-hoc basis. Like the island sinking, new realms, and various other changes awhile back. And we have seen older players check out the game again, either prompted by that email way back when, or just curious on their own account. The other part of that though, is there are probably a lot of emails that just aren't used/checked by the owners anymore.
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I'm wondering if there's some peasant mechanics that can be introduced to encourage war. Similar to how peasants get mad when you're at war for too long, they could get mad when you aren't at war often enough. Or maybe have peasant armies attacking other regions to strike out on their own. They could have the banner of the realm they spawn from and everything, but make players have absolutely no control over them.
Not saying it would solve anything, but just wondering if anyone has thought of it at all.
Especially when peasants aren't dying, they have more time to think and rebel against their lords.
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I'm wondering if there's some peasant mechanics that can be introduced to encourage war. Similar to how peasants get mad when you're at war for too long, they could get mad when you aren't at war often enough.
We tried this. It nearly killed the game, because it introduced a vicious cycle: there's not enough war, so peasants get upset (manifesting as trouble with regions), so trying to go to war would be far too dangerous, so we have to fix up our regions, so there's not enough war....etc.
Or maybe have peasant armies attacking other regions to strike out on their own. They could have the banner of the realm they spawn from and everything, but make players have absolutely no control over them.
That wouldn't achieve anything except to annoy people. If Realm A doesn't want to go to war with Realm B, peasants from Realm B attacking Realm A (which everyone knows is not being done by the players) will do nothing to provoke a war. If Realm A does want to go to war, sure, they could use the peasant attack as a pretext for war, but they could also use any of a dozen other things that already exist.
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What about rebellions against their current lords? Instead of needing the stats to be super low, maybe if they're too peaceful, the peasants start to get some thoughts of "independence" and start wanting freedom.
Gotta kill off the trouble makers by giving them an enemy other than yourself.
I do think thought that a PVE island with a set storyline would be really fun and perhaps easier for new players to get into.
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What about rebellions against their current lords? Instead of needing the stats to be super low, maybe if they're too peaceful, the peasants start to get some thoughts of "independence" and start wanting freedom.
Yes, that's exactly what we tried.
Think about it for a minute, Bronnen. What happens if your regions start revolting? Does that put you in a good position to go to war? Or does it mean that if you try declaring war and fighting battles, you'll end up getting the floor mopped with you and lose even more?
Any kind of "regions have trouble if you are at peace too long" system is going to be guaranteed to set up a lose-lose situation for anyone who falls afoul of it.
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I wouldn't care lol, but I'm probably one of the few that play the game to have fun and not to win. I know there are a lot more people who play it just to have fun, but there's way too many who play it to gain power and never lose it. I was just spitballing is all.
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I like the idea of a "Noob" Island with an actual coherent storyline.
Make it a PVE island or something, have a storyline, let people get invested in the game, and then make a transition over to a PVP island.
Also, I honestly feel that monsters and demons detract from the game more than they aid.
Sure I understand on Dwilight the player base was too fractured, wanted to push them all together, but at a certain point all you're doing is making it so the realms are too busy fighting monsters than they are interacting with one another.
Make the eastern part of Dwilight just be swamped with them, and let the western part fight each other.
Belu has the same issue as well, right now we're trying to deal with a storyline of demons and rooting out demon worshippers, but most of the realms are too busy defending against 15k CS of undead and monsters to actually be able to leave.
Teleporting also sucks, get rid of that.
This game is old. A lot of its problems existed way back, even if not quite as they are now, and pretty much all of the obvious things have already been at least considered, if not outright tried.
The daimons on BT, it's a love-hate relationship, really. They've been back and forth there for about a decade now, around 8-10 years off the top of my head. Anyone who sends a character to Beluaterra knows about them, it's in the continent's description. If they were such a deal breaker, then why was BT, historically at least, one of the most populous and dynamic continents? NPCs popping back and forth to kick down peoples' sandcastles had a large role in it. Of course, there are always people who complain, too. Sometimes justified, sometimes not so much. But there are a lot of players on BT, and knowledge is not shared universally, so some people aren't getting all the fun they could be having because of other players. Are the GMs to blame for this? Too much hand holding makes it less real and fun. The perfect balance of how hard to make the invasions, how much to spread the lore, how long to make it last, and so on, is ultimately arbitrary and everyone will have their own opinions on it. I don't think invasions have ever generated enduring consensus. Some parts of some invasions were more largely appreciated, others were more resented, but in the end the devs aren't omniscient and can't really predict what actions will always have the best outcomes, and even if they were the players themselves wouldn't agree on what's "best". I think it's a common trend to have these invasions linger on too long, but it was also rather underwhelming when at least one was abruptly ended.
Dwilight... the continent itself does not lend itself to conflict, much. Only the North-East has a respectable spread/density that has allowed for many conflicts over the years. But for the rest? Very few wars were had. Take Madina for example: can they afford to go fight another realm now, with all those monsters that were unleashed? No. But were they doing it before the monsters were unleashed? No. They weren't. Basically the only realm in the east that is now able to wage wars despite the monsters is also basically the only realm that was doing so before the monsters. Morek, HD, and Westfold (in particular) get some credit for what they did in the recent past, but I don't think the monsters had really anything to do with they current states. Maybe, MAYBE Luria could have intervened had it not been for the rogues... but that's a huge maybe, and as the saying goes, "you snooze, you lose". They didn't really have anything stopping them from getting involved well before the monsters came. Nothing that wouldn't still exist, anyways. So really, if you remove all of the rogues on Dwilight, you won't see more fighting. In fact, what you'll see is just realms spreading eternally, and propping up micro-realm colonies, until the whole continent is populated by 25 realms that each have only 4 nobles and no financial means to fight each other. The monsters, in this sense, are a needed stick to beat out the urge of eternally expanding into the wild, and instead looking at neighbors.
All in all, PvE elements have often been criticized, but the continents that featured them the most have also been, historically, the most dynamic. Perhaps for the simple reason that in PvE, you can't sue for peace, while continents without any often devolved into alliance blocks that either united everyone on the same side or split them into factions unwilling to risk fighting each other.
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Why not reward those who go to war then? Boost production, morale, and control as your armies win more battles maybe?
As for the new player experience, I think there isn't much you can do about it.
At the end of the game, BM is a social game. Most people don't have the patience to wait a day to see a welcome message from another player. Not sure sending an automated welcome message will even do anything. Maybe sending a message where the game encourages people to introduce themselves and get involved right away wouldn't hurt.
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Why not reward those who go to war then? Boost production, morale, and control as your armies win more battles maybe?
Because that's the same problem applied in a reverse matter.
Giving bonuses to winners just makes losers lose more. Big realms bulling entire continents used to be a pretty big problem: "don't do anything, or we'll destroy you". Such mechanics, instead of preventing the small realms from waging efficient war, would have made it easier for the big realms to enforce their no-war policy. End result is the same: no war.
Superpowers are less of a thing now, though, but still. War is favored by a multiplicity of similarly-powered realms, and giving bonuses to victors tends to just make lopsided battles even more lopsided.
Not saying that the entire concept was completely unworkable, but it's hard to think of a perfect code that will be perfectly fair. If I remember correctly, one of the last nails in that mechanic's coffin was when it started applying to small realms that were already at war with a bunch of nations and under siege from the daimons, "too much peace" was hitting what might have been the most militaristic realm on the continent of the time. But the thing is, the more you code the mechanic so that no innocents are hit, the easier you make it bypassable, and a mechanic that is too easy to bypass does no good whatsoever.
So it boils down to this: can you think of a mechanic that doesn't harm people in a way to dissuade them from waging war, doesn't overpower the strongest in a way that would dissuade others from war, and is not easily bypassable by gimmicky false wars and the like, and does not penalize people during a normal peace cycle after (or before) an important war? Because as it is, the most straightforward answer to "too much peace" is the grassroot one: players that are bored from too much peace should replace their leaders with others that will give them less peace. The Dev team can only do so much hand holding. And a lot of players are quite content with doing absolutely nothing year-round.
I think what has more potential is not looking at mechanics that regulate wars, but more indirect matters. For example, making militia far less effective, siege engines far more effective, travel times lower, salaries lower, penalties from distance from the realm lower, and such things. "Just fight someone closer" used to be the automatic response to those saying fighting realms far away is too difficult, and there's a lot of truth in that. But the declining player base has changed the continental dynamics some. Many realms have no immediate neighbors that would make sense to fight. Take Fissoa and Madina, for example... Adjacent cities are utterly stupid for this, I must insist. Neither realm would ever want to aggress the other, because both of them have their capital adjacent to the other's. As soon as one realm turns on the other, both will never be able to have their army leave their capital, out of fear of a surprise sneak siege that would destroy their realm. They have zero choice but to be friends, or just about. But then who else could they fight? They are so far from everyone else, especially Madina, that even if they did magically grow a pair, they'd never be able to even scratch their next neighbor. Another point I've made many times is the impact of lowered player counts on the feasibility of sieges; we now have people leading way, way more men than before. Instead of 20 units of 25 men with 1 siege engine each, we have 5 units of 100 men with 5 siege engines each. Though the number of men the army has is the same, the CS is much lower, and the travel times much higher. While in the defending realm, the city will still have a ton of militia units without size penalties, and since all realms have less nobles, the wealth is usually concentrated more into the lords and dukes, who in turn tend to invest much more readily into lots of militia for their cities. So you've got weaker and slower units marching against better defended cities than back when BM had its highest player count. Wars are therefore harder to wage than before, simply by player demographics, and adjusting the mechanics to bring things back in balance would seem appropriate to me. We should be favoring player vs player battles, not player vs militia battles. If militia units gradually decreased to about 50% morale (after say 10 days of being made militias), maybe we wouldn't have quite as much of them, and players would have more gold, and mobile armies would be more potent. Or maybe increasing their decay so that every month half of the men are gone. Of course, we need to make it so that militia isn't so weakened so that realms are afraid of having their armies leave their capital, but as it is, realms don't leave their capital because their armies are too weak to accomplish anything anyways.
