What Can Be Done to Recruit Players?

[ShardWarrior]

14 minutes ago, Krimson said:

Time for another one of my dumb ideas...

 

What if we removed Architect Entertainment from ONE Shard, like Torchbearer, and then advertised said Shard as being a Farm Free Zone. Do you think Torch would see an uptick in players from the Big Two?

 

As far as suggestions go I do not think it a horrible idea.  However with that said, I also do not see it necessary.  All we need to do is look at other servers like Rebirth that are more geared to how the game was at the time.  P2W is not in the starter zones and AE is a ghost town like the rest of the server.  Not to mention the market there is essentially useless as there is no supply of materials or recipes.  As much as some may not want to admit it, farming goes a long way to having a thriving market. 

 

Of course I doubt HC will maintain two separate code bases to remove AE from one shard.

[Saikochoro]

32 minutes ago, Krimson said:

Time for another one of my dumb ideas...

 

What if we removed Architect Entertainment from ONE Shard, like Torchbearer, and then advertised said Shard as being a Farm Free Zone. Do you think Torch would see an uptick in players from the Big Two?

Im against this because it’s just throwing a bone to the crowd that wants to control how other people play. People just need to accept that they can’t control others nor should they be able to. People have fun in different ways and thus approach the game and focus on different parts of the game. 
 

Some people will pick the game up, realize often some time, that it’s not for them and quit. And honestly that is fine. It happens with any game. 
 

Also, even if AE were nerfed/removed farming would not be mitigated. Farming is an extremely common activity in the gaming genre in general. People will find a repeatable activity that has good rewards/time spent and do it until they get what they want. If AE were removed people would just move to the next best activity with the same exact behavior. 
 

People also absolutely farm task forces and story arcs for merits and levels. This doesn’t seem to have the same stigma as AE because at least to the controlling crowd task forces and story arcs are in their opinion “part of the game”.  They seem to ignore the fact that it is the same behavior. 
 

End of story: people need to stop running around the play ground screaming at all the other kids to “STOP HAVING FUN!!! YOU ARE PLAYING WRONG!!! YOU CAN ONLY HAVE FUN MY WAY!!!”. Players don’t own the playground. Nor do they control the others on the playground. People should play how they want to play. Playing is playing even if it’s not playing the way others are playing. 

Edited May 16, 2022 by Saikochoro

[Troo]

29 minutes ago, Krimson said:

What if we removed Architect Entertainment from ONE Shard

 

Could be a good idea. Farm-free Excelsior coming soon^tm. Free move tokens provided.

[Troo]

meanwhile

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 minute ago, Troo said:

meanwhile

Uh oh! You know what this means, right?

 

Incoming warning about how we've posted too much and it got a certain someone's attention.

 

As if the entire purpose behind forums isn't to post on them.  🙄

[ShardWarrior]

2 minutes ago, Krimson said:

I'd be okay with it. Population is too high anyway.

 

Personally, I would not want to see it removed from any of the shards.  Farming teams are very easily avoided.

[Without_Pause]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

 

How would it be "Farm Free" if scanner/paper missions, tips, story arcs and *Fs remained in the game and farmable?

Unai Kemen's missions are farm ready as just about anything in AE.

[macskull]

1 hour ago, Krimson said:

If the players who opposed power leveling had the numbers they claim to represent, then the other non-Homecoming servers, wouldn't have populations in the tens or dozens. 😄

The single biggest reason Homecoming has the lion's share of the playerbase is because it was the first server cluster. If Rebirth had a 3-week head start over Homecoming this conversation would be happening on the Rebirth forums.

 

13 minutes ago, Without_Pause said:

Unai Kemen's missions are farm ready as just about anything in AE.

Sure they are, but in order to use them you:

• Unlock Unai as a contact
• Do his story arc up to the farm mission of your choice
• Hope you or someone else doesn't accidentally (or maliciously) complete the mission
• Get lower rewards for time spent

In order to use an AE farm you:

• Go to almost any zone
• Start the mission arc of your choosing

 

EDIT: I'm looking through old Massively articles because information on player numbers going back earlier than April 27 of this year is hard to find - apparently HC set a concurrent player record of 7950 players in mid-May 2019, about 3 weeks after the servers spun up. We are seeing peaks of around 1/4 that number on the weekends.

Edited May 16, 2022 by macskull

[Troo]

33 minutes ago, macskull said:

The single biggest reason Homecoming has the lion's share of the playerbase is because it was the first server cluster.

 

While not disagreeing with your statement I'd like to add that I am here because of the system stability and the work that was done to modernize the backend. Props dev team.

