Making your realm interesting can be as simple as a few letters going up and down the chain of command, beyond the usual orders and reports. Right now in many places BM is just a strategy game, and there is almost zero roleplaying going on (and by roleplaying I don't just mean narrative RPs, I mean nobles interacting among eachother). To me, the reason I've been playing BM for over 8 years now is that it was an entirely unique game, but it's lost a lot of its flair recently. But I don't think that the problem will be (or even can be) solved by adding or removing mechanics. I get the feeling that a lot of players are expecting Tom and the dev team to come up with solutions, but to say it with a huge cliché: true change starts with one's self.
The community is what makes BM unique, so the community bears a responsibility to keep it that way. If enough of us put in a little bit of extra effort, I think it will create a snowball effect, involving more and more people until the game is back to the level of activity it had years ago. And it really can be as simple as just sending a few letters here and there.
I certainly can agree with the idea that involving the rest of the realm in much of the 'higher up' discussion is a good way to attempt to gather more interest from the entire realm. I have been doing this with both of my ruler characters lately, but unfortunately, it only seems to be having a minor effect at best.
It is nice to (even in monarchy/theocratic/tyranny type regimes) include the entire realm in discussion of foreign policy, possible treaties and the like, and I have certainly been doing my best to do this - but as I said, only a handful of people are actually 'taking the bait' so to speak and offering input and discussion. It does make me quite sad.
Another way to address the low noble count is to re-think the character limits rules. That doesn't mean abolishing character limits, but perhaps the rules can be tweaked. For example:
- Rather than increasing +1 every 12 months, every 9 or 10 months instead.
- Offer a +1 to certain players on the condition that their character will be in a fledgling realm or island.
- Give out more medals
- Give a fam/honour/prestige boost to players who go to fledgling, or less desirable realms or islands.
These are just a few off the top of my head. I'm sure the BattleMaster Brain-Trust, i.e. the collective genius of all of us, could come up with more and better innovations.
Though I have always been in favor of increasing the character limit (or increasing the rate at which new character slots can be obtained), I have always respected the reasons for leaving them as they are. In this case, I have seen the argument being made that it is more a matter of increasing the player count, not the character limit.
As much as I would love to be playing fifteen characters, I do find it tricky to keep up with my five I currently have. I definitely agree with you, but I do think it'd only have a marginal effect at best, unfortunately. I also am aware that this has been replied to with very similar feedback to my own.
Tom, please please please let new players have three starting nobles, not two.
I too think that this would be a decent idea, though I think the time it would take for an all new player to get the hang of the game and start capitalizing on the additional slot might mean we won't see the fruit of such a change until some time well into the future.
Easy way to increase n° of new players joining:
-Allow @hotmail people to create accounts. Most people aren't going to bother making a new email adress just to see how a game is if they only have a hotmail email adress. I know some cases of this.
I for one can state that this was an issue for me in the past (though I still made an account on a secondary email address). Obviously I cannot speak for everyone else who has/had a Hotmail account but it is no longer an issue for me now and wasn't enough of an issue to keep me from playing before.
With that being said, some people would find this kind of a hurdle to be not worth the extra effort. With that being said, someone who is so easily turned off by an obstacle this small probably wouldn't be much of a useful player to the overall survival of BattleMaster as a whole. Even someone like me who has left and come back two times now, I don't feel like I am really doing even a fraction of my part toward amplifying the game's survivability. I am sure for every player who leaves and comes back there are hundreds who leave and never come back, sadly...
Do away with all the paranoid limits and restrictions
Though I normally would approve of this in the interest of improving retention and interest, I do know from personal experience that lightening restrictions can lead to very interesting game play in the short (and long run), rebellions, factions forming, and that sort of thing, though for a player who has been 'at the top' for a long time in a particular realm, he or she might find it extremely frustrating and difficult to get back into the swing of things if he/she has to rebuild everything from the ground up after being dethroned.
I personally like the idea of fighting exciting, internal conflicts and have been on both ends of them in the past. However, it can be frustrating if something you've worked for for many years suddenly came to an end in a very interesting struggle. With that being said, at least we're not talking about Eve where we can not only lose years of hard work, but also $7000+ worth of in game merchandise as well
Our problem is not noble count. Our problem is player count.
I'm done discussing ideas to increase the number of characters per player. We've been over this two dozen times.
Very true, though I do think the character count increase could help in a small way, the ultimate issue here is the player count which has been said repeatedly.
Which is why the correct order is deciding upon an island first and THEN giving people an opportunity to save it by finding enough new players. As long as the threat is abstract, not much will happen.
You know, this actually gave me an interesting idea. Beluaterra has long been the island that has to deal with supernatural disasters and fight to survive. Lack of Role Playing and in some cases "conflict" has been stated to be a large issue for the lack of player retention.
Why can we not have a
Game Wide catastrophe of some sort? A game wide fight for survival? I am not talking about linking all of the continents together programmatically or anything along those lines, but a huge humanity-wide fight for survival that will ultimately lead to one island's total destruction?
The colonies would find themselves at a slight disadvantage due to the one turn per day limit (and as much as I am not a fan of the colonies, its temporary removal from the game would not bring too many players back to the other continents due to its already low player base and the fact that many of them there are there BECAUSE of the one turn rule), but what I envision is a massive "World vs World" type of scenario where all islands are fighting some sort of united force (united Role Playing wise, not programmatically) and the island to lose all of its regions first to this new threat is the island that gets "frozen" (occupied) by this new force?
The reason I like this idea is that it sort of goes hand in hand with a long term idea I have as well, but I'll hold off on that for the moment...
Darfix? Holy crap! Talk about a blast from the past.... Welcome back! I totally didn't realize that was you....
I've been around for awhile - I just have been hesitant to reveal exactly who I am for various reasons. I stepped on plenty of toes on my previous account and I am not sure that 'all is forgiven'. I've grown up some since then and don't let things bother me like I used to, and seeing that BM's future is on the line has motivated me into 'all bets are off mode', so - here I am once again. I was not expecting such an enthusiastic re-welcome, so I do appreciate it
