Treshure

Immediately after the Player Retention Report was made, we got to work. Each and every reply on that thread was taken into account and considered. Much of the task was distilling actionable player feedback from the broad (but still valid) criticisms of our server experience. I want to use this thread to unveil what we have been working on and listen to your feedback once again. There's a lot to improve & perfect on LotC, but I believe that this is just one move of many in the right direction. The first steps are usually the hardest.

The reason why this solution to the Community Team's Retention Report has taken so long largely plays into long term efficiency. The easy move would have been to immediately set up a player-ran system to address the new player experience. I think that this is just a gesture. It's very hard to motivate entire teams to dedicate even more unpaid, volunteer hours into just one issue that needs addressing. A player-ran solution also wouldn't solve our primary problem: consistency. New players typically either receive a fantastic experience or one that drives them to quit. We have too many players joining every day with too few CT members to match.

I believed that only a well-designed plugin could provide the quality and long term consistency that we were looking to achieve with player retention. Moreover, data can be easily retrieved from the project and tweaks can improve it even further. Project Genesis was drafted a week after the Retention Report. It received unanimous Admin approval a few days after that. I asked my good friend @Llir to add the proposed plugin to his enormous work queue. Without him, none of this would have been possible.

It's been a long time coming, folks. The plugin is now nearing the testing phase. With "Project Genesis" on the horizon, I'm excited to finally reveal the contents of the plugin. This is the Google Doc proposal exactly as it was originally proposed. Please give your feedback in the comments below. This will influence how we adjust the plugin for release.

Project Genesis

This proposition comes in light of the Player Retention Report, which covered some very worrying numbers surrounding the new player experience. For instance, 60% of new players will quit in their first week of the server. One consistent highlight from player feedback was that the server’s increasing bureaucracy and restriction has suppressed the spontaneous roleplay that initially attracted them to the server. Of course, this does not cover the breadth of what the players have voiced in the thread.

This proposal is an effort to address the primary issues surrounding the New Player Experience™ whilst staying true to the playerbase’s expressed desire to see more dynamic, fun roleplay when joining the server. While this proposal is not to fix every issue we’d like with activity and player retention, I view it as a measurable first step to hopefully build on.

--

The time between which a player joins the server for the first time and the aforementioned player is “integrated” into a community is critical. A new player will quickly quit if they cannot engage with a group of players and join their circle. Simply guiding a new player to a settlement is also tricky, because the settlement must first be A) active and B) ready and willing to receive them.

 Discovering a city of sprint jumping, closed off circles of roleplay will be as effective as having not led them at all. Neither are shallow acts of integration, such as recruiting said new player into the city guard, linking a Discord chat & skin, and logging off. Players come to join epic adventures. If this is all the attention they’ve been given, they’ll give us none of theirs.

I think the logical solution to this is in providing a clean, automated way for new players to easily find populated cities whilst embarking on an immediate “adventure”. Here’s how.

The Quest

When a new player exits Tutorial Island, they are usually placed at Cloud Temple. Instead, I propose that they be placed in front of a venue of portals. Each portal lists a major settlement and, if applicable, the race it belongs to. The current amount of players in that specific settlement’s region are also listed. The player will then have the choice of which capital they’d like to embark to. The likely event is that the player will either choose an active settlement or one that matches up with their race, such as Elf → Elvenesse. While this may become a compounding benefit to already active settlements, it is far better than losing the player entirely.

After the player selects the settlement, they are teleported to the travel hub that is closest to their destination. For demonstrative purposes, the player has chosen Haense as their destination. The player is spawned with several items,

Compass - A compass named after the target settlement, such as ‘Haense Compass’. It will point in the direction of Haense, and display a counter above the health bar in meters (blocks) detailing how far the player is from Haense, such as: ‘Distance to Haense: 308m’. The compass will disappear from the player’s inventory as soon as they enter the city’s region.

 Bread - A stack of 64 bread.

Quest Tome - Soulbound. A book that lays out the new player’s very first quest: navigate the roads, pay caution to the signs, and arrive to Haense. Once the new player arrives in the region, that quest line is “finished” with a line through the quest name and its brief summary.

Sample quest prompt: “It is the 13th of the Sun’s Smile, Year 9 of the Second Age. You have arrived through Cloud Temple, and now seek the fabled northern sprawl of Haense. Follow your path and compass carefully, and read the signs along the roadway. You may meet friends and foes on your journey. Be wary, these roads are dangerous.”

