Ok Ideas that would almost 100% increase the player numbers?

[WowGain]

social hub created by jorb/loftar and a leaderboard for random things would prob keep some of the autists playing.

I'm increasingly leaning towards kind of copying Boston from Salem. In my head it would be an instanced place (like Valhalla) you can access through your HF for trading and socializing. There would be lot of details to work out (would there be stalls, how would their ownership be determined and how would they operate etc.)

i gotta say, honestly yeah. +1 to this shit.
are quest trees still taking up dev time?
if so, maybe they ought to shift focus for a bit. if oceans and thingwalls and majority token trading and etc,etc,etc are all here to stay and can't really be adjusted to assist trading without just completely changing them- maybe a permanent City of Brodgar is a necessity to instantiate mass trade.

[SnuggleSnail]

If Jorbtar decide to take the Boston(tm) route, it being instanced with barter hands you can use to sell things directly from your village to an auction house would be kinda dank. Also splitting tokens into 1,000ths, or 10,000ths as a standardized coin that can be combined back into a token.

On the actual topic, though... I agree with marketing + client.
Jorbtar is spooked to mess up their initial launch on steam since they only get one, but honestly too many systems in this game are only not seen as obscenely broken because the population isn't large enough for people to consistently abuse them.

For example what is the fix when people start scouting every single thingwall with alts/bots 24/7? What happens when somebody has an actual monopoly on geysers, and therefore a monopoly on both siege defense and offense? Speedhacks have been publicly known for several years, and remain unimportant because simply nobody has bothered to hard abuse it. What happens when people make bots to consistently load in the only areas where certain necessary resources spawn? What happens when there are 1,000 man groups dedicated to fucking over the world? What happens when somebody more competent than Shubla puts malicious spyware in their client and actually does something cool with it? What happens when somebody has an actual realm monopoly? So many ways to easily ruin the game for everybody with a dedicated enough group.

Too much of this game is balanced around obfuscation & abusing something being too much effort for normal people, instead of being impossible. IMO, if the game is intended to have thousand(s) of concurrent players it can't continue to be developed with best case player behavior in mind.

[vatas]

Also splitting tokens into 1,000ths, or 10,000ths as a standardized coin that can be combined back into a token.

Has been discussed almost 6 years ago and generally deemed a bad idea.

[wonder-ass]

Also splitting tokens into 1,000ths, or 10,000ths as a standardized coin that can be combined back into a token.

Has been discussed almost 6 years ago and generally deemed a bad idea.

the easiest thing to do is blame tokens when in reality there is simply nothing to buy.

[JohnFoogotti]

All roads lead back to client.

Why do people say this? I don't have the exact stats, but if we use OSRS as an example, something like 80% of online non-mobile players use custom clients. The fact is, custom clients will always be superior to vanilla and Jorb and Loftar should only do the bare minimum to not waste dev time on it.

[strpk0]

All roads lead back to client.

Why do people say this? I don't have the exact stats, but if we use OSRS as an example, something like 80% of online non-mobile players use custom clients. The fact is, custom clients will always be superior to vanilla and Jorb and Loftar should only do the bare minimum to not waste dev time on it.

Not really true when you don't have an in house client dev in your village. Whenever public custom clients break (like when pre-render rewrite clients died several times just this year) there can be long stretches of time where most people either have to play with default client or whatever bootleg of a bootleg of a bootleg patchwork semi-broken lagfest of a client people are sharing. Same happens when updates break compatibility with non updated clients and the public custom client maintainers (which is like, just ender nowadays?) go inactive.

Also, having custom features get baked into the vanilla client is good, its less things for custom clients to needlessly maintain on their own. Also stuff like mass-item transfer being turned into server-sided features is better than having clients mass spamming the server with packets, for many reasons (can we please get a server-sided drink hotkey already? ).

I'd say for sure they should over time, slowly incorporate the more popular features into the default client, ideally to the point where someone can use the default client and not feel like they're fucked for doing so, which vanilla client is closer to reaching than it has ever before.

[MagicManICT]

I'm increasingly leaning towards kind of copying Boston from Salem. In my head it would be an instanced place (like Valhalla) you can access through your HF for trading and socializing.

I think I actually like this concept. Definitely some fine details to work out as far as how it could be used as a market and a social spot without driving loftar up the walls with crazy special case rules.

IMO, if the game is intended to have thousand(s) of concurrent players it can't continue to be developed with best case player behavior in mind.

I keep telling the sprucecaps this, but they don't want to believe me. 90% of online game dev time goes in to trying to find ways to combat exploits and effective game balance. Big difference when you have an internal playtest group of hundreds (or at least dozens) in addition to player test servers with players willing to report exploits and imbalances that make it past internal testing.

[SnuggleSnail]

The fact is, custom clients will always be superior to vanilla and Jorb and Loftar should only do the bare minimum to not waste dev time on it.

There hasn't been a PVP-viable custom client on the wizard's tower since early/mid 2019. I respect Ender a lot for his contribution, but it's not enough to prop up the entire game.

[Jalpha]

Trade hub similar to Boston really would be great for player interaction. I'm not going to support the idea unless something is done about scented trade goods giving away wealthy player locations via tracking triangulation.

[strpk0]

And if you do a trade hub please don't lock teleporting to it behind some bastard unreachable cost (like travel weariness, or similar), kind of defeats the purpose. Accessibility is key for these kind of features to work at all (in salem, teleporting to/from the town is free as long as you're next to your hearth fire).