[What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?]

2 hours ago, DarionLeonidas said:

 

Make good story AE missions part of the canon and put the contacts on the streets. Let good AE mission creators add to the tapestry of the game.

 

 

Love this idea

[What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?]

5 hours ago, Nemu said:

I started on Torchbearer too because of the name is symbolic to CoH's history. But then I found my old SG/Coalition on Excelsior.

 

It'll be a bit of a cultural shock if you do test the waters over at Excelsior. Watch out for Pandas, they are all over that shard.

Pandas?

[What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?]

5 hours ago, Nemu said:

Are you having a hard time finding groups because of low population or because people don't take the initiative to form groups but they are always waiting for others to form a group so they can ask to join?

 

I can definitely see the former being an issue on low population servers. I play mostly on Excelsior nowadays and I'll often see the latter. A dozen people asking for group in LFG over a relatively long period of time not one of those asking taking the initiative to form one and just start inviting. I also see people afraid to ask to join teams when there are obviously teams recruiting in LFG. One guys was adding an offer to pay with his request to join teams. Long story short I got him invited to our coalition and now he has an easier time getting on teams within that circle, without the need to offer pay to team.

 

I've also invited all the people LFG but don't want to form their own teams, offer mission arcs they can run in their level range, and run those missions. Over a few missions I'll ask the mission holders if they are comfortable taking the star, and transition team lead to that person after they agree. I stay around, help them with setting rep/mission and teaching them how to recruit, and hang around for a few missions before I leave. They end up actually doing it! It's not terribly hard to start a team and now they know.

 

The thing about a community is that sometimes you need to reach out, sometimes you need to coax people to participate. That's the other observation I have about this game. There are less people that are willing to reach out and engage, or they have their own inner cliques and choose to isolate themselves within those circles. I know that within my coalition, a lot of the vets that got back are a solitary bunch that only hang out with people within the coalition which are mostly refugees from the CoH SNAP. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people remark "I don't join Pick up Groups or invite people outside my circle because various reasons usually centered around PuG horror stories." How do you foster a community and attract new people if you shut yourselves in?

 

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.

 

 

[What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?]

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.

[What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?]

4 hours ago, ShardWarrior said:

 

 

Everyone has a different experience and different perspective.  What you are saying here is not a universal truth for everyone.  There is no right or wrong here.

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

[What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?]

On 4/24/2022 at 2:28 AM, Rokkeb said:

 

Slow lvling of alts in an MMO, especially one as end-game lite, and as alt-heavy as this one is a way to lose retention though. People get sick of grinding the same shit over and over slowly to level a new alt. So killing power leveling IMO does much more harm to the game, than those noobs that just sit around spamming LFG and Broadcast looking for power lvling.

 

I honestly feel like 1 or 2 DFB's should take you to 15, then give shit exp after that (like when the server first launched) then DIB to take you to 22 or so. 1-20 is boring as shit on all characters, and the missions are lame. By 20 you finally start to feel like your character. Then maybe bump up posi 1 and 2 to high teens low 20's as the max lvl for those missions instead of what is it, 14, and 16?

 

Unless they could make it so you can't get exp in an AE until you have a lvl 50 on the server, I don't see nerfing AE farming as a solution to anything as far as population retention goes. Lvling up new alts fast is a huge part of the game to many people who play.

 

I would say reseed the AH and set caps on all the IO sets might help too though. Feeling like you have to firefarm to afford IO sets seems to turn a lot of people away. As it is you have 2 choices play the AH for hours or farm AE for hours, because running TF's , story lines, and radios does not get you anywhere close to enough cash to kit out a character. That also could potentially lower the amount of fire farmers just hanging out willing to plvl random noobs in atlas as well.

 

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)_/¯