Pets are ruining small scale PVP
- Thread starter NYOCHTAR
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Three*
And yes, based on my observations of all the games that have died and the few that have been successful. I believe my conclusions are accurate and I assure you can trust my observations; I am a great observer, I play poker for a living, I wish there was a way to quantify observational skills with metrics but there's not. The fact that I play a game for a living that largely depends on observation should be enough to put me in the top 1% at a minimum however.
As far as mortal goes, i'm likely in the bottom 35% haha. I'm truly a pleb. Beastmaster would be the most suitable playstyle for me but I still just play my Thursar, even knowing i'll never win because the playstyle of beastmaster doesn't appeal to me. So that's why I spend my days dueling or fishing. When I want actual PvP I just log out of Mortal and log into another game.
You're really not going to like this next part... it's not enough. Pets existing as a method of casual players to be competitive is not enough. There will have to be many additional concessions made to casual gamers that will further anger you, or the game will die.
It's unfortunate but we need to start talking about exactly what it takes to keep a game online. The overhead or costs associated. If you have a modest team of 5 developers(very modest for a MMORPG) that right there will be roughly 1million in overhead a year. Now we have office rent, accounting/payroll staff, marketing, and game moderators to pay. Finally we have hardware expenses, hosting, Unreal engine royalties/costs, miscellaneous. Assuming that Henrik can be CEO and Human resources at the same time that will save some expense. All together I expect overhead for a modest project to be 3-5million a year.
Do you know how many subscriptions @ 15$ a month it takes to cover 3million of overhead a year? What about 5million?
How are you going to convince casual players, the largest market share, 100% and totally necessary to your games survival to pay this subscription fee?
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I will stop you right there. MO 1 was around for 10 years (13 if you count alpha). Most of its life it hovered around 1k to 2k players. It never made money and actually lost money year over year. It didnt die. It never got popular. It was always a super small community of uber fans.
MO2 is nothing but a visually upgraded version. The server(the only one the devs will ever have) cant handle more than 5k players at once. If it makes it to 10k way way down the road it will be a miracle. There actually is very little room for influx of people.
Your ideas are not without merit if this was a commercial enterprise. But its not. This Henrik's baby. The dream world he paid for. His own personal server, and he lets you play on it. Thats what MO has always been.
Your ideas are kind of wasted here.
MO2 is nothing but a visually upgraded version. The server(the only one the devs will ever have) cant handle more than 5k players at once. If it makes it to 10k way way down the road it will be a miracle. There actually is very little room for influx of people.
Your ideas are not without merit if this was a commercial enterprise. But its not. This Henrik's baby. The dream world he paid for. His own personal server, and he lets you play on it. Thats what MO has always been.
Your ideas are kind of wasted here.
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1000 concurrent players is probably more like 2000 subscriptions a month(possibly more but not much). The game ran at a loss, on someones money. Either investors or otherwise. You elaborated on this yourself. I do not know how wealthy Henrik is but if MO2 can replicate "MO1 Success" it will run at a net loss of 2million+ a year. Perhaps if you cut resources down to just one or two developers and just a few moderators you could stretch this budget, but at the cost of efficiency. Perhaps there are other ways to cut down expenses but again they will have implications for such. You can't get a project like this "too low", it's going to be costly no matter what.
Henrik seems like a very rational man but it would be pure speculation to whether or not he wants Mortal 2 to have a large population or a small population. It would also be speculation to imply he could stomach the costs associated with this project if it is not profitable. The population is the metric for which we define MMO success, in fact it is the only metric which we can use, because the rate at which humans adopt your game is the consensus either good or bad. All other forms of measurement would be subjective.
But i'll leave you to it, personally I am indifferent, you can take all the pets away for all I care, I'm just telling you it would be detrimental to your already low population. However if in the future you decide differently, I can tell you what would make humans adopt Mortal Online at a greater rate, if that should ever become a priority for you. There is a balance to be struck in Full-loot games that allows casuals and "veterans" to exist together, it has been done before, the recipe is actually not that complex.
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Your math would suggest that 50% of players would be logged on at most all hours of the day, when its probably around 20%.
If they can maintain 1000 concurrent players online with a subscription model, thats probably closer 5000 active subscriptions.
I've played my fair share of low-pop games(sub 2000 concurrent) MO1 wasn't one of them (other then briefly trying the game) because DFUW was out at the time and DFUW had a superior player count and superior mechanics so playing MO1 was out of the question for me. Despite this it would be disingenuous to imply that DFUW was not also a low-pop game...because it was, it was on life-support a few months after its release. And my experience in low-pop games is exactly that; About half of all the users are daily and logged in most hours of prime-time and then the concurrent player count wanes during the night. But the same names are seen every day, with little variation. Definitely not the case with MO2 yet, It's still lively despite being a low-pop game. I see new names daily, I see new players daily, they typically do not stick around though which is an ominous sign. It's not uncommon for me to strike up a conversation with a new player in fab or tindrem, add them to my friends list and then never see them log in again. But the fact that they are even willing to try it in the first place could be a positive?
I have my doubts that MO1 had 5000 subs at any point in its life. Because I logged into it around the time DFUW was out and it was "very quiet" to put it nicely. Of course I could be wrong, but I would need to see some evidence first.
Here's a homework assignment for you: Yesterday Tatsuya ran into a player called "Slarti", a man singing while riding a pig. He was obviously new, having to be instructed on how to board a horse. But quite the impressionable lad and would be a positive addition to any gaming community. Try to find this character in game 4 weeks from now.