 

35 minutes ago, macskull said:

We are seeing peaks of around 1/4 that number on the weekends.

 

**with an unknown number of multi-boxers running 2 or 3 or 4 or ?? accounts.

[macskull]

42 minutes ago, Krimson said:

Looking on the Rebirth forums, I don't see any evidence of them existing before February 2021. 

 

Ah thanks to Reddit, it was 2019. I'm not convinced that the server that brought us The Guardian would be the big one due to timing.

"First one out the gate" is hugely important in situations like this. When tens of thousands of people have had three weeks to start over playing a game most hadn't seen in at least seven years, and they've used those three weeks to reform old friendships, level old characters, and otherwise get established, it's a hard sell to get them to move anywhere else. Homecoming players can move at-will between the HC shards because server transfers are free and they don't really have to start over, but the same isn't true for moving from, say, Homecoming to Rebirth or Thunderspy.

 

Once player momentum like that is established it's next to impossible to stop barring any cataclysmic events.

 

EDIT: Also, man. I would kill for Guardians, but instead we're stuck with... Sentinels. Yay.

Edited May 16, 2022 by macskull

[Snarky]

*looks around carefully. "Nothing."  *Hits stealth and runs!

[macskull]

25 minutes ago, Krimson said:

I guess then Hurray for Homecoming having it's act together. 😄

It wasn't them having their act together so much as it was the people who were running the server while it was "secret" for 7 years.

[Apparition]

1 hour ago, Troo said:

 

While not disagreeing with your statement I'd like to add that I am here because of the system stability and the work that was done to modernize the backend. Props dev team.

 

 

**with an unknown number of multi-boxers running 2 or 3 or 4 or ?? accounts.

 

 

Yep.  If Rebirth had a 64 bit client and server with a modernized backend like Homecoming, I'd go check it out since quite a few people here tell me that I should play on Rebirth anyhoo. 

[Glacier Peak]

4 hours ago, Krimson said:

Time for another one of my dumb ideas...

 

What if we removed Architect Entertainment from ONE Shard, like Torchbearer, and then advertised said Shard as being a Farm Free Zone. Do you think Torch would see an uptick in players from the Big Two?

The beta shard has no AE missions loaded in it. Great place for folks to play if they're not in to that. Players can also click a button to level up to 50, grant themselves infinite inf, and grant every badge in the game. Come to think of it, why doesn't everyone just play on the beta shard? 😁

[wjrasmussen]

7 minutes ago, Krimson said:

I have suggested Level 50 tokens as a way to mitigate farming. Guess how that went?

You still haven't made a case to convince that your way is a win for us all.

[ShardWarrior]

5 hours ago, macskull said:

The single biggest reason Homecoming has the lion's share of the playerbase is because it was the first server cluster. If Rebirth had a 3-week head start over Homecoming this conversation would be happening on the Rebirth forums.

 

I am not so sure of that.  I believe this has more to do with what each individual server is doing.  Rebirth and New Dawn (aka Cake) have done and continue to do different things and approach their vision of the game differently.  Other servers have certain things that blow HC out of the water and vice versa.  Just my personal observation here, HC has done more to offer a variety of options for a player in what they want to do and how they want to play.

[macskull]

31 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

I am not so sure of that.  I believe this has more to do with what each individual server is doing.  Rebirth and New Dawn (aka Cake) have done and continue to do different things and approach their vision of the game differently.  Other servers have certain things that blow HC out of the water and vice versa.  Just my personal observation here, HC has done more to offer a variety of options for a player in what they want to do and how they want to play.

If you do a Google search for "City of Heroes" Homecoming shows up multiple times on the first page alone. There isn't an explicit mention of any other server in the first ten pages of search results. When a player rediscovers the game odds are Homecoming will be the place they end up because it's the one they found first - and if they know the game is back and know there are multiple options, they'll go to Reddit to figure out where they should play and most people will recommend Homecoming on the basis of its population. Players tend to gravitate toward where the others already are - we saw it with the individual shards from the Live servers and we're still seeing it on Homecoming. Homecoming launched on April 24, 2019 and by April 29 there were over 30k registered accounts. Within the first month it was almost 100k.

 

The other servers never stood a chance.

[ShardWarrior]

22 minutes ago, macskull said:

If you do a Google search for "City of Heroes" Homecoming shows up multiple times on the first page alone. There isn't an explicit mention of any other server in the first ten pages of search results. When a player rediscovers the game odds are Homecoming will be the place they end up because it's the one they found first - and if they know the game is back and know there are multiple options, they'll go to Reddit to figure out where they should play and most people will recommend Homecoming on the basis of its population. Players tend to gravitate toward where the others already are - we saw it with the individual shards from the Live servers and we're still seeing it on Homecoming. Homecoming launched on April 24, 2019 and by April 29 there were over 30k registered accounts. Within the first month it was almost 100k.

