Content Creators and Lessons From the Recent Past

[Ghanburi]

The timeline of New World's demise is fresh in out memories. I, like probably many here, witnessed it hemorrhage players. Now, it has lost the vast majority of its original player base. People would say the game was not simply ready for release, and/or that Amazon changed horses in the middle of the stream with the redesign. Regardless, from a longevity standpoint, NW is a failure currently (though they could have made enough money on sales to justify it from a business standpoint).

So, I played NW and witnessed its death throws. There is one significant aspect that I noticed that I wanted to bring up, and that's content creators. Youtubers and Twitch streamers, indifferent to them, love them, or hate them, they are here and they have an impact on popular opinion. They're significant in that they have a lot of influence over their viewers. Personally, I watched many of these creators move from interest and support for NW, to concern, and then to sharp criticism. Did they help shape the sentiment or simply reflect it? Perhaps both. Regardless, I would call them the coal mine canaries of the MMO-vers.

The "press" that NW received, from relatively early on, drove negative sentiment. Why? Because the NW team made a lot of mistakes, and players caught on quickly. Creators like Asmongold, Josh Strife Hayes, and KiraTV ripped into NW (especially the latter 2) displaying every flaw they could uncover. Why? Well, the game was broken, and since they do MMO criticism, it was fresh fodder to pump up those numbers. Don't get me wrong, most of their objections were justified, but lets get real--outrage sells. Outrage gets the clicks. Outrage spreads.

Recently, I have been watching several MO2 streamers. The ones I watch have been, historically, great supporters of MO2 and SV. However, in the last 2 or 3 days, I have noticed a familiar phenomena. The shine for these streamers, it seems, is coming off and they are showing concern (understandably so).

I predict that if there is not a significant improvement in the queue system within the next week (or possibly less), the support of many (all?) of these streamers will begin a sharper turn toward criticism, which may end in a recommendation to avoid the game and a moving on to other options. This, from my observance, is how the cookie crumbles.

So, good luck to you SV. I sincerely hope you can pull it off, because I think you have an amazing game here. If you have a last ditch option that you've been reticent to consider, I would put those on the table. The clock is ticking, and we are rooting for you.

 

[[CTX] Contractor]

As bad as it might sound - I feel like the game did a good job building up a much more solid, dedicated core player base through the alpha & beta. The game can sustain (in-game) with 1.2 to 2k active players. Anything additional is obviously good, but it's clearly causing the game problems..

Also as much as people say that having numbers is everything, in this game the world feels congested IMO past 2k players. Hell, the old Vanilla WoW map was built to hold 2k players and it feels larger then the MO2 map.

Not sure. I'm conflicted. I feel like less players will actually solve more problems then bring, we should of just got regional servers from the beginning.

 

[Ghanburi]

And it is happening right now. I guess you didn't have a week.

EDIT (5:45 PST): No major badmouthing of the game, but a lot of disappointment, some critique of a lack of a auto log off for afk/idle players, and a consensus that the server caps around 2-2.5k players. I expect most/all of them to stop playing MO2 within 2 days if this persists.

 

[Kyllike]

And it is happening right now. I guess you didn't have a week.

EDIT (5:45 PST): No major badmouthing of the game, but a lot of disappointment, some critique of a lack of a auto log off for afk/idle players, and a consensus that the server caps around 2-2.5k players. I expect most/all of them to stop playing MO2 within 2 days if this persists.

An auto-logout option for afk players could be a solution if macros did not exist or could be checked. This takes time to implement that the dev team has no cycles to make at the moment. This was already brought up and answered.
Server caps were never really explicitly announced where they?

 

[Ghanburi]

An auto-logout option for afk players could be a solution if macros did not exist or could be checked. This takes time to implement that the dev team has no cycles to make at the moment. This was already brought up and answered.
Server caps were never really explicitly announced where they?

Server caps were discussed by 3 streamers that I watched, but I've heard nothing officially about it. Again, it is my opinion that content creators are the coal mine canaries of MMOs, and even if they are incorrect about something they still effect public perception. I believe that MO2, due to its niche nature, will survive the population fall off, but an exodus of sorts is inevitable at this point, unless server queues are significantly improved.

 

[Emdash]

I agree w/ the low pop numbers being optimal. Game got too soft. It was self-governing, but it stopped being so when they tried to hold new player's hands too much. Sucks, but it's true. Condensed version of my story (which I told a million times) before I go into a more important topic, re: content creators. I came in as a non-combat. I met non-combat new players, tamers, etc; I put a lot of people on. These were just normal people, but I gave them a "job" so they could have means to do what they wanted in the game. It wasn't dying that bothers most people; it's never progressing.

The resources did not increase, but with less pvp you have more lag, a bigger map with fewer or close to the same amount of mobs as the first map, and a bunch of people clumped together which actually makes the game LESS IMMERSIVE/PERSONAL.

As for content creators, I may have also said this before, but I am a writer. Publishing in academia has its own pitfalls (zeitgeist, etc), but if you go into the poetry section of Barnes and Noble, you will find some of the classics, very few modern people, and DUDES FROM INSTAGRAM. In a way, it is an artistic failure to be overtaken by Instagram, but, in reverse, as samey and trashy as a lot of the academic writing is, it's still WAY more complex and interesting than IG stuff.

So, it is the same, I believe, with games or fashion or whatever social media influencers are involved with. They are definitely effective at pushing products, however, they are being paid, given perks ETC, so their experience is NOT like the experience of the normal consumer. As academia has done, maybe to its downfall, is build a wall around itself and isolate from the rest of the writing world. Thus, you get "literature."

I believe this thing we have here... the hardcore first person pvp sandbox, basically the closest thing we can get to a WORLD sim, is not dissimilar, metaphorically, to 'high art' or literature. It's a bit of a crazy hot take when you realize a large portion of the player base is kids wanting to say unbelievable things on VoIP and slaughter your animals cuz THEY CAN, but, as "a whole," one cannot take away what the sandbox world offers, so much that even said kids start to become influenced by it. It'd be like taking rh sin ( IG writer) and putting him in a MFA writer's workshop. It just doesn't work. It might get more attention; it might, in the best case, draw people's attention to HOW MUCH BETTER the quality of the work is, but it would not do anything to help the workshop and just as likely could lead to the masses arguing "why people write like that when rh sin so much better tho??"

This might be a rambling mess. I haven't downloaded grammarly app (as suggested loool), so I'm still trying to figure out this whole English thing. However, do you see what I'm saying? Let the streamers stay on fortnight or whatever FOTM game. If we have content creators, let it be people coming from our world. Let US elevate them to their platform by choosing, because WE understand the sandbox world, much like academia. It sucks to seem like a closed community, and that's not what I'm saying I want the end game to be, but I just think we got plenty of guys in here who are vets who could create organic content as streamers which could be enjoyed throughout OUR community, and then, over time, resonate further outward. Bringing in some rando streamer to try to increase pop is just BG and, as said, they are fickle so they may end up as your worst enemy just as easily.

THAT BEING SAID, I hope SV can find a way to make MO2 not DoA. Shock it! I've changed my stance. I support multiple 2k cap servers if that's what it takes. Beyond that, fuck it. Can even make servers w/ diff rules or skill gain rates

But New World's failure and streamers... yea I'm good on that. I might be a bit old school, but so is MO. We are a collection of pretty old gamers. haha. Let us be. Let us have our working game. We can't even support what we have right now. We don't need to pay and boost fuccbois to advertise. There are already more than enough people here.