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I lost my old account with an influential and wealthy family. I started a new account and immediately looked for Sirion... I was not surprised to find that the realm is a cemetery of old characters in the same positions and beyond the orders, nothing. Even in elections, nothing. No messages. The place is basically a disgrace to new characters, even the ones of old players returning to the game.
Mortality would be good for them and for the realm.
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I lost my old account with an influential and wealthy family. I started a new account and immediately looked for Sirion... I was not surprised to find that the realm is a cemetery of old characters in the same positions and beyond the orders, nothing. Even in elections, nothing. No messages. The place is basically a disgrace to new characters, even the ones of old players returning to the game.
Mortality would be good for them and for the realm.
If the more northern realms would actually see that and turn on Sirion, now that would be great.
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No one's characters are going to be forced into mortality against their will.
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So it boils down to this: can you think of a mechanic that doesn't harm people in a way to dissuade them from waging war, doesn't overpower the strongest in a way that would dissuade others from war, and is not easily bypassable by gimmicky false wars and the like, and does not penalize people during a normal peace cycle after (or before) an important war?
I think I can, though it's not simple, and there is, of course, still no guarantee that it won't suffer from some of the same problems as the others. Note that all of this, while I have written (at least parts of) it down before, is still highly speculative and if it were to happen, it wouldn't be in the immediate future.
It involves making some changes to recruitment centers that I've wanted to do for a while, to combat the homogenization that's occurred over the past several years. Essentially, I would add the possibility of values above 100% for equipment and training, but in different ways.
Equipment above 100% would be something centers could rarely generate with, and in a similar manner to the current RC-selection system, you wouldn't be able to create more than a small number of them in your realm at a given time. (You could, however, capture them from other realms—adding a potential drive for war.) This would be "Expert Equipment", and would normally be unusable to the soldiers, because its use is too complex.
But that's where the extra training comes in. RCs could not generate with extra training, but as units engage in battle, they would have the ability to gain training above the usual 100% (just training the unit would not be able to surpass that limit: battle would be required for it). Their total training level would be a limiting factor on their ability to use their equipment, much like adventuring/combat gear level is a limiting factor on an adventurer's ability to use their skills.
But as yet, none of this is particularly a reason to go to war. This extra training should give two reasons:
1) The training developed from fighting decays after a while. The game would keep track of when the unit had been in battles, and after it's been a while since it's been fighting regularly (not just a single battle every few months), its skills would start to get rusty. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed over time. It would only lose the training from battles: the training it was hired with and the training from training sessions would stay.
2) Though RCs would not generate with the ability to hire troops with expert training, there would be a way to allow them to have it: You can retire a unit to the RC as expert trainers, which adds a portion of their expert training to any unit hired from there. It would have to be a unit of the same type as the RC, each RC could have only one set of expert trainers, and, as I said, it would only be a portion of the expert training the unit retired with. Furthermore, and most importantly for this, after a period of time, they would get old, and begin to die off or retire.
This would be something the game would warn you about well in advance, and even when it was coming very close, you could still hire expert-trained units from the RC that could help you in fighting your next war, so even letting it go past the "deadline" would not cripple your fighting ability. But it would leave you with less, and should be a pretty clear incentive to engage in warfare telegraphed RL months before you would actually need to worry about any reduction in capability.
(I have some ideas lying around, too, about adding a "war fatigue" mechanic that incentivizes breaks in wars that have dragged on for a long time; that one would involve region stats starting to fall if you ignored it too long, but since its purpose is to get you to find a way to declare peace, hurting your regions is actually in line with that goal, and shouldn't be as counterproductive. The basic reasoning behind this is twofold: 1) Players get bored when all they're doing is marching to the front, fighting one or two battles, then marching home for weeks or months on end; and 2) Giving both sides an incentive to come to some sort of agreement is likely to increase the frequency, and thus the normalcy, of peace terms that involve a small number of regions or large sums of gold changing hands, rather than abject surrender.)
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No one's characters are going to be forced into mortality against their will.
I know, but I will keep my opinion about the subject.
I love the realm, but it's dead. I had more activity in Vix and I believe the "new" southern realms are enjoying more activity in general. Even war is not solving the problem. Sirion have endless wars, against direct enemies or to help allies. However, the realm is empty of any activity beside orders. When even war cannot solve it, people will just seek another realms waging war where they can feel they can help to improve something. In a small scale, I noticed it in other realms as well, so it's not just a Sirionite problem. If they just begin in Sirion, well, they will not come back.
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As noted above, the thing with the most "obvious" solution is that most of them have already been experimented with, and if we don't have them today, it's because they didn't work as intended.
First of all, do you really think that killing off the ruling oligarchy will in any way prevent it from creating new characters to replace the dead one, re-instating the old status quo? There's absolutely no benefit with forcing players to replace King Bob Johnson with King Bob II Johnson. Heck, we gain nothing, while we lost a bit of history and culture, as that character is in itself somewhat remarkable for its persistence alone. I much rather dealing with an original character than trying to roleplay with what is a new character but what I mentally fully know is a perfect clone of the old character. Makes roleplay awkward and uninviting.
Secondly, the worst thing of mortality is its impacts on the lower strata of the player base. The established elites you mentioned will reinstate themselves no problem. But those players that don't belong to the cliques and somehow manage to grind their way up, with a lot of time, patience, and hard work, they aren't guaranteed to have it back. Might even lose what they got to a member of the establishment. Mortality doesn't diffuse power, it just makes it easier to concentrate it. From my experience, a lot of players who lose their favorite character will simply leave the game. They might make a new one at first, but often will give up, or will engage with much lowered activity. Take Enweil, for example, it used to be a super power on Beluaterra. At the end, it was a disgraceful hollow shell. What happened? In my opinion, the largest contributor to Enweil's demise was the temporary mortality that was brought during that invasion (though the blighting of key economic regions, Enweilieos and Ete in particular, comes close second). Enweil got hit, really hard (mortality rates were decreased afterwards, and then completely removed). It lost like, what, 16 nobles? I'd have to look back at archives for that. But I had played there since a long time, and continued there till its end, and I can tell you, it never recovered. Because of all the low to mid tier nobles that died there, barely any ever came back. And a few of them had only had characters there. And from then on, the player count just decayed into a spiral of death, until barely anyone was left.
Players don't typically like to lose their characters. If they did, they already have the option to become heroes. Forcing people to retire their characters, either by killing them or with age penalties, has been shown to be a false good idea. It doesn't help. It just makes things worse.
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I think I can, though it's not simple, and there is, of course, still no guarantee that it won't suffer from some of the same problems as the others. Note that all of this, while I have written (at least parts of) it down before, is still highly speculative and if it were to happen, it wouldn't be in the immediate future.
Seems complicated, I'm not sure I grasp it correctly. I'd have to re-read later.
Not sure how I feel about war fatigue. Sounds weaponizable. "We won't actually fight them, but we'll use this war fatigue as attrition to help our other allies, closer to them, do the actual fighting against the penalized realm, while we'll focus on courtier work back home".
I seem to recall having had an idea relating to recruitment centers as well, back when it was decided to just scrap it all. I don't recall what it was. Maybe if recruitment centers got less costly, or gave better results, when built by realms that have lots of battles (victories or defeats, regardless)? That way even the losing realms get the boon. And realms that are often at war can gradually invest to have better centers overall than their more peaceful neighbors.
You'd have to factor in realm size in the bonus, though. Some realms can easily have lots of small battles without really being at war. At least, against rogues. Maybe just not consider battles with 3500 CS or less of rogues. Feels to me like huge battles with the rogues ought to count, but not the regular every day skirmishes with random little rogue units.
Perhaps give a higher bonus when the battle happens in your own realm's regions. Or based on distance from the capital. Just to make sure the mechanic doesn't make lopsided battles moreso.
Does feel to me like more militaristic realms should have better soldiers, but it often isn't the case, because the more militaristic realms must spend more on their mobile armies and thus have less funds to invest in better RCs, thus they just take whatever they first get.
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I do not believe Anaris' idea is that great. That just feels like it is adding something way too complex. Maybe foraging the field should also increase weapon/armour values instead of just fixing equip dmg only.
I wouldn't mind seeing all RCs with low training. Maybe to 10~30% range and make people build up overtime.
At the moment, war fatigue affects players physically. Long dragged out wars tire people out which leads to equally long peace periods. Maybe shortening wars in different ways might be better. short wars happening often would be better than long wars followed by long peace.
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First of all, do you really think that killing off the ruling oligarchy will in any way prevent it from creating new characters to replace the dead one, re-instating the old status quo?