Instruction Manual - Soulbound. A book that links to our forum’s Guide section. Alternatively, it can contain simple text of our more useful tips & tricks for a new player. Disappears from inventory after the “New Player” tag has expired.

The Compass, Instruction Manual, & Bread are all in the spirit of facilitating confidence in the new player. They will have a set destination to arrive toward with plenty of food to sustain them. Additionally, the Instruction Manual can provide the new player with a further depth of knowledge as they start their journeys on LotC. 

The Quest Tome is intended to give the player a sense of an “objective” once they join LotC for the first time. It can also be used for several other purposes (unrelated to this specific proposal), such as assigning gathering quests to help players better understand Vortex, or event-tracking for ST eventlines.

As soon as the player enters the outermost region of their target settlement, a broadcast is made to every player in their selected region, Haense. The broadcast indicates that the new player (username) has joined the world and is currently attempting to navigate towards Haense. It also encourages the players in the region to set out on the road and meet them. This is intended to provide the benefits of announcing a new player’s arrival without the negative attachments (aggressive recruiting from separate factions).

Alongside Haense’s regional broadcast, Story Team Actors can also opt in to receive broadcasts about new players joining server-wide. Once receiving the broadcast, ST Actors can follow the new player and set up an encounter across the road. It may be things such as a creature encounter, or exploring a shimmering light in the forest. The events need not have depth; whilst a wolf hunt may be a tired cliche of veteran players, it’s the most exciting thing that can happen to a new player that has freshly joined the server. It's also a great way for new ST Actors to hone their craft. This feature will first be test-ran to make sure it is an effective use of ST resources.
 

The Result

In the worst case scenario, no players come from the city to greet the new player on their journey, and no ST Actors provide the new player with a short & spontaneous event. Despite all this, the new player still will have a deliberate path towards their city, the sense of a quest, and an additional manual that will answer further questions.

In the best case scenario, the new player will begin their journey to shortly be greeted by strange, new, and friendly faces. As they begin to acquaint each other and head towards the city, they are beset by a curious and spontaneous event. The new player has undergone a quest, players eagerly seeking them out, and an event all within an hour of joining. 

The greatest benefit of this system will be removing the possibility of chance. Currently, new players lie in the good graces of a CT member to be available to guide them. CT members are still welcome to help guide new players along their journey, but it would now be styled to provide more to the new player in a more consistent manner.

In addition, a Player Retention Report will be made for the month prior to the implementation date of Project Genesis. Another report will be made afterwards (in a second post following the project’s announcement) to see if retention data has improved, and if this system is due to stay (according to player feedback).

A young man sets out to find his lost grandfather.

Was a little too impatient to wait to post this little labor of love on the weekend. Enjoy!

I was in the process of editing a future video when I caught wind that there was a fight about to unfold. I cobbled this video together over the next day. I hope you enjoy! Let me know if you'd like to see more videos in this sort of style.

P.S. Recognition to @grnappafor firing the first shot of the war.

A month and lots of editing later, I'm proud to release the first of a new series of premium MineMan videos. I felt a need to explain the underpinnings that make Minecraft RP truly unique, something I've always wanted to expand on since some of my earlier videos. From myself and all the really talented people who've helped me with this (Thumbnail creds to Basket!), I hope you enjoy!

†† Big thanks to DelfShadowLeader, Devvy, HeeroZero, & Llir for helping on this little project.

Player retention has always been a concern of mine. Hundreds of players apply to our server every month, and well over a hundred are accepted out of that bunch. Anyone who pays half a mind to the frequency of applications that we receive will sooner or later ask the critical question, “Where are all these players going?”.

“Player retention” has been on the minds of many players over the years, but we’ve had no idea on where to start. You don’t know what you don’t know. That’s what this post is for. I don’t believe a player retention rate has ever been recorded, so this is as good of a starting point that we can muster.

How did you collect this data?

I feel weird about collecting user data, so I want to be as transparent as possible throughout this process. The data was gathered through using /seen on a month’s worth of applicants in the months of December 2020 & January 2020. Most of the information gathered on this report is already publicly available. You can navigate to our Apply section on the website and scroll down to the Accepted category. This spans back a few years.

