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Player Retention Report


Treshure
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12 minutes ago, Laeonathan said:

100%

If my Nations gets killed I

a) try to revive under another one

b) join a different one

 

War rules should change to more dynamic possibilites. But hey we want no one to lose stuff. 

Another issue I see: Staff and Nation leadership.

People who are in Nation leadership shouldn't be management... how could that ever go well?

Also what Grool said, old cliques controlling **** - but that all plays together, I suppose.

 

 

I'd even go as far as to say nations dying every now and then is actually a good thing, and not even an unhappy consequence of libertarian war rules. It's a great way of shattering old cliques and forcing players to interact with others groups they wouldn't have before.

 

Protecting nations from unlimited warfare just means everyone sticks to their own World of Warcraft RP Village and has nothing to do with the rest of the server. That kind of thing creates toxic and intolerant attitudes of other people's RP, and just increases the issues and drama when different groups are finally forced to interact.

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1 minute ago, monkeypoacher said:

 

It comes down to procedure. The process of getting lore approved or making an event happen involves going through layers of staff

authority -- like calling customer service. If I want to fight a dragon or build a town or write a piece of lore I have to find the right person to talk to, hope I have the time to talk to them over several days on Discord, and hope that our schedules align across timezones. This is daunting to do for new players and just generally frustrating and time-consuming. I'd rather just get a D&D group together.

 

I oppose staff regime change. Telanir isn't terribly active or driven, but he's also not an idiot; there's no guarantee whoever gets on the other end of a hypothetical ownership transfer wouldn't be. We've had absolutely horrific admins in the past who have ran with what little authority they've had; getting away with anything from spawning in sharpness swords to grooming children. I think the problem doesn't lie with the admins themselves but their policies: Admin approval should be stripped out from most minor, non-world-altering decisions. Red tags and managers should be comfortable giving up some of their authority to low-level staff and players with ambition.

I think some of that does come down to different teams having different culture and changing regulations. You can still for the most part get land from any one of the nations on the map and create something new. I have seen quite a few towns popping up on the additional tiles owned by the nations which is a much better way to integrate roleplayers into the greater story then one off settlements ever will be. You are right about not really needing Admin approval for a lot of what is voted on. The reason why that stuff ends up there is because of pass controversies where people complain which forces a response out of Admins to grab the reigns tighter. 

 

On regime change. Telanir does not own the server or really run it day to day at all. I was more saying that something very radical like that would need to happen to really shake up the culture from the top down. Either that or all players who have been here over three years step back from nation leadership. 

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Remember when we had activity requirements in check to prevent players arriving at inactive nations or settlements day 1 and quitting? Man I'm so glad we have those, it's clearly done a lot and not burned out community leaders in the process.

 

 

13 hours ago, monkeypoacher said:

The problem with this server has ******* nothing to do with settlements. People join LoTC and expect to embark on an epic, meaningful quest. They get shuttled limp-wristedly right into "activity hubs" full of people randomly sprint hopping around or afking.

Hit the nail on the head.

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18 minutes ago, argonian said:

I think an over-reliance on staff teams is part of the problem. We shouldn't need the CT to personally integrate new players, and we shouldn't need the ST to work round the clock to entertain us. The server should just be entertaining by itself, with small enough barriers and enough fun to keep players new and old alike around. 

 

The amount of rules and regulations regarding regions, nations, war, etc. now mean that the world is incredibly static and very few interesting things happen on a large scale. There's no sense that history is being made and that you're part of that history. The ST can try emulating this, as they did with the Inferi, but it always feels fake when it's a top-down initiative. Even in Aegis when the Undead as the antagonist were a huge focus of RP and conflict, the Undead were mostly player-run, and the few times the staff took charge to script things were the few least enjoyable moments. 

 

We need to cut back the red tape so that players can create their own conflict and drama again without relying on the ST. We need to turn integrating new players into something that happens more naturally and less as part of someone's job--an example of this would be reviving the Wilven Monks who, while they had their issues, were an actual IC group who enjoyed RP'ing around the CT and didn't just log solely to hand-hold new players. Noobs should feel like they're joining in on stuff already happening, not that their only RP is someone deliberately trying to entertain them with stilted and fake introduction RP which neither side really enjoys.