I know... hell, I used it myself. No one likes to admit it, but when I lost Erik, my second character immediately became him... and I always considered myself a good roleplayer. Just referencing the Serpentis and people will immediately hate or love, although this I find useful in a more legitimate way: this was a legacy I built. However, it's easy to go right to the top because more than the characters, the players know me and know I can solve problems like, unh, take care of a region or a city or a great duchy, etc, so I don't need to work hard to get a position like years ago when no one knew me. My problem is not the elite in power... is the SILENT elite in power. They don't need to roleplay. They don't need to talk to the realm. They just need to give the orders and see the army working. How to keep new people around with this kind of mentality?
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Killing off an oligarchy will just make a room for another one.
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I'm not against the oligarchies. Times ago it was funny to try to enter in one, stay in one, challenge one. I'm not against the character and players in places of power, I'm just frustraded withe the silence and "I don't need a campaign, I will won". It's not for me, an old player that experienced every option and position, but for new players it's terrible.
If I had to join the game for the first time theses days, I would leave in no time. I don't think we can solve this with game mechanics. Mortality is funnier when you decide it by yourself........ like the song said: "Let it go..."
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BM is a game you get what you put into. If you put more time into it and play it well, you will garner supports of other players in no time. Probably it is easier than ever with only 400 accounts around. People appreciate active characters and as long as you are loyal, you will eventually climb up to be a duke.
But yeah I agree with new players not wanting to stay. It is way too slow for most people. You need to build some form of bonds with people but it isn't something that happens overnight. People just aren't willing to stick around.
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I know... hell, I used it myself. No one likes to admit it, but when I lost Erik, my second character immediately became him... and I always considered myself a good roleplayer. Just referencing the Serpentis and people will immediately hate or love, although this I find useful in a more legitimate way: this was a legacy I built. However, it's easy to go right to the top because more than the characters, the players know me and know I can solve problems like, unh, take care of a region or a city or a great duchy, etc, so I don't need to work hard to get a position like years ago when no one knew me. My problem is not the elite in power... is the SILENT elite in power. They don't need to roleplay. They don't need to talk to the realm. They just need to give the orders and see the army working. How to keep new people around with this kind of mentality?
Well, there's really no way to make the game distinguish "good oligarchies" from "bad oligarchies". Players overthrowing the bad ones, or flocking to the good ones, are the only real driving force that has any chance to fight them. The dev team can only hold people's hands so much; if a realm allows itself to be ruled by a silent oligarchy, that's largely on them.
Killing off an oligarchy will just make a room for another one.
If it was real life, maybe. But that's not the case. We can all just make new characters to replace the dead ones the moment they die. And since the odds of the whole oligarchy dying at once are pretty close to zero, they'll just shuffle positions around between each other until the existing mechanical restrictions (minimum h/p for example) are overcome. Strong cliques are barely hindered at all by character mortality, those whom it harms the most are the unaffiliated who rise by merit and who live by roleplay.
I'm not against the oligarchies. Times ago it was funny to try to enter in one, stay in one, challenge one. I'm not against the character and players in places of power, I'm just frustraded withe the silence and "I don't need a campaign, I will won". It's not for me, an old player that experienced every option and position, but for new players it's terrible.
If I had to join the game for the first time theses days, I would leave in no time. I don't think we can solve this with game mechanics. Mortality is funnier when you decide it by yourself........ like the song said: "Let it go..."
As stated above. Though I would add that I find this less disturbing than I used to. As it is now, with the decreased player base, elections often end up with a single candidate running. And since you need to actively add yourself to the list for people to vote for you, that person knows there's no one else running. There's really little incentive to invest yourself in a long speech when it's your 50th election, nothing really changed since the last one, and no one's bothering to run against you. I do prefer the new referendum mechanic, but back then, people could silently campaign, and you'd occasionally see people win despite zero public campaigning. Sometimes to their own surprise! But in the end, the voters decide. If no one else cares to run... that's on the realm.
BM is a game you get what you put into. If you put more time into it and play it well, you will garner supports of other players in no time. Probably it is easier than ever with only 400 accounts around. People appreciate active characters and as long as you are loyal, you will eventually climb up to be a duke.
But yeah I agree with new players not wanting to stay. It is way too slow for most people. You need to build some form of bonds with people but it isn't something that happens overnight. People just aren't willing to stick around.
I think duke is a poor example, given how most realms have a mostly stable spread and that cities are only infrequently exchanged, but overall, yes, it takes much less to progress than it used to. Just sending letters irregularly has gotten somewhat impressive nowadays... which is kind of sad, to be honest.
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I've been trying to gather new players by inviting everyone to post on communities, vote on websites,..
I've also been trying to get a good and more accessible Tutorial, based on the needs of new players.
So again, I invite everyone here to join me in this goal to attract and retain more players.
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Purrcious have a question which is relatively related in the context of this thread. Is it possible for a realm to march 5 days worth of destination as a target for a war? Purrcious looks at Dwilight and all Purrcious can think is that's a really huge map that can't attack each other because of inconvenience and heavily favoured defensive mechanics in the game.
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Well, its somewhat dependent upon the continent. Dwilight would be the most difficult of continents with which to do that. South Island perhaps the easiest (can you even keep marching for five days in one destination on SI?). Which is why its all the more important for humans to bundle together on Dwilight. There have been plenty of successful offensive wars on Dwilight over the years, so the defensive advantage isn't impossible to overcome.
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Dwilight has a lot of sea regions, which can make travel quicker. But it also makes it a hellavalot more expensive. And riskier. But yea, otherwise, for the most part, it's terrible for this. Not to mention the sea zone through city chokepoints, the large deserts, and the many mountain ranges that make long distances ridiculously longer.
The problem with marching too far is not only the time spent doing so, but that farther we go the more morale penalties our units get. Mercenary settings can be used, making the unit much more expensive to maintain, but imo it doesn't reduce the penalty enough. Those distance issues used to be a good thing, to prevent the superpowers of old from enforcing their hegemony everywhere, but I find that benefit to no longer be very relevant.
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Wish sea travel wasn't so expensive :o
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So, I'm an old player who left the game, had my old account auto-deleted after being away for so long, and who has just recently created a new account.
As such I'm experiencing the game from scratch (no family fame or wealth to back me up, no long glorious history, no name recognition) but with the benefit of pre-existing knowledge about how it works. Here's my thoughts:
1) Most realm government types are recipes for stagnation
I deliberately made sure that both my new characters were created in realms that were either democracies or republics. I know that these are the least medieval government types from a RP point of view but in my experience they also make for more dynamic realms with opportunities for nobles to rise and fall in influence.
In realms where key office holders are elected or appointed once, for life, then it is incredibly difficult for a new player to make an impact short of waiting for someone to die or be severely wounded.
Obviously this doesn't always hold true, democracies and republics can be utterly dead (see: Sirion), but there's definitely a problem with government and region lord mechanics locking most new players into purely the knight game which can be very boring if the realm you're in doesn't have active discussions or active wars going on.
In my case my first character landed on his feet in Vix Tiramora - pretty much everything possible is debated by all nobles and even though I don't have enough prestige to run in lordship elections I can see that there will be plenty of opportunities to advance in the future.
2) There's very little information to guide new players as to how to choose a realm or continent
Before choosing a realm I did some research on the wiki, used my existing knowledge and looked at noble densities to decide which one to pick. But when I went through the character creation process only Steps 1 and 2 were easy and informative.
When you get to Step 3 the continent descriptions are a bit outdated and don't really give you an honest impression of what it's like to play on them. If I was new to the game then I might pick Dwilight for the SMA without realising that it's a place where realms are far from each other and where the game is often more PVE than PVP. Equally it tells me that BT uses the same map as Atamara(!) which is inaccurate and unhelpful but fails to mention that the periodic invasions make it a place where realms rise and fall a lot more quickly and that therefore there's more potential for a new character to rise to power and influence
And when you get to Step 4 it'd be useful if there was something explaining what kind of gameplay activity, opportunity and war translate into and it's utterly appalling just how many realms don't have descriptions at all, let alone descriptions that are useful to guiding a new player to what they're like to play in.
So overall, just more information about what options you should pick in order to enjoy different kinds of gameplay, and explaining to new players what the implications of their choices are better would be a big improvement. Otherwise it's easier to create a character in a realm that's utterly unsuited for your vision of playing the game.
And if there was a system of properly curating realm descriptions, and promoting realms with high activity to new players, then it might do more to help new players get started in places that aren't utterly dead.
It was also a bit offputting that the heraldry creation system currently breaks when you try to save a new shield but that's a more minor niggle.
3) Once you've started the game there's very little within the game itself to give you an idea about what to do next
After creating a character the only thing the game suggested I do was to tell me to send a letter to my liege. It doesn't suggest what to put in it, it doesn't make you aware that your liege might never reply to you and it doesn't suggest you introduce yourself to the whole realm (which is more likely to get a response).
And after that you're utterly on your own. I really think things would be greatly improved if new characters (at least those of new players) were given advice about general courses of action they could take. For instance, some good advice might be:
"As you gain honour and prestige (from battle) you'll have the opportunity to steer your character in lots of different directions but right now you're a knight in a world of war. A good way to start would be to ask your liege to assign you to an army, travel to the capital to recruit more men for your unit and to start training your men so they'll perform better in battle.
