Message #122898

[Blue Star]

Some thoughts about the idea that Battlemaster is dying.

Firstly we need to look at the medium. Think back to when you started playing Battlemaster. Now consider, how many other games that you were playing at the time are you still playing? And just HOW often you play them. In general, no matter how good or how much you enjoyed a game, you are going to move on. People achieve the goals that mattered to them, or simply find other games/hobbies/activities that are more interesting to them.

This is why, while having long term players leave is sad, it is also mostly inevitable. Now people will bring up games like MOO, CIV and others that remain popular, and sure they do. But even those gaming classics have nothing like the popularity they once enjoyed. I fire up my favourite old games for a couple of weeks in a given year. When CIV first came out I played it for 4-6 hours daily for 3 months.

So if you assume that at least some percentage of long term players leaving is unavoidable, you arrive at the next problem - New player retention, The golden days of text based web game is long gone in terms of popularity, the advent and popularity of casual web based games has massively changed peoples expectations for web games in general.

All this doesn't mean we can't improve aspects of the game, nor does it mean the decline couldn't have been less significant then it has been. I do however think the reality is that we are likely never going to see the player numbers we had in the past. I think we can make the game more approachable to those that actually fit the niche, which will help new player retention, however the reality is more then likely that there just isn't a huge pool of new players interested in this style of game.

In terms of retaining old players, it is sometimes a catch 22. Improving the game surely keeps it interesting and can help retain players, but you have to remember that no two people want the same thing from Battlemaster. New feature X might be just what we need to keep one group of players interested, while another group either hate it so much they leave, or they leave because while implementing feature X we did not have time to implement feature Y, which would have been interesting to them.

The game needs to be changed so that it remains viable with fewer players. I would think that we actually need to modify it in such a way that it remains viable should the player base continue to decline so that in 2-3 years we don't run the risk that low player density is significantly detracting from the game for those that remain. We also need to be clever enough with the changes that in the case that numbers do increase, we don't have the opposite issue where higher player density is causing issues.

+1