I also used a recently implemented tool provided by the Tech Team that’ll drastically improve activity tracking in the next few months. It tracks things like server peaks and the ratio of active to inactive players on the server. The only additional thing it did for the report was discerning weird cases of activity, such as a player playing only a few hours in a month, but having recently logged in for the past few days (would you call them inactive?).

Finally, I used Devvy’s help as a Moderator to validate the last logged in dates for players that haven’t logged in for over a month. This does what /seen cannot. 

If you want to double check our data, I’ve created player-copies of the December and January Google spreadsheets here and here, respectively. I removed the usernames for the sake of not blowing up peoples’ playtimes.

Results

Let’s break this down. We recorded 165 new players that applied from Dec 5, 2020 - Jan 5, 2020. Our criteria for “Active” stood at 3 hours of playtime per week, or 12 hours per month. “Weak Activity” stood for fringe cases of new players logging infrequently yet recently at around 4 hours a month, or 1 hour per week. The rest of the applicants were utterly inactive. Thus, our true retention rate stands at 20%. It’s pleasantly surprising that many of the “Active” players are very active. There doesn’t seem to be a strong middle ground between these two polar opposites.

Meanwhile, 80% of new players have been practically lost. Mind you, these are players that have already undergone the process of applying to the server, reading lore, finding skins, creating characters, and even rewriting their application. 80% of new players have already taken the effort to join our community, and yet slipped through our fingers. This is not good. Let’s take a further look into the last login times for the 69.7% "Inactive" portion of the report.

A staggering 35% of new players quit on their first day. A new player’s chance of quitting the first week is a combined 60%. While these numbers are grim, there is a reason for hope that I will explain later.

After compiling this data, we wanted to take a look back in January of 2020 to see how our applicants fared over a longer period of time - the retention rate of a month compared to a year.

Big thanks to DelfShadowLeader for collecting January’s data. The January 2020 report worsens the implications of December. Only 4 players are still active from January’s accepted pool which consisted of 148 players. While the “Inactive” group last logged in (on average) 2-3 weeks ago, 94% of these players have not logged in for the entire month of January 2021. This is really, really bad.

If we extrapolate this data across the entire year of 2020, it might be reasonable to assume that we would have gained a very rough ballpark of 48 permanent, active players. The rest of our daily player count would be a mix of veterans, regulars, and a forever impermanent swarm of new players destined to quit.

This is a vicious, unsustainable cycle. But it’s also our greatest key to building the playerbase.

Implications

I don’t want to pollute this thread with my own theories about how to fix this. We want to bring the numbers so that this conversation can be opened up to you. That being said, there are a few immediately obvious things that you can infer from these retention rates.

First, this is indicative of both the Staff (specifically the CT) and player leaders. 35% of new players quitting on the first day falls directly on the staff that are designated to guide new players. 54.8% of these players quitting afterwards in the next few weeks are a sign that they weren’t integrated into a community quickly or well enough by the playerbase. But most importantly,

Second, this is none of our fault. Look at that data again. 165 new players were accepted in a month. That’s almost six new players a day - players that aren’t announced that they’ve joined the server (thus the playerbase doesn’t know), and are entirely dependent on CT to be around; they won’t always be around, because this is a game that’s supposed to be fun instead of a chore. Take it from a former noob wrangler: settling in a new player is ridiculously difficult. You don’t drop them off at an inactive city and say, “Kumbaya!”. That’s a surefire way to have them quit.

They need to be guided, taught, and placed in an engaging atmosphere as quickly as possible. And maybe, just maybe, our current way of making this happen is not working. No army of CT guides will have the availability nor time to properly incorporate every new player of every day. Neither do player leaders have the proper tools to get new players into their circles as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort.

I'm a big fan of solutions aimed towards automation, such as expediting new players automatically to the settlements with the highest current player count. Once you look at the numbers, it's hard to argue against these kinds of solutions. That is for another thread, though.

Conclusion

There is absolutely no reason that we can’t dramatically improve our player count through addressing the challenges here. In fact, I’d bargain that this is our most pressing issue on the Road to 500. We can’t go anywhere when we are continuously losing 80% of our future nation leaders, storytellers, artists, and coders. 

It’s also one of the most addressable. Systemic changes made to the new player experience have immediate effects on our Retention Rate -- one that is now objectively measurable. This is a conversation that I am going to bring to the Community Team. In the meanwhile, I want to hear your thoughts about this.