If you want to become a lord or a duke or a ruler then you'll need more honour and prestige. The best way to gain it is to fight in battle alongside other nobles in your realm. Don't worry about making mistakes or fighting on being on the losing side of a battle at first.
Even if your unit gets wiped out you can always recruit another one and in the meantime you'll be making a name for yourself, bonding with your fellow troopleaders and gaining the honour and prestige that your character will need to advance in the game later on."
It doesn't need to be a big wall of text but guides as to paths you can lead your character down and ways you can start to get involved, as well as warning that it often takes hours and sometimes a couple of days for other characters to respond to messages, would all help a new player avoid feeling lost, confused or disappointed by the gameplay experience.
4) The knight game mechanics by themselves are very boring and isolating
If your realm doesn't have active discussions going on then the basic knight game can be pretty dull. Even if you're getting orders your gameplay could quite easily just consist of login, train your men, travel to X, recruit men, train men, travel to Y, rinse and repeat. Over time that just becomes dull, repetitive and isolating. You might know that discussions are going on to decide important issues of war and peace but if they're happening behind closed doors then you soon feel pretty irrelevant.
I know that there's probably not much that can be done to make being a knight more interesting in turns of gameplay, and the real solution is to just have more active realms with lots of conversations for new knights to join in with (in my case, Vix Tiramora having public debate about just about every decision imaginable means that things are never quiet or boring), but anything that gave knights more to do to make an impact, or accomplish something in the game, would be an improvement.
5) Most of the flavour and history of the game is locked away out of sight and out of mind on the wiki or forum
Even Vix Tiramora is a great example of this. On the wiki there's lots of background to the realm and potentially lots of room for detail about its history or even just lots of flavour content but you have to leave the game in order to find it and create it. Most new players won't do this.
I don't think there's an easy way to bridge that gap but I remember that one of the best parts of the game years ago were the newspapers, histories, descriptions and propaganda that you could find on the wiki and I easily spent as much time checking the wiki as I did the game. Now people are less likely to check the wiki and, because it's separate from the game, it's updated a lot less.
But if it was, for instance, possible to create a newspaper within the game, update it within the game, read it within the game and distribute it within the game (probably on a continent wide basis via a notification message or even just a link from the politics section) then I bet you'd see active newspapers again. Similarly, while you get (often high quality) region descriptions within the game, a lot of other things are very bare bones in terms of flavour and detail.
The realm/government/army pages in the game have limited space and can only be contributed to by a very small number of people. Your realm might have a glorious history or detailed descriptions of how your constitution and governing bodies work but there's no space for it in the information pages. Your army might have a system of medals for honouring its heroes but there's no way to record it on the army pages. Your city might have been the capital of multiple realms in the past and been the sight of major battles but there's no way to see that on the region page unless you take the time to manually put it all in the region description. Your realm might have a long line of heroic kings and queens but there's no place in game to record their names and reigns.
You might have a detailed backstory for your family but the only place you can put it is the wiki, not in the game - a link to a family page on the wiki really isn't the same since, if nothing else, it requires you to create another account for the wiki and to get used to editing the wiki to create that detail. And you might have a clear idea of what your character looks like, and have accumulated impressive stats, but there's no way you can record a character description inside the game and the only way another character can even look at the stats of your player is through a convoluted route.
World building is such an important, and enjoyable, part of the game but by having most of it separate from the game and on the wiki it just creates more barriers to participation and leaves it isolated from the gameplay and liable to stagnate.
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I know that all of the above would take a lot of effort to fix, and some of them might be unfixable, but those are the main things I've noticed so far that limit the enjoyability of the game. In particular, I think that BM handholding new players through their first few days and weeks in the game and doing more to integrate flavour, history and RP descriptions into the game mechanics would do a lot to improve it.
After all, even if you join a realm, send an introduction letter and don't hear back for half a day, just being able to explore your new realm, read up about its long line of kings, look at the latest war heroes, read the character descriptions of prominent nobles and maybe read a newspaper published by some biased propagandist on the other side of the continent, all without ever leaving the game, would mean you'd come away impressed with the depth and detail in the game instead of just getting impatient because of the silence.
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P.S.
If helpful I could turn some of the above into feature requests :)
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This is probably one of the most useful replies I've read since I created a forum account. This is exactly the point of view we need. And since real new players won't be on here to explain the difficulties, your situation helps us greatly.
I have several things I want to respond to.
- We definitely should update the character creation process to more accurately display current information. Anything that can be helpful on those screens and is do-able from a technical perspective is welcome for me.
- A thing that concerns me greatly as well is having players guide them in character creation and then boom.. putting them in a realm and there's no guide whatsoever. I am not sure, though, how to fix this. A more elaborate message like the one you proposed is probably a good start. I know Gabanus (Aeneas) is currently proposing an outline for a new Tutorial (because surprise surprise, the old ones are pretty out dated). But from experience I know many of the new players didn't bother to click through this tutorial. I know Gildre has made a wonderful effort of actually recording a video (because yes, I think players are more inclined to watch a video tutorial of 3-4 or even 5 minutes then take the time to click through a text based basic tutorial) for the tutorials. At this moment, they are still a bit too long though. Any input you can offer us on that would be very great: https://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,7627.30.html . This tutorial link, or an inline video tutorial to watch could be a good start on how to proceed with roughly their first day in BM.
- Stagnation and activity: There's very little from technical perspective, I think, we can do about this. The game still is about interaction with each other and if the people simply don't do that, they're doomed to be bored. Same for electing in government officials once and have the same ones on top for years.
- Wiki: I've made it a big TODO to update many wiki pages and bundle the many help pages into something more useful than the current 'Basics', 'Manual', 'Introduction',.. It's not structured well and on top of that very outdated. Problem is time and effort of volounteers here. Anyone with access to wiki may update it where they see fit. The fact that it's separate to BM is a burden indeed, but I do not see how we can incorporate the huge amount of information that's there into BM. There's simply no room or we would be overcrowding things. I've recently made it possible to use links to wiki inline (through the [[ ]] codes) in BM so a direct link can be stashed. You can simply view wiki pages without an account, as long as you're not editing. I've pushed many times to have 1 account for all (BM - Forum (this is already in place I heard) - Bugtracker - Wiki). But I simply have no idea of its technical complications and possibilities.
- As for news papers, this will always be a player-based or manual update. There were some initiatives on the Wiki to have a newspaper in place for DWI know, but such things become rapidly obsolete since it's out of the game and no one cares to look. A great way to start on this could perhaps be the 'World News' link we have under information. I am unsure why that one was ever built, can't say I ever really looked at it. It looks aweful as well. But maybe we can transform this page into a more newspaper 'Herald' like design and appoint someone to update it with news. Problem here is if it's a player, it's prone to bias. If it's run by GM's or devs, the activity or feeling with what's going on will be lower.. Suggestions to elaborate on this topic are welcome.
Many other things came to mind but already forgotten. I'm very interested to take actions on this, since retaining new players is a very important technique of getting your playerbase back up.
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Those are some solid feedback.
How about making new players send a letter to their liege first, then another to their realm?
Once they press that play button for the first time, instead of showing them letters right away, direct them to send a message to your liege page with some flavour texts like 'as you kneel before your liege, your liege etc... if you want to say anything, please do so.' first then 'many nobles of your realm have sent you small gifts to congratulate the start of your new career. Send a letter to thank them' or something. Then again it does feel like you are trying to force this new person to write two letters off the bet.
As for knights not being able to do much, not sure there is that many solutions. The biggest issue I feel about the game is how top heavy it is. Most discussions happen at the top of the line so most of the time, knights only get orders or announcements. Maybe there are ways to strengthen the involvement of knights and make them matter more. Not just people who are there to command units.
As for wiki, maybe we can transfer some stuff from wiki to the game in the form of books. Mix something interesting too like history of famous families or storied battles etc.
As for making a tutorial, videoes are way to go I feel. But not sure how many will be interested in watching a video of a text game.
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This is perfect timing and some perfect stuff! As Wimpie said, we're working on making a new tutorial and I'm most in favor of the video idea of Gildre as well and since he's not active I will try to make some of my own (hopefully a first try this weekend or so, if I can find the time) hence I started writing an outline on what has to be in it. So any advice on that would be most welcome.
From what I gather it could provide a bit more info on the different islands and their upsides and downsides?
1) As for the government type, it's not that limiting anymore, it's more an issue of player base. I know Greater Xavax was a Monarchy and Oligarch was a tyranny, but both shared most, if not all the information, with the entire realm, because that's what we as rulers valued, the interaction of everyone. You mentioned Sirion yourself where I experienced the opposite within a Republic. So a tyranny can do that just as good as a Republic pretty much (these days you can choose seperately of your government types if elections for positions are held, so you could do an elect once in a democracy I think (uuuh, don't, just don't guys) and a elect monthly in tyrannies as we did in Oligarch for Judge and Banker.
2) I love the idea of updating some of the text within the game itself as well as to guiding the new players. Wimpie I'll be happy to volunteer for that also and hopefully Antonine as well, although would like to finish the new tutorials first.
