Author Topic: New Player Experience  (Read 27964 times)

Chenier

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Re: New Player Experience
« Reply #30: August 04, 2017, 07:01:43 PM »
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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