by VDZ » Mon May 02, 2022 4:17 am SnuggleSnail wrote:Mostly natural decay / bad development decisions caused by devs not rly understanding the player-base or the game, I'd say
While I agree that the devs are rather disconnected from the game/playerbase in that they don't really seem to get what the experience is like for players, I'm fairly sure you are even more disconnected from the average player. The average player is hyper-casual compared to what you are used to, and your list of things wrong with the game that you claim makes it bleed players is an obvious example of that.
SnuggleSnail wrote:(realms, whales, satiations, knarrs, snekkjas, seasons, skiis, sleds, boulders, mine support decay, million% ARP swords, old bows, new bows, invisible crop growth speed fields, etc, etc)
I'm sure I've posted this historical anecdote before somewhere on this forum, but I'll post it again because it's relevant:
"During World War II, the statistician Abraham Wald took survivorship bias into his calculations when considering how to minimize bomber losses to enemy fire. The Statistical Research Group (SRG) at Columbia University, which Wald was a part of, examined the damage done to aircraft that had returned from missions and recommended adding armor to the areas that showed the least damage. The bullet holes in the returning aircraft represented areas where a bomber could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base. Therefore, Wald proposed that the Navy reinforce areas where the returning aircraft were unscathed, inferring that planes hit in those areas were the ones most likely to be lost. His work is considered seminal in the then-nascent discipline of operational research."
The only people who complain about realms, whales, satiations, knarrs, snekkjas, skiis, sleds, boulders, mine support decay, swords, bows and crop growth speed fields are the hardcore players who stick around. Most of those problems are hardly relevant or even completely irrelevant to casual players, who drop out far more often and far more quickly than the hardcore players who complain about these problems (and may well continue playing despite complaining). So if the intent is to minimize the number of players who quit, those issues are relatively unimportant. (Seasons, on the other hand, is genuinely something that a larger portion of the playerbase complains about and is a likely cause for players quitting.)
SnuggleSnail wrote:The harvest moon-esque early game being so disjointed from the PVP orientated portion of the game that PVPers don't get enough action, and harvest moon bois never learn the basics fucking both groups over
This is absolutely a thing. It's pretty much impossible to learn how to PvP without joining a faction, and unless you plan on simply running without fighting back it's nothing like PvE.
Uephorias wrote:I'm going to refrain from flaming the shit out of you and instead ask what, in your opinion, has caused the playercount problem for all these years, both the low player count in general, and the parabolic dropoff shortly after resets.
For the low player count in general, that's at least in part because the devs don't want too many players as the infrastructure is not ready for it:
loftar wrote:There are mainly two things I worry about, though; partly, as mentioned, the risk of getting our mail-servers and/or domain blacklisted; but I'm also a bit worried about having a too successful world launch. The last two resets were teetering right on the edge of server overload, and so if we can't handle more players than that for now, it may be actively harmful to bring in even more until that has been fixed.
The overall player count depends on the player count at world start, and that number is bottlenecked by technical aspects.
As for the player dropoff, there recently was a good thread about it ("Are devs happy/okay/satisfied with the player numbers?") that got bumped again a few days ago. I recommend you read that thread and that if you feel there remains something unsaid you add your post there, rather than doing the whole discussion over again in here.
Uephorias wrote:even when anyone could roll up and 2 shot me because I started playing on this world 3 weeks ago
That hasn't been the case since we got the openings-focused combat system. Enemies need to build openings first before they can do any significant damage, and that will take several hits, especially if you use restoration moves while running to reduce your openings. It's more of a battle of attrition nowadays; one you'll definitely lose if you're nowhere near your base, but at least they have to work for it. (Unless they mug you 3v1 or something, in that case you're just screwed generally.)