5) For the first time now I'm honestly thinking about making a guild to preserve realm history. Would that work? Is there enough room for writing text etc? Rather than creation very complex new mechanics, it would maybe only extend the options of guilds slightly (ability to make a library kind of thing that's in game, or would that be too much info stored on the servers?).
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5) For the first time now I'm honestly thinking about making a guild to preserve realm history. Would that work? Is there enough room for writing text etc? Rather than creation very complex new mechanics, it would maybe only extend the options of guilds slightly (ability to make a library kind of thing that's in game, or would that be too much info stored on the servers?).
Just a quick note, I'm not at all sure why you want to create a guild to preserve realm history.
- I don't think there is enough space or appropriate space to write stuff
- Guilds can die and everything will be erased.
From my point of view, Wiki is still the place to be if we want to keep elaborate information, because it will always exist and keep the data and versions and such. Any realm bulletins, guild boards etc are temporary as all realms/guilds/religions/.. can die.
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So I don't know what the game's data infrastructure and set up looks like so there may be limits on what's actually feasible but here are my thoughts on potential ways to improve the issues I've identified:
1) & 2) Fixing realm stagnation and elites hoarding power is always going to be impossible to fix through mechanics but I do think some better guidance for rulers/dukes would be a good thing.
E.g. the ruler options could say something like "you are STRONGLY RECOMMENDED to share most information (though not all of it) with the realm as a whole and to encourage discussion even if you intend to ignore your subjects' opinion" and anything else that reminds rulers to take a key role in encouraging activity.
Equally, it might be useful if, in addition to the protest mechanic, there could be a way for knights to be discontented in a similar fashion to the way peasants can be discontented. There could be an option under Politics to set your room about the realm's direction to Happy, Content, Discontent, Unhappy, Neutral and then a weekly report could be sent to the realm with a summary of the mood of the realm's knights and lords according to category. That way characters would know what the overall mood of the realm was and have an anonymous way of giving feedback on the realm without having to stick their neck out with a public letter or protest. It would also give characters a way of knowing if the public mood might be safer for actual protest, public letters criticising the government or even rebellion - so it could be something which could enhance the use of the existing mechanics rather than taking away from them.
I also think that, in addition to improving the detail and guidance in the character creation process, when it comes to choosing a realm the Activity metric should be massively promoted and flagged for the player's attention. This would reward realms that are active and penalise realms which are inactive, which is a good thing. Because it means an active realm would gain nobles faster and therefore be more likely to beat realms with low activity which would in turn help encourage realm destruction and creation with the inactive realms gradually being eliminated in favour of those with a culture of activity.
It would also be great if there could be an alert displayed in game to everyone in a realm on a regular basis if their realm didn't have a description written for the new character creation process and if there was a reminder every two months of what the realm's description currently is just so that it doesn't just get forgotten or neglected.
3) Improving guidance within the game could probably just be a matter of improving the splash page for when you've just joined a realm to contain more advice and maybe including a brief description of each of the Actions, Orders, Politics, etc. tabs to say what they're for - ideally as hideable hints for new players that get auto-hidden after a certain amount of time in game.
4) There's only so much that could be done to improve the knight game but I think that one good mechanic would be either to open up the guild creation/construction mechanic to any noble with an estate (although only with the permission of the region lord) or to give knights the option to create mini message groups to expand the potential for knights to interact with each other from a social and organisational perspective.
Also, anything that would give knights the option to do more with their estate and/or unit would be a good thing. If I'm playing the game as a knight and I know that if I can save up enough then I'll be able to, for instance, build a smith at my estate so that my men (and my men only) can repair a limited amount of equipment damage, or build a new farm that will increase my tax income by 10%, or even just build a new manorhouse with a description that will be seen by anyone who looks at the region page, then it would give me achievable goals to work towards and deepen my connection to my estate/region in a way that just doesn't exist at the moment.
Equally, being able to create a character description in game (see point 5) which my character's name would link to (e.g. if a message comes from Sir Kepler then everyone who receives it can click on Sir Kepler's name and get taken to his character stats and description) would help improve my investment in developing my character from an RP perspective.
5) This leads neatly on to ways to improve the opportunity for player created flavour in the game. Obviously this would have an impact on the database and storage space could be an issue but here are a few things that I think could work well:
Newspapers
The Politics tab could have options to start a newspaper and read the newspapers. Anyone with enough gold could start a newspaper and any newspapers created on a continent could be read by any character on the same continent.
Newspapers could basically consist of one or more editors who could write and publish articles which could then be viewed on the newspaper's page in game. Articles would basically just be letters but without a sender name (it would be up to the author to include their name or pseudonym within the article). There could also be a button to allow any character to write to the editors of a newspaper to allow them to submit an article or share news which the editors could then publish.
Alternatively, a character could subscribe to a newspaper and articles from that newspaper would show up in the messages feed as they're published.
I don't think there should be any efforts to set up official newspapers for a continent or concerns about bias and propaganda. That should be left to players and a blatant propaganda sheet by one character could just serve to entertain others and maybe prompt them to start a propaganda sheet of their own.
Realm History and other flavour
Database storage could be an issue here. If it is then the only workaround I can think of is creating a way to view and edit (editing only for certain characters and if necessary through a shared wiki account) wiki pages in game. So a Realm History link on the Information menu could take you to an in game view of the appropriate page on the wiki - the key thing is that players should at least be able to read flavour content without leaving the game.
In terms of flavour content, there's already the option to build monuments with descriptions and create/edit ruler/judge/banker/general bulletins, etc. So creating, editing and viewing descriptions in game is already possible with current mechanics.
What I think is that there should be more places to put descriptions. You should be able to create an in game description of your character's appearance with other characters can view. You should be able to create and update a Realm History in the information pages (which even characters in other realms could read). You should have a way to view a game generated list of a realm's rulers (even if historic data can't be recovered it would be nice to have going forward). You should be able to write and view a description for an army (which would give you a way to record medals and other honours for heroes). And you should have space to write a more detailed realm description so there's space to talk about the realm's culture/alliances/etc. rather than being limited to a very short bulletin.
If it's not possible to store this information on the database then hopefully it would be possible to store it on the wiki but make it accessible in game. What I definitely think though is that you shouldn't need to leave the game just to be able to access the most basic lore, flavour and history about your realm at the very least. And if it is stored in game then there should be a way in which it gets copied to the wiki.
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Which reminds me, does the wiki have any kind of API?
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Just a quick note, I'm not at all sure why you want to create a guild to preserve realm history.
- I don't think there is enough space or appropriate space to write stuff
- Guilds can die and everything will be erased.
From my point of view, Wiki is still the place to be if we want to keep elaborate information, because it will always exist and keep the data and versions and such. Any realm bulletins, guild boards etc are temporary as all realms/guilds/religions/.. can die.
I have to agree. Guilds have limited space to write stuff and cost money to maintain. They're also easily destroyed and require active characters to keep them functioning. The administrative overhead and risk of destruction don't make it worth it IMO.
The only thing you could really use one for is as a library perhaps by having the internal description include a list of links to books/pages on the wiki - but I'm not even sure if direct links work if they're put in a description.
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I have to agree. Guilds have limited space to write stuff and cost money to maintain. They're also easily destroyed and require active characters to keep them functioning. The administrative overhead and risk of destruction don't make it worth it IMO.
The only thing you could really use one for is as a library perhaps by having the internal description include a list of links to books/pages on the wiki - but I'm not even sure if direct links work if they're put in a description.
It's been a long while since I did anything with guilds, but noted, no guild for that purpose.
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I have to agree. Guilds have limited space to write stuff and cost money to maintain. They're also easily destroyed and require active characters to keep them functioning. The administrative overhead and risk of destruction don't make it worth it IMO.
The only thing you could really use one for is as a library perhaps by having the internal description include a list of links to books/pages on the wiki - but I'm not even sure if direct links work if they're put in a description.
I think people make too many special-purpose guilds. Guilds with special purposes often lose their purpose, and then there's little reason to keep it around other than nostalgia. I think people should focus on combining the purposes of compatible guilds rather than having to build a network/infrastructure/membership for each and every one.
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I think people make too many special-purpose guilds. Guilds with special purposes often lose their purpose, and then there's little reason to keep it around other than nostalgia. I think people should focus on combining the purposes of compatible guilds rather than having to build a network/infrastructure/membership for each and every one.
Don't listen to this silly man. Just do what you want with guilds. They all die eventually. And you need to make one at least once at some point to gain those sweet fame points.
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Well, the whole structure of guilds/religions favors multiplication, because any elder can cause a lot of harm with just a few clicks, and whoever has the top rank can do whatever he pleases. If you've got a need for a guild, and you let someone else found it, you are leaving yourself at their mercy should your relations ever deteriorate.
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Don't listen to this silly man. Just do what you want with guilds. They all die eventually. And you need to make one at least once at some point to gain those sweet fame points.
Pffft, as if we don't have that fame point already :o
But we digress, the concept of a guild in terms of using it to keep records of the realm's history only has limited use to provide stuff for new players as it now stands other than storing a bunch of links towards the wiki.
If you want a discussion on guilds, what to do with them etc, I suggest a new topic
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No matter the medium, you can't really force people to click links or read what you send them.