 

The other servers never stood a chance.

 

Well sure, no question that is what happened.  I was talking more about the here and now.  It all depends on what the individual player is looking for.  It is not a bad thing at all that there are options out there. 

[macskull]

5 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

Well sure, no question that is what happened.  I was talking more about the here and now.  It all depends on what the individual player is looking for.  It is not a bad thing at all that there are options out there. 

"The here and now" is because that happened. To be clear, I agree with you that options are good (and I don't understand this wacky "the other servers' devs should start contributing to Homecoming and stop splitting the player base" that some posters here seem to want), but I don't agree that Homecoming has a population orders of magnitude higher than any of the other servers because it is somehow better.

[Ironblade]

38 minutes ago, macskull said:

If you do a Google search for "City of Heroes" Homecoming shows up multiple times on the first page alone.

I think you're mixing up the cause and effect.

It sounds like you're suggesting that Homecoming is popular because it's the first result on Google.

I would contend that it's the first result because it is ALREADY popular.

[macskull]

1 minute ago, Ironblade said:

I think you're mixing up the cause and effect.

It sounds like you're suggesting that Homecoming is popular because it's the first result on Google.

I would contend that it's the first result because it is ALREADY popular.

I suppose I could summarize the whole thing in a series of bullet points:

• Existence of a "secret" server is made public
• The powers-that-be behind said server launch a public server, which shuts down within a few days for various reasons
• The powers-that-be make a second attempt, which is Homecoming
• All returning players go there because it's the only large-scale option (the software for a DIY server exists but it requires substantial hardware to support more than a handful of players)
• Some players aren't happy with all the post-shutdown changes and want to start their own server(s) based off the I24 beta code
• This code is not initially available to the public since it needs to be scrubbed for sensitive information
• A few groups launch I25-based servers which then roll back to I24-based once that code becomes available

In short, yes, it's the first result because it's the most popular - but that's just causing a cyclic effect of more players going there because it's the first one they find, ensuring it stays the most popular. The overall argument I'm making here (and it's the same one I've been making since 2019) is that Homecoming became popular because it was the first and only option, and stayed popular because that's where the players already were.

[Kal5]

6 hours ago, macskull said:

 

In short, yes, it's the first result because it's the most popular - but that's just causing a cyclic effect of more players going there because it's the first one they find, ensuring it stays the most popular. The overall argument I'm making here (and it's the same one I've been making since 2019) is that Homecoming became popular because it was the first and only option, and stayed popular because that's where the players already were.

Nah, I'm gonna disagree with that.
I think most players have tried out other CoH servers to some extent. Particularly in the first year or so. I did.
What did I find in different amounts?

• Auction houses not seeded.
• No moderation.
• Having to unlock or even AH buy costume parts. (that were not on the AH anyway)
• Required logins for tokens.
• SG bases not free.
• Drama from staff.

Some people might like some of those choices; and it might be right for them.
All big nopes for me.
I grinded for Rocket Boots during live. Not again, thanks.

Also, Homecoming was not first, and was not the only option when HC did start. Bree came first. Then others, then Bree closed, then HC started.

[PeregrineFalcon]

6 hours ago, Kal5 said:

Bree came first. Then others, then Bree closed, then HC started.

I remember. I remade my main on Bree and was unhappy when it closed.

 

I'm pretty sure it was the Homecoming team even then. It's just that their first server was called Bree.

[Jiro Ito]

22 hours ago, Krimson said:

Time for another one of my dumb ideas...

 

What if we removed Architect Entertainment from ONE Shard, like Torchbearer, and then advertised said Shard as being a Farm Free Zone. Do you think Torch would see an uptick in players from the Big Two?

 

As someone whose idea of a good time is writing actual AE stories, and who plays only on Torchbearer, I can't get behind this idea.

[ShardWarrior]

9 hours ago, Kal5 said:

• Auction houses not seeded.
• No moderation.
• Having to unlock or even AH buy costume parts. (that were not on the AH anyway)
• Required logins for tokens.
• SG bases not free.
• Drama from staff.

 

I have accounts on Rebirth and New Dawn and I can tell you, not having any supply in the AH at all, needing prestige for base items are huge deterrents for me personally.  Not to mention New Dawn does not have what I would consider a user friendly, secure way to create an account.  They are also intentionally keeping the player population low which is understandable given that there is no player donation system there.  Shame really as both servers have some interesting and unique things on them.  Getting to roll a character with Signature Hero or Villain power sets is fun.