 

 

Any player who wants to do even something moderately ambitious is squeezed to death in the iron grasp of server rules and lore and procedure. I don't think the ST should have to write a story top-down to fit the entirety of the server, but they should have a reason to exist other than to police and means test every magic and creature. Also, it's just nice to have an event team that's detached from individual roleplay factions, because they can create spontaneous, fun encounters. 

 

The Undead were player ran and Aegis was a different time for this server. The thought that you could even play an undead character without doing errands for the Story Admin for a year is now strange to most people. I've already kvetched about how hard it is to start anything on this server, but it comes down to the staff and their unwillingness to not get involved in players' roleplay, or hand over their toys so new people can play with them.

 

8 minutes ago, VonAulus said:

I think some of that does come down to different teams having different culture and changing regulations. You can still for the most part get land from any one of the nations on the map and create something new. I have seen quite a few towns popping up on the additional tiles owned by the nations which is a much better way to integrate roleplayers into the greater story then one off settlements ever will be. You are right about not really needing Admin approval for a lot of what is voted on. The reason why that stuff ends up there is because of pass controversies where people complain which forces a response out of Admins to grab the reigns tighter. 

 

On regime change. Telanir does not own the server or really run it day to day at all. I was more saying that something very radical like that would need to happen to really shake up the culture from the top down. Either that or all players who have been here over three years step back from nation leadership. 

 

The nations are backed too heavily by the staff, and this makes them lazy and paradoxically more insular than they were as free-standing, competing factions. Anyone who pays any attention realizes that nations don't integrate new players and they don't give them land. Land gets parceled out to inactive, uncharismatic noble characters in the inner circle of most nations, and those people don't have the motivation to really make things happen. The idea that you can "for the most part get land" because Oren has a bunch of freeholds or Norland creates little mini principalities is kinda preposterous. But land isn't really the issue, it's that broadly everyone relies on some sort of OOC authority figure to roleplay, and that's toxic to the server.

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10 minutes ago, Luciloo said:

Remember when we had activity requirements in check to prevent players arriving at inactive nations or settlements day 1 and quitting? Man I'm so glad we have those, it's clearly done a lot and not burned out community leaders in the process.

One of the reasons why freebuild is the best is because settlements will naturally pop up on the paths people take out of CT and between nations, and ofc the settlements that are built in those spots will be the most active, so noobs and returning players are 100x more likely to wander into somewhere with RP than if the most active settlements are just in arbitrary places.

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31 minutes ago, argonian said:

One of us has a virus because that happen turned into the weirdest link. 

 

 

Lmfao, my bad. I’m trying to reference “SMART Goals”. You can search it up to see what I mean.

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3 minutes ago, monkeypoacher said:

Any player who wants to do even something moderately ambitious is squeezed to death in the iron grasp of server rules and lore and procedure. I don't think the ST should have to write a story top-down to fit the entirety of the server, but they should have a reason to exist other than to police and means test every magic and creature. Also, it's just nice to have an event team that's detached from individual roleplay factions, because they can create spontaneous, fun encounters. 

 

The Undead were player ran and Aegis was a different time for this server. The thought that you could even play an undead character without doing errands for the Story Admin for a year is now strange to most people. I've already kvetched about how hard it is to start anything on this server, but it comes down to the staff and their unwillingness to not get involved in players' roleplay, or hand over their toys so new people can play with them.

Yeah, I didn't bring up the Undead as a nice, easy "this worked then so it should work now", but rather just to show how all conflict has to be between player-run factions to be authentic and fun. Even server antagonists are usually the better the more player-run they are. ST events can be very fun and help things along, but we can't rely on them to entertain us; players have to be given the freedom to entertain themselves and each other. 

 

3 minutes ago, monkeypoacher said:

The nations are backed too heavily by the staff, and this makes them lazy and paradoxically more insular than they were as free-standing, competing factions. Anyone who pays any attention realizes that nations don't integrate new players and they don't give them land. Land gets parceled out to inactive, uncharismatic noble characters in the inner circle of most nations, and those people don't have the motivation to really make things happen. The idea that you can "for the most part get land" because Oren has a bunch of freeholds or Norland creates little mini principalities is kinda preposterous. But land isn't really the issue, it's that broadly everyone relies on some sort of OOC authority figure to roleplay, and that's toxic to the server.