It's kind of an inherent problem with social a game such as BM. Sometimes groups don't really put the minimum effort required to further the collective good, it's hard to regulate behavior. The wiki is external, but linking to it is easy and can be done inside the text editor with [[ ]]. So when it's just a click away, is it really that less accessible on the wiki than on some remote in-game page, like guild boards, region descriptions, or realm bulletins? The wiki is now largely outdated, but that's a player problem. People used to be zealously dedicated to it, with many newspapers, realm pages, and such always up to date. The Forum sucked in a lot of that out of character activity, but decreasing densities also means that that there are a lot less potential contributors per page. Player ageing and game culture shifts are also to blame. It used to be that just about every realm had a handful of extremely dedicated players, who'd be on IRC at every turn change, keep all the documents up to date, go about and recruit others, and so on. Lots of them left, the rest just don't have the time anymore, now having kids, a career, and all. What is there to do? Can't really make up a rule that a realm needs at least X zealous players in order to exist.
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No matter the medium, you can't really force people to click links or read what you send them.
It's kind of an inherent problem with social a game such as BM. Sometimes groups don't really put the minimum effort required to further the collective good, it's hard to regulate behavior. The wiki is external, but linking to it is easy and can be done inside the text editor with [[ ]]. So when it's just a click away, is it really that less accessible on the wiki than on some remote in-game page, like guild boards, region descriptions, or realm bulletins? The wiki is now largely outdated, but that's a player problem. People used to be zealously dedicated to it, with many newspapers, realm pages, and such always up to date. The Forum sucked in a lot of that out of character activity, but decreasing densities also means that that there are a lot less potential contributors per page. Player ageing and game culture shifts are also to blame. It used to be that just about every realm had a handful of extremely dedicated players, who'd be on IRC at every turn change, keep all the documents up to date, go about and recruit others, and so on. Lots of them left, the rest just don't have the time anymore, now having kids, a career, and all. What is there to do? Can't really make up a rule that a realm needs at least X zealous players in order to exist.
This is very true but the simple fact is that, as a new player, you can quite easily play the game without ever even realising that there's anything on the wiki other than a detailed game manual.
That's why I think having a lot of the fluff on the wiki is a bad idea. Yes it's only a few clicks away but it's only something that you encounter directly within the game if another player puts a link in front of your face. On the other hand, every character can see things like region descriptions, ruler bulletins and the like. There's also the factor that if you want to update something on the wiki you have to switch to it, login to your wiki account, go to the page and then edit it - assuming you've learned the wiki formatting syntax properly so your edit doesn't look like a mess.
Look at it this way: Before we had region descriptions in game there was nothing stopping lords updating the region descriptions on the wiki. But after region descriptions became an in game thing then it didn't take long for lords to update their region descriptions, adding some pretty permanent (but periodically changing) flavour to the game in the process.
I think that if you had a similar facility in game for realm history, character descriptions, army descriptions, newspapers, etc. then they would get a lot more usage simply because the average player is going to run into them regularly within the game rather than them all being left out of sight and out of mind on the wiki.
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A few places in the game link to the wiki, maybe we should make references to the wiki more common? That way it'd be harder to be oblivious to its existence.
The wiki has its advantages, though, such as record-keeping. You can go look at the history of pages, and that can be interesting in itself. Also no one person can forever erase the great texts of predecessors.
The point you make about regions is valid (though many of them I think still lack descriptions, many that do have a mediocre one at best), regions are at least permanent. Realms, characters, armies, guilds, newspapers, these kinds of things are not, and the game tends to erase unused data. We could add more stuff in game for those, but we have to remember that it wouldn't be as enduring.
I'll concede that it's not particularly tempting to multiply the references to the wiki, though, when one considers how it's mostly increasingly obsolete (information not getting updated).
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Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:
- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.
Things I like and could possible be investigated more:
A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)
API exists, as far as I know, to create pages from external source (like some event in BM triggers the creation of a page with certain content). Not sure about updating an existing page through API.
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Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:
- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.
Things I like and could possible be investigated more:
A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)
API exists, as far as I know, to create pages from external source (like some event in BM triggers the creation of a page with certain content). Not sure about updating an existing page through API.
I mostly agree.
Autonitifications sounds like a fair idea, keeping in mind to avoid it being spam. Completely legitimate to spam the realm for not having a description at all yet, or an empty bulletin. A bit less so for banners, which often take dev approval. Not a great idea for outdated bulletins and such though (which I know you didn't mention, I am), unless we want to lose relics of the past like Outer Tilog's (or code in an exception for that one). Forcing meaningless changes would not really be productive though.
Armies have descriptions? Where the hell can we read them? Maybe I'm just clueless because the armies I can see had none set.
I completely agree with giving players more information at character creation, always have. I've made relevant suggestions in the past, at least some of which are now live. Activity meters and chattyness meters have been suggested a few times, though the concern is always promoting spamming. Perhaps a breakdown of average messages per day, broken down by message type and by sender could help give a better idea. One could therefore see if "this realm has an average of 5 messages per day! but an average of 1 person writing per day... maybe I'll pick the other with the average of 4 messages per day sent by 2.5 people per day instead."
More record keeping would be nice. In the past many would do this on the wiki, but often only for rulership, mostly in non-elected realms, and only for as long as the record keeper was around. The list of past government members, how they got there (election, appointment, rebellion), how they got out (resigned, election, protests, died, wound), would be nice. Even if it only starts keeping records now.
Giving more things to do to knights is always a double-edged sword, though. This game is built on the premises of masses of knights blindly following orders into warfare. The game's culture has evolved much since, and so have demographics, with the reality of things being closer to equal masses of knights and lords sometimes following orders into the occasional war, but still. If the new things we give to knights remove from their ability to follow orders and go to war, then we are further handicapping realms' capacity to go to war, which is already at a historical low.
Knights having nothing to do in peace is somewhat problematic, but really, no one has anything to do in peace. Lord have more buttons to click, sure, but most of them you never touch. One doesn't change the tax rate every day, nor build new recruitment centers, and so on. Once a region is set, it's auto-pilot, you mostly forget it, at which point it's really only a vanity title (of decreasing value as the number of knights:lords wanes). The ruler might be in on some continental regal private club chat, but that rarely extends to all lords when it does not also extend to everyone.
Two things come to mind, though. First is to increase incentives to go to war and for what knights can do in war. The most prominent of which is looting. Make it more desirable (without making it cripple the victims for ages). Both by the ones at the top and lower down. For example, you could increase the gold and food reward going to all looting actions, without taking it out of the region's treasury (stealing goods directly from the locals). Add the option to knights to specifically target heathens, not just temples. For peace time, consider Civ-like quests. "This city-state wants you to go clear that barbarian camp nearby" kind of thing, but at the knight level (or both knight and realm level?). "You meet an aristocratic refugee offers you a reward for coming to clear the bandits in his region", which can be in foreign lands. Doesn't even need to be something external like actual monsters, could just be a link that appears only to the player once he gets there. Rewards can be gold and h/p. "Your subjects seek spiritual guidance from your part", "your subjects would like you to import food good from far away", "your subjects would want you to come deal out justice", and so on. Ideally these things shouldn't trigger too much during wars, if at all, though, to avoid dissuading knights from participating in what is the core of the game. Because let's remember that the only way knights are getting lordships, outside of war, is through player decay, and that's not something we should be aiming for.
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Army description:
Go to information & your army. There's an extra field there 'Description'. It's been there for quite some time: http://bugs.battlemaster.org/view.php?id=8582 .
Sponsors can set description on their army sponsorship specific page.
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Comments on things that I don't particularly agree with:
- We don't want anyone else besides the Lord to build stuff in the region. Priests can't build temples, Knights can't build guildhouses (even with the approval of the lord).
- Mini-message groups go against what we want, realm wide conversations. I believe there are more than enough channels already.
- I think the building of smiths or farms in own estate are a bit far fetched and will more complicate the game. Estates are mostly temporary, since knights should strive to become lord one day anyway.
- Descriptions for armies already exist, but probably barely used. Recording medals and such on there as I am doing in Vix on a wiki page for example will be very difficult. We don't have the extended markup text options in these description boxes as we have on wiki.
That's fair enough, though I do at least thing it would be nice if you could a) write a description for your estate (which would be displayed on the region page) and b) spend gold to build a purely flavour Building which would be displayed on the region page in the same way as monuments are.
It wouldn't change gameplay at all but it would give knights something to do with their estates and give them a way to contribute fluff to the game as well as perhaps making them more emotionally attached to their region. I know that the goal of a knight should be to become a lord but the fact is that lots of realms have long-established region lords so vacancies are few and far between - a new player in particular might have to wait a while to become a region lord and at least having several actions available to a knight character immediately would give them something to do even in a quiet realm.
In terms of armies it may well be that you should just have a link to an automatically generated wiki page with a section for recording medals and what-not. The key thing should be that the flavour is automatically put in front of players in-game so that they at least have a reason to know it exists without relying on another player to point it out to them.
Things I like and could possible be investigated more:
A. Autonotification if realm does not have realm description set
B. Improve realm joining page to explain more the different options & guide the player better. Should only be visible for first character ever for this player.
C. Newspaper option could be detailed out. I like the idea of having something that we can use and see in game, but not sure how it should be run. If completely up to the players, I'm afraid we'll be having a newspaper per realm with just plain propaganda.