Also here's a great video on the fall of Mordhau from one of its most respected players:
Granted I understand the games differ from each-other in many ways but I find this video is very relevant to our discussion of skill cap, pet mechanics, melee parry based games, and player retention in regards to casual players. If players struggle to be competitive, they will leave. Losing their stuff when they die is ultimately not that big of a consideration, many people play Albion despite losing their items on death.
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your trying to argue with mo comunity.... lmao, you are 100% correct, and you can easy fix all this random ganking, make it so you lose skill lvls when you die as a criminal and increase it the more murders you have... you will see how Roleplay will come back to the medieval fantasy roleplay in a blink of an eye... its a no brainer in my opinion... specially sense its an HARDCORE mechanic directed at the most HARDCORE group of the game, xD... i dont even mind special content for criminals... i just want for the criminal system to mean something hell even a reputation chart would do wonders for this game...
Something similar was already part of MO1. After 5 murder counts you were red flagged and would get attacked on sight by any guard. Also players could attack you and not go grey. Also upon death, if you had a certain amount of murder count, you would get stat loss (lose a percentage of your character stars) that you then had to train back up. The only way to remove each individual murder count was to wait 8 hours of ingame time without getting one other one.It was much harder to be a murderer then.
It didnt work. People still ganked just as much as now. If they got too many muder counts they would simply re-roll and start fresh.
Its not as easy as you think.
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What a bunch of stupid suggestions...
"Stat loss", "8 hours in game to decrease count", "freely attackable"... penalties penalties and more penalties to murderers..
Jesus, are you sure you re playing the right game ?
There are tons of crappy games out there for you to choose...
Go play some Elder scrolls online or some of these carebear clones and stop trying to ruin the only good game we still have.
You wont be attacked in any of those other 638284 games out there.
Why do you have to complain about MO2 rules ?
God damn it.
Just stop.
The only change this game needed was to REMOVE NPC GUARDS that patrol outside of towns.
Period.
Let the justice be made by players, not by developers creating restrictions.
"Stat loss", "8 hours in game to decrease count", "freely attackable"... penalties penalties and more penalties to murderers..
Jesus, are you sure you re playing the right game ?
There are tons of crappy games out there for you to choose...
Go play some Elder scrolls online or some of these carebear clones and stop trying to ruin the only good game we still have.
You wont be attacked in any of those other 638284 games out there.
Why do you have to complain about MO2 rules ?
God damn it.
Just stop.
The only change this game needed was to REMOVE NPC GUARDS that patrol outside of towns.
Period.
Let the justice be made by players, not by developers creating restrictions.
see here ya go again... the problem wasn't that it didn't work the problem was the game was getting to hardcore for the hardcore crowd... see a fantasy realm with stablished factions and role play elements shouldn't have different rewards/penalties from different playstyle's, it should be like rust you get a big group and rule the server... xD. enjoy the game i guess. gl to everyone in it.
The difference is that on Rust theres no towns, with npc guards... and a max of 100 players per server.
MO2 is much better... you may have more than 100 players at same time, a single server so that everyone has a real identity... if you get a bad reputation, you have to live with it.
MO2 is by far the best game in the market.
If you want something exciting, stick with us here.... but if you want something easy-mode, pick up any of the thousand carebear clones out there.
Theres absolutely no problem.
Each person has their own preferences...
The problem is when someone starts asking for the devs to change game rules so that they wont be killed anymore, instead of simply playing something else.
People are asking for change so that the game can live on and their time investment isn't squandered as MMO's commonly absorb thousands of hours of investment from individual players.
Did you completely ignore the argument on what it takes financially to run MO2? (3-5Million per year)
Are you aware of how many subscriptions it takes to reach that goal?
How are you going to reach that goal without convincing casual players to subscribe?
Current concurrent player counts are averaging around 1200, how many subs do you think that's going to translate into?
Manure what is your plan for keeping MO2 financially viable and to stop it from dying like its predecessors? Ultima,Shadowbane,DF1,DFUW, MO1 and others?
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My plan ?
It was their idea to make this game.
They probably made a research before launching this game with these rules.
If it wasnt viable since the beginning, why did they proceed ?
I respectly say that you re wrong with your calculations...
This game was a huge success in the beginning, mainly because of its different rules and freedom it promised to give to all players... it sold thousands of copies, proving that people are tired of easy-mode games.
The big problem was the server capability.
They lost several people in the beginning due to those queue times to log in....
Now with subscription, they will earn even more.
What can not be acceptable is to have a complete change in the core of the game now.... they attracted people who did not want to play an easy game... and now they want to implement easy mode ?
Thats treacherous... a betrayal.
They should respect their most loyal players and do changes like :
"Remove npc guards outside towns"
"Balance pvp and pets"
"Give us thieving"
"Make weaker town guards"
"Ability to poison stuff"
Instead of thinking about penalties for murderers and adding npc guards inside cemeteries.
Pffttt
"Huge success" "We lost several people due to login issues"
500k+ copies sold and we have 1200 avg players in game, of which many are alts, on the precipice of its most anticipated content patch . You're telling me 500k people decided to pay 50$ for the download and then not play the game because of issues that happened nearly two years ago? You're delusional and quite frankly I can tell by the way you articulate your thoughts that you are not logical, you are not objective and you are not highly intelligent. (no offense)
Our current population which will translate into roughly 2000-4000 subs when game goes sub only; Lets just be generous and say 4000. That's 60k USD a month. After taxes and Unreal royalties it's going to be 500k a year or less. Which is enough to hire 2 senior developers and maybe one junior at best. Who's going to pay all the other costs associated with this project? You? Henrik?
Remember a MMO needs around 100k subscribers at a minimum to survive long-term, with regular content updates and a thriving game. Albion online for reference has nearly 4million subscribers.
"If it wasn't viable then why did they proceed" "They made research