Agreed. Not up for going full rant mode on this point rn, maybe I'll come back to it later, but I think nations becoming OOC entities that mattered OOCly for anything beyond map-transfers was one of the worst things that ever happened on this server. "Nation Leader" should be a purely IC position as it was for like 90% of the server's history.

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22 minutes ago, argonian said:

I'd even go as far as to say nations dying every now and then is actually a good thing, and not even an unhappy consequence of libertarian war rules. It's a great way of shattering old cliques and forcing players to interact with others groups they wouldn't have before.

 

Protecting nations from unlimited warfare just means everyone sticks to their own World of Warcraft RP Village and has nothing to do with the rest of the server. That kind of thing creates toxic and intolerant attitudes of other people's RP, and just increases the issues and drama when different groups are finally forced to interact.

A good mix is certainly needed. Big Nations shouldnt just fall apart. But if everyone banded together to take a big nation or coalition like the Iron Accord, Oren or Elvennese down... some of them might crumble. Maybe Norland gets crusaded again and burned to the ground. To break off cliques there should be coup rules... but hey, they are still not there. I remember when the Ves Republic or Adria or Kaedrin was couped 3 times and everyone forced their new regime on it. Everyone said it was chaos and killed the nation, but I honestly had fun seeing the world burn. Also, my character can still talk about how much his father loved the Ves Republic. Good way to start a conversation.


 

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@Treshureis there any possibility of being able to get the race that the player applied as added to the Spreadsheet? 
 

As a steward I think it’d be very beneficial to be able to know how your nation’s main race did with player retention so we can analyze our own personal results and see how we did. The statistics alone work great for looking at it in relation to the Staff Teams, but It’s not overly useful for each nation or group. It could be possible that a certain race has higher retention rates than others, if that’s the case that race might not need to change how they work with new players because it’s already working.


I apologize if this has already been asked, I haven’t read over all the responses to the post!

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I think it would also be helpful if we talked not just about what doesn't work, but what does. I think we should limit these to our recent experiences, as we can't reasonably expect LOTC to be entirely rehauled. I'm just as guilty as that here, so I'll go first. 

 

The best RP I've had in the last several months was when @altiar1011 haunted the Basilica in Karosgrad with her poltergeist. It was a good story that lasted over a week, involved multiple groups, didn't cause a single modreq (that I'm aware of), and everyone enjoyed and consented to it. Heck, the consequences of that storyline are still playing out to this day on RP. That's an example of player conflict against other players that worked extremely well.

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I think we can all agree wars are the only fun part of lotc. During peace, it's boring and stagnant. Back in Anthos we actually used to have a map storyline, which were the harbingers. Bring back a map storyline and we'll be fine.

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-snip, not relevant-

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10 hours ago, Basil Moroul said:

There's no ruins anymore, there's no exploration, event sites as most event sites are jumped on by a nation or restricted to certain groups. Its literally warp to hub, go to city then tavern rp for the rest of your days, nothing really happens. There are no quests or something that would get people having fun as you seem to need constant staff approval to do even the littlest of things. Though I doubt this thread will do much but have them offer promises of change which ultimately will never be delivered upon.

 

Also to add into the ct warps to hubs, it is confusing for new players to decide where they want to go. They don't know what each name or flag means, what they really want to know is what place is the human place, where do the dwarves live and stuff like that.

There is a ruin site actually. Me and two other people discovered it during out exploration of the map. But not sure if it will be used for events :/

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33 minutes ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

Alright, I'll say a blurb about what I thought was decent with Atlas.

 

I'm not sure you understood what I meant by recent. We need things that will be fun right now and we need more of, not things that require multiple rule, plugin, and world changes to work.

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47 minutes ago, Burnsider said:

 

I'm not sure you understood what I meant by recent. We need things that will be fun right now and we need more of, not things that require multiple rule, plugin, and world changes to work.

uhhh I guess the Slice of Life Hour events I held back in Brandybrook were alright, as were the Birding events of Bramblebury.

 

As for Story Team stuff, I think if we had something original like the Athera eventline again, that'd be pretty epic. Try to do something wildly different from what's been done before and see if it sticks.

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