D. A character description/stats page for better flavour and RP sounds nice as well. To be discussed.
E. I like the idea of linking Information tab directly to wiki page of realm, for example, but unsure about the technical capabilities of Wiki to be viewed inline. It will probably look like a mess though. Wiki simply has huge advantages.
F. Keep a chronological history of realm's rulers sounds like something that would add to realm's flavour history. Don't think we can capture it from the past though. This in combination with the more detailed realm description (in combination with E?)
A. It should also periodically remind everyone in the realm of what it actually says - otherwise someone could write one, it gets forgotten about and then becomes massively out of date and misleading a year later.
B. I think one of the key metrics put in front of players here and massively highlighted should be activity, especially for new players. More than anything else, an active realm is the key factor in making sure you have fun in the first realm you end up in. But the most important thing is that new players should be given realistic expectations of what will happen in their first few days of the game and the things they'll be able to do. If you're expecting hectic action and then find yourself unable to do much more than travel and waiting hours to get a reply to your welcome message then you'll give up but if you're given a realistic idea of what the game will be like and what you should do to begin with then you'll be less likely to be unhappy with the gameplay.
C. I remember back when newspapers were a thing. Pretty much every realm had its own newspaper and they were full of propaganda. It was great! You had your realm's version of the truth and your enemy's version with the truth somewhere in between. You had wars of words and realms without newspapers would be motivated to set up their own to counter the propaganda of their enemy. And you had some which deliberately tried to be impartial and cross-realm instead. It was a whole mess of activity that made the game feel really alive and if we saw that happening again then I'd be just as happy about it as if we only got a couple of staid, impartial, collaborative, continent-wide newspapers.
E. I can easily imagine that viewing the wiki inline might be impractical. So perhaps the easiest workaround, as you say, is to have auto-generated pages on the wiki for the Realm Description and Realm History which are then linked to from the Information screen (and the Realm List).
F. If this could be done then perhaps it could be used by the semantic wiki to help auto-populate the Realm History via a template?
Finally, I know that the above are all likely to take a significant amount of time and effort to implement. If it helps, I'd be happy to assist on some of the simpler tasks since I'm a lot more experienced as a dev now than I was the first time I tried to assist with BM development :)
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P.S. Is there anywhere I could go to look at the wiki API at all please?
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P.S. Is there anywhere I could go to look at the wiki API at all please?
You should probably poke Ethan Lee Vita for that.
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That's fair enough, though I do at least thing it would be nice if you could a) write a description for your estate (which would be displayed on the region page) and b) spend gold to build a purely flavour Building which would be displayed on the region page in the same way as monuments are.
It wouldn't change gameplay at all but it would give knights something to do with their estates and give them a way to contribute fluff to the game as well as perhaps making them more emotionally attached to their region. I know that the goal of a knight should be to become a lord but the fact is that lots of realms have long-established region lords so vacancies are few and far between - a new player in particular might have to wait a while to become a region lord and at least having several actions available to a knight character immediately would give them something to do even in a quiet realm.
In terms of armies it may well be that you should just have a link to an automatically generated wiki page with a section for recording medals and what-not. The key thing should be that the flavour is automatically put in front of players in-game so that they at least have a reason to know it exists without relying on another player to point it out to them.
A. It should also periodically remind everyone in the realm of what it actually says - otherwise someone could write one, it gets forgotten about and then becomes massively out of date and misleading a year later.
B. I think one of the key metrics put in front of players here and massively highlighted should be activity, especially for new players. More than anything else, an active realm is the key factor in making sure you have fun in the first realm you end up in. But the most important thing is that new players should be given realistic expectations of what will happen in their first few days of the game and the things they'll be able to do. If you're expecting hectic action and then find yourself unable to do much more than travel and waiting hours to get a reply to your welcome message then you'll give up but if you're given a realistic idea of what the game will be like and what you should do to begin with then you'll be less likely to be unhappy with the gameplay.
C. I remember back when newspapers were a thing. Pretty much every realm had its own newspaper and they were full of propaganda. It was great! You had your realm's version of the truth and your enemy's version with the truth somewhere in between. You had wars of words and realms without newspapers would be motivated to set up their own to counter the propaganda of their enemy. And you had some which deliberately tried to be impartial and cross-realm instead. It was a whole mess of activity that made the game feel really alive and if we saw that happening again then I'd be just as happy about it as if we only got a couple of staid, impartial, collaborative, continent-wide newspapers.
E. I can easily imagine that viewing the wiki inline might be impractical. So perhaps the easiest workaround, as you say, is to have auto-generated pages on the wiki for the Realm Description and Realm History which are then linked to from the Information screen (and the Realm List).
F. If this could be done then perhaps it could be used by the semantic wiki to help auto-populate the Realm History via a template?
Finally, I know that the above are all likely to take a significant amount of time and effort to implement. If it helps, I'd be happy to assist on some of the simpler tasks since I'm a lot more experienced as a dev now than I was the first time I tried to assist with BM development :)
Giving knights the ability to flavor estates sounds fair, though keep in mind they are all reset when a region is lost, and that lords can and more or less regularly open and close them.
Newspapers were propaganda, that's what they were about. If someone just wanted to write to one's own realm mates, one already can pretty easily. The purpose was also to reach out to foreigners. Made them interesting to read, too, for the most part. They could be handled in game, though, in the information tab perhaps, and every entry could be pushed automatically to the wiki by the game itself. A notice could be sent out to the continent every time a new article appears, and everyone would have the option to mute notices from specific newspapers. Some restrictions should be had, though, to avoid people using it as a means to quickly relay information to the whole continent (15k CS of Bobistan in Smallville!) as a lazy means to target just a subgroup of it. Perhaps delays in publication. Not sure how much work such a thing would require though.
Periodic updates to everyone seems fine. Every 4 months, perhaps, everyone gets an update "the X bulletin was last updated Y months ago", with a link to it. Most bulletins take quite a while to "expire" though.
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I REALLY like the idea of the Civ-like quests, it should definitely help.
Chenier, if you want I'll chuck it in a feature request.
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Go ahead. 8)
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Giving knights the ability to flavor estates sounds fair, though keep in mind they are all reset when a region is lost, and that lords can and more or less regularly open and close them.
Newspapers were propaganda, that's what they were about. If someone just wanted to write to one's own realm mates, one already can pretty easily. The purpose was also to reach out to foreigners. Made them interesting to read, too, for the most part. They could be handled in game, though, in the information tab perhaps, and every entry could be pushed automatically to the wiki by the game itself. A notice could be sent out to the continent every time a new article appears, and everyone would have the option to mute notices from specific newspapers. Some restrictions should be had, though, to avoid people using it as a means to quickly relay information to the whole continent (15k CS of Bobistan in Smallville!) as a lazy means to target just a subgroup of it. Perhaps delays in publication. Not sure how much work such a thing would require though.
Periodic updates to everyone seems fine. Every 4 months, perhaps, everyone gets an update "the X bulletin was last updated Y months ago", with a link to it. Most bulletins take quite a while to "expire" though.
I think lords being able to open, close, delete, etc. estates is completely fair and realistic but if a region is lost then perhaps estates shouldn't just get wiped? They could become vacant instead (and if the region is rogue then obviously no one should be able to take up an estate) so it's then up to the new region owner to decide if they want to keep/modify the existing estates or not. I mean it's already the case that one region lord can just wipe the description given to it by their predecessor but I don't think fluff should be wiped unless a player action causes it to happen.
In terms of updates about the bulletins perhaps they could just be a six-monthly reminder of what the bulletin currently says. E.g. "Reminder: The Ruler Bulletin currently says X (and was last updated Y months ago)." That way you don't feel pressured to update it just for the sake of doing so but people will notice if it's become outdated.
In terms of newspapers I think that preventing sharing of detailed information could just be a matter of a strongly worded warning at the top of the newspaper article writing window. But equally, if someone wants to write a newspaper article saying "Our glorious army marched from the capital of Kepler today to attack the vile enemy stronghold of Butterville" or post a summary of a battle that's happened then I don't think that should be a problem - besides, if you're foolish enough to rely on your enemy's propaganda to keep track of what they're doing then you're just asking to be fed deliberate misinformation ;)
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Anyone may feel free to put the other topics into feature requests as well ;D
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Update on this: still haven't had time to put these into feature requests but it turns out the wiki does have the API installed which would allow the game to directly edit pages on the wiki.
And there's also an extension available which, if installed, could pull a page from the wiki as HTML to allow it to be viewed in game.
So perhaps this would be a solution to the database storage issue if more descriptions and fluff end up being added to the game. The description storage could be handled in the wiki but it could be created, edited and viewed in game via the API.
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. . .
So, instead of doing a bunch of stuff in the game's database and teaching it how to track events, you all want to teach the game how to edit the wiki so the wiki's database can track events?
What?
Actually, I have an image for how little sense this is making to me:
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aSlu4HgEgHo/S7PMAMhujII/AAAAAAAAALI/OSUUfk_me5Y/s1600/star-wars-darth-vader-sense.jpg)
Anyways, I did talk to Anaris about newspapers being moved in game on IRC, and it sounds like it's approved as a CONCEPT for them to be moved in game assuming someone is willing to do the work to add them. Which lines up nicely, because I'm going to start reworking M&F's own publications system soon, and I'm not a fan of re-inventing wheels.
In regards to database storage issues, it's not so much that you can't add things to the game, it's that you need to add them in a way that keeps them from just taking up extra space.
