actiontvstar

Love this idea

Pandas?

I was only soloing for the first week or two of play - when I decided to jump on a team, I found one quickly. Played with the same folks a couple days in a row. Today I couldn't find a group but I think I only saw 4 other players total the whole time I was on, chat was dead. I've been playing on Torchbearer because I read it was the most vanilla server. Maybe I'll switch to Excelsior, maybe I'll keep mostly soloing. I don't know; I'm having fun still either way.

Also just going to throw it out there that a game being repetitive isn't going to stop people from playing it. I spent probably 6 or 8 months logging at least an hour or two a day on Animal Crossing in 2020. However, as a new player, I do want it to be easy to find a group, find a super group, and play in groups of 4-8 to run missions. I don't know how possible this would be, or how much it would fuck stuff up for players, but if it's about finding groups, what if there were a way to reach out to the active players on the two least used shards and try to gauge their interest in merging the two to make one with twice as many players? Additionally, what if next month during the donation drive to pay for the servers - or for the next few months - there were also a donation drive to pay for some advertising? People can't play if they don't know it exists.

Totally agree - that was my point in sharing my perspective, not to say he's wrong I'm right, but you know, there are many viewpoints and a wide variety of tastes and interests

AE farming killed my interest in the original game back in 2008-9ish. I'd been playing two characters that had gotten to level 15-16ish when AE was introduced and suddenly nobody was doing missions and everyone was just farming and I and my other friends just stopped playing. Meanwhile for the past two weeks I've had a lot of fun getting two characters up to about 12 and 16 so far. Never once did I think it was a slog. I think a lot of people here are making a lot of assumptions about what new players want when they haven't been a new player in a long time and they probably played the original much longer than I did. At no point in the past two weeks have I thought, man this is a slog, this sucks, I wish I could power level this guy to 50 real quick. What kept me from signing up was that I didn't know about it. Then when I learned it existed, I was hesitant because of my bad experiences with AE farming being like the whole game. But I decided to give it a try. Getting your travel power early made the game way more fun. So yeah, there are a lot of assumptions from everyone on this thread about what new players want, but nobody seems to be asking new players. I'm sure once I get a character to 50, yeah, I'll probably want to power level a character at some point, but the first 20 levels actually are fun if you've never done them before or if you haven't done them in 14 years. I think simply letting people know it exists and it's free is a huge step in the right direction, making the sign up less confusing (I had friends I invited to join who didn't get the need to make a forum account and a game account and they gave up) would help, and also the amount of jargon in the chat can be confusing and make a new player not want to join a group. Just my two cents as someone who has been playing about two weeks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