501warhead 1796 Share Posted May 17, 2018 Hail friends of the Dominion As many of you have seen the Cloud Temple has gotten a fair bit of a facelift thanks to the wonders of plastic surgery The World Development team. After a few months of work on both the plugin and build side we’re pleased to introduce a friendlier layout to new players and old players alike with new features for all to enjoy. See attached screenshot for how it looks now if you have somehow not managed to see it in the time it takes me to write this post (aka half an eternity) There are many new facilities here for players to enjoy as well as a streamlined process for new players to get right into the world without getting too lost at the new temple A Huntsmaster who will guide you to finding and fighting powerful spawning enemies throughout the world A bounty board that will soon have many different posted bounties to collect A return of the AuctionHouse, located in the tavern Etcetera However as fun as most of these are (and they really are, the mobs can be really fun if you can get past the dying part. But hey, Dark Souls is popular) this post has another purpose, something of a duality. Lately the great non-secret has been that we’ve been looking a lot at growing the playerbase and the server. This is something fairly important to us and through making applications easy and making not voting hard we’ve managed to pull in 829 new players this year alone. This would not be possible without our outstanding Application Team and the works of @Sporadic who continues to be a gem. New applications however are only just one aspect of server growth, with retention being a significant factor at play here as well. Out of 829 new players that we’ve accepted only 300 (Oddly enough this was the exact number) of them played 10 hours in their first month. This could be as a result of playing after the start of the next month but such cases are ultimately rather rare, but the number is still pretty good all things considered. However, out of those 300 only about 74 played during their second month meaning we lost around 226 players who did not want to continue playing after playing the server for a bit. Smash those two numbers together and out comes out retention rate of players who actually tried the server; 24.7%. While this rate isn’t specifically bad it can definitely be higher and considering that our server is intended to be played for the long term (7 years and running) the more the merrier, so we’re seeking to raise that number. For that purpose we aim to introduce several methods to improve the ways which all the new players get involved with the server and the community, one of which being Cloud Temple (hence the post). One of the things we noted when we were doing data checking was that a lot of players seemed to log out on the roads themselves around the cloud temple. While we don’t have data that explicitly says this it seems pretty reasonable to suspect that the reason is that they don’t know where to go. Some of the plugins we’ve added lately have helped with this void a bit - creating Caravans through llamas that new players can find and ask questions potentially or at least follow for a bit to know the server is active, but it alone won’t be enough to get a new player to a space that they’ll want to return to the server. While we talked about a number of ways to potentially improve this such as fast travels or improved soulstones we eventually always hit a stall - if a new player gets lost or finds themselves in an empty city for the first few hours of gameplay chances are we’ll never see them again. It is for this purpose that we believe the most effective form of assistance is a personal, intimate assistance that only our community can provide - and it is this role that the Wilven Monks will fulfill. We understand however that this will be a controversial change and one that may not be so rapidly accepted. For this purpose however our goal is simple - we’re running a trial phase on the Monk project. As we now have a better way to physically measure retention we can map noticeable improvements over time - such as improvements made by a joint staff/player monk organization. As such the goal is fairly simple - give this project three months to take off on its feet to see how retention improves. If it doesn’t then it’ll be sent off to the farm post-haste. Some of the concerns around the previous order of monks will likely be a concern around this point. The order will not have any magic to start out, instead focusing it’s daily on assisting new players to get to nations and groups ready to accept them. This will be something of a joint project between these nations and the monks, aiming to try to coordinate new player “drop offs” where players are brought to the gates and passed off to a steward or some such. This should help decently with retention and give every nation and group a good chance to prove their ability to retain players. That’s all for now, keep an eye out for additional posts on the monks if you’re interested in joining and know that you’ll be expected to be nice, and really who wants to do that? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Evangelli 83 Share Posted May 17, 2018 Okay ? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pond 1069 Share Posted May 17, 2018 lets make this into a factions server, whos with me! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
MickMeist 175 Share Posted May 17, 2018 The monk Lawrence casually rps his way into this ooc post, nodding his old ass head the entire time in syncrony with 501. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaotikal 2392 Share Posted May 17, 2018 add music discs Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
seannie 7443 Share Posted May 17, 2018 lotc is the dark souls of minecraft servers Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Temp 2006 Share Posted May 17, 2018 Wouldn't it be more beneficial to incentivize, through OOC reward, an actually productive steward program for cities and nations? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChonGojDragonski 317 Share Posted May 17, 2018 I think that this is a fantastic idea, if it wasn't for the fact that the "Monks" were being used. I'm not necessarily against the idea of Cloud Temple Monks, but the way they're tied in with the complete and utter lack of IC consequences on the server in how people can just resurrect after a death leaves a bad taste in my mouth. By further validating them and the crutch they provide, I just have a feeling that we'll further exacerbate an issue with the server. Perhaps disconnecting coming back to life with the Monks, and just using them as the place where you wake up at would work? All in all, it's a good idea for player retention, but it might have further implications down the line. If anything, perhaps we can use this as an opportunity to make a completely staff driven roleplay group that handles resurrection? That'd be killing two birds with one stone, though I would never dare hope for such a thing. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lark 2227 Share Posted May 17, 2018 17 minutes ago, Temp said: Wouldn't it be more beneficial to incentivize, through OOC reward, an actually productive steward program for cities and nations? I mean the incentive is new players, why don't nations start doing that now? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
501warhead 1796 Author Share Posted May 17, 2018 33 minutes ago, ChonGojDragonski said: I think that this is a fantastic idea, if it wasn't for the fact that the "Monks" were being used. I'm not necessarily against the idea of Cloud Temple Monks, but the way they're tied in with the complete and utter lack of IC consequences on the server in how people can just resurrect after a death leaves a bad taste in my mouth. By further validating them and the crutch they provide, I just have a feeling that we'll further exacerbate an issue with the server. Perhaps disconnecting coming back to life with the Monks, and just using them as the place where you wake up at would work? All in all, it's a good idea for player retention, but it might have further implications down the line. If anything, perhaps we can use this as an opportunity to make a completely staff driven roleplay group that handles resurrection? That'd be killing two birds with one stone, though I would never dare hope for such a thing. It should be made perfectly, utterly clear (and I apologize for not doing so in the post) that there are two types of monks; Crypt/Silent Monks (Who revive players) and Wilven Monks. They are both monks, but Crypt/Silent Monks are unplayable and are the only monks who revive. The playable monks will have no magic to speak of, and will simply take care of the grounds and new players while the serious monks get busy below the temple doing the do. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaun 102 Share Posted May 17, 2018 My monkie shall make a return !_! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
MyLittleUnicorn 229 Share Posted May 17, 2018 4 hours ago, 501warhead said: Hail friends of the Dominion Great post but first line makes me question! Anyhow, good work, hopefully we can get some improvement with these things. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sporadic 2844 Share Posted May 17, 2018 5 hours ago, 501warhead said: the mobs can be really fun if you can get past the dying part. But hey, Dark Souls is popular These mobs are gonna make Dark Souls look like a ******* joke. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ada 150 Share Posted May 17, 2018 33 minutes ago, Sporadic said: These mobs are gonna make Dark Souls look like a ******* joke. I support this! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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