Say you added newspapers or books, or just in general: publications, right? How do you add them in such a way that they take up the least amount of space for the least amount of time.
That same principle applies to the game as well. Storing things in the game, will take up less space.
Let me give you an example. Say you edit the realm page of Perdan (they're still a realm, right?) with a new description. The wiki will log who edited, what they changed, and the new page, all to it's database. If you want to edit the realm description in game, the game will just track new description, and not care about the old one or log who did it.
The advantage of in-game content is also that it's IN the game. Players are more likely to interact with it, and it automatically makes it IC info.
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Viewing old versions of wiki pages is nice sometimes though. ::)
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. . .
So, instead of doing a bunch of stuff in the game's database and teaching it how to track events, you all want to teach the game how to edit the wiki so the wiki's database can track events?
What?
Actually, I have an image for how little sense this is making to me:
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aSlu4HgEgHo/S7PMAMhujII/AAAAAAAAALI/OSUUfk_me5Y/s1600/star-wars-darth-vader-sense.jpg)
Anyways, I did talk to Anaris about newspapers being moved in game on IRC, and it sounds like it's approved as a CONCEPT for them to be moved in game assuming someone is willing to do the work to add them. Which lines up nicely, because I'm going to start reworking M&F's own publications system soon, and I'm not a fan of re-inventing wheels.
In regards to database storage issues, it's not so much that you can't add things to the game, it's that you need to add them in a way that keeps them from just taking up extra space.
Say you added newspapers or books, or just in general: publications, right? How do you add them in such a way that they take up the least amount of space for the least amount of time.
That same principle applies to the game as well. Storing things in the game, will take up less space.
Let me give you an example. Say you edit the realm page of Perdan (they're still a realm, right?) with a new description. The wiki will log who edited, what they changed, and the new page, all to it's database. If you want to edit the realm description in game, the game will just track new description, and not care about the old one or log who did it.
The advantage of in-game content is also that it's IN the game. Players are more likely to interact with it, and it automatically makes it IC info.
Sorry but you've completely misunderstood what I was saying.
I initially suggested that things like the Realm History, Realm Summary, character descriptions, estate descriptions, newspapers, etc. should be included as in-game things that players can view and edit in-game.
I was told that issues with this might be that it could a) give players even less reason to visit the wiki, b) cause problems in terms of database storage and c) mean that earlier versions of things like realm histories get lost.
Now I don't know what the database situation is or how it's structured but one way around these problems would be to use the wiki API so that when something like a character description is written, the wiki API is used to automatically create that as a page on the wiki at the same time. When a player goes to view a character description in game, the API is used to pull the content from the wiki to display in game. When a player edits the description then the wiki page could be updated.
This would solve the problems that other people have raised. So yes, it would involve teaching the game to edit the wiki. But if people are concerned about keeping records of past versions of things and making sure they're not just temporary things which can only seen by a limited number of players in game then that's the most logical solution.
However, I would equally be happy if these things were added solely in game and were, just like the realm council bulletins, overwriteable at any time and lost when the realm dies/character dies/estate is deleted/newspaper goes inactive/etc.
I don't really care which approach was followed as long as the content is made available in game for players to see and interact with it instead of being hidden away on the wiki.
And, as I've already mentioned, I would be happy to do the coding involved to implement these changes, including the newspapers, if that's something that the dev team would be comfortable with. I don't like to just suggest a solution when I'm not prepared to do something to make it happen
For what it's worth, I think that one advantage of teaching the game to edit the wiki is that, provided the code was done as a 'black box' and properly encapsulated, it could be re-used in lots of places. I think the best way to start would be with something already existing in the game (like region descriptions) and then, once that was working, it would be fairly trivial to use the same functionality for lots of other bits of in-game fluff.
But if the preference is just for the simple, in-game solution, then I really wouldn't object to that either.
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While I agree with Chenier that the wiki history can be interesting in itself, I don't think I misunderstood you. If a concern is about database size, the wiki isn't the way to go. That's not me saying it's a bad idea to use the wiki, it's just a statement based on how the wiki functions compared to the game.
I guess the best question here, for Anaris, is where he thinks things should be. Game vs Wiki vs Something Else.
Adding descriptions in game is easy. It's just text loaded in specific spots with a page to submit it.
Adding newspapers in game would be doable. They're mutliple text boxes associated to each other, at the minimum. At the maximum, the game keeps track of who has what editions or what guild runs them and you can only read those you have.
Adding realm histories would be a considerable amount of work. It's a lot of new code that would need to go in a lot of different places. I'm pretty confident in saying that, based solely on the amount of places I have to do event triggers in M&F. That's also a HUGE database addition, one I'm certain would see the size of the game's database significantly increase.
As for your black box concept, yeah, that should be the goal of anything like that. The game already has a similar implementation for the forum. Ideally, you just pass a few variables to a php method and it just does everything as necessary. Once the methods are all built, include a use statement where you need it and presto, it's done and good.
The impression I get, is if you're willing to contribute to the game's development, they're not likely to turn you away. To code for BM, the bulk of what you need to know is HTML and PHP. There's some JavaScript in places, and while the game is slowly getting away from it, still a number of SQL queries in places.
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Adding realm histories would be a considerable amount of work. It's a lot of new code that would need to go in a lot of different places. I'm pretty confident in saying that, based solely on the amount of places I have to do event triggers in M&F. That's also a HUGE database addition, one I'm certain would see the size of the game's database significantly increase.
So when I say realm histories I mean two things, the second of which is non-essential.
The first thing is just a link on the Information page to something called Realm History. This, like the ruler bulletin, would be blank by default and up to the players to edit. At its most basic it would literally just be a text box which the users and could function in a very similar way to the existing ruler bulletin.
It would be nice if the game were to automatically record and display a list of rulers, with titles, for each realm (to be displayed either as an addition to the Realm History or as a standalone thing on the Information page) but this isn't essential and, if it were to be done, should be relatively straight forward to implement.
Ideally the game would push the above content to pages on the wiki as well (I have some ideas on how that could work and be done) but that's not essential either.
What I'm certainly NOT suggesting is that the game automatically generate a history for each realm based on in-game events.
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Ah, you mean a realm propaganda page! That's just a text box, and should be an easy add, if approved.
A history of rulers wouldn't be hard to add either. The only downside is that it'd probably start now, unless they find a way to pull it from the family histories somehow.
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Ah, you mean a realm propaganda page! That's just a text box, and should be an easy add, if approved.
A history of rulers wouldn't be hard to add either. The only downside is that it'd probably start now, unless they find a way to pull it from the family histories somehow.
Yup, exactly. Basically the same as what a lot of realms already put on the wiki - an official history presented from their perspective. So just another way for players to add fluff in game to flesh out their realm and its heritage and to demonise their enemies :)
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Lots and Lots of good ideas
I wasn't even aware of most of these as it has been so long since I started my last character, much less my family. And since I check daily, I am familiar with all the ins and outs already and never really considered all the room for improvement you just flashed a light over.
I really hope you decide to draft some specific feature requests.
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I wasn't even aware of most of these as it has been so long since I started my last character, much less my family. And since I check daily, I am familiar with all the ins and outs already and never really considered all the room for improvement you just flashed a light over.
I really hope you decide to draft some specific feature requests.
I think turning these into specific feature requests is going to be most of my Saturday :)
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I think turning these into specific feature requests is going to be most of my Saturday :)
Good!
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UPDATE:
Haven't turned even most of these into feature requests yet but I've started on improving the info for new players:
https://imgur.com/a/pzP9K (https://imgur.com/a/pzP9K)
(Screenshot taken from the development version of the game rather than the live one). Feedback very much appreciated :)
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Hello, new player here. I got into the game from a Discord clan that I joined for unrelated reasons, and their discussions got me interested. I joined the Kingdom (Highmarch) that several of the members helped to found and found it to be quite lively, with constant messaging and communication. A new noble coming from another Kingdom also said something similar, that he had gotten more messages in his first 5 hours in Highmarch than in the entire time he was at the other kingdom. I also got A LOT of help from my clan with the crash course of what things meant what, and how to navigate the menus and where to go to help out. I even got to participate in a few battles, which was interesting.
Unfortunately, I got wounded in the second battle, so I'm stuck twiddling my thumbs at the healers, and from what I can find on the wiki, after I'm out of the healers I'll be unable to travel anywhere for even more time due to recovery and since I'm in enemy territory and need to get back to the capitol to resupply (I have all of 3 guys left of my unit), it means I'll be stuck doing nothing even longer. I'm willing to suck it up and wait because of the support of my clan and because this game really interests me; but i can easily see another new player dropping it after essentially loosing the ability to play for multiple days in a row due to participating in a battle. I understand why wounds are in the game, but I feel that at the very least, the chance of new players (lets say less than 30 days playing) getting them should be reduced and/or they should heal the wound faster.
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I actually agree. New players shouldn't even be wounded for the first 3 months at least. If you are in a peaceful realm, you won't even see a battle for the first month. Good that there are plenty to fight these days.
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Welcome (again) first of all and glad you like it so far. Highmarch is indeed quite active and has some interesting dynamics also in terms of its nobility.
I actually really like your suggestion of wounding of new chars and will check later today if there's already a feature request for that, otherwise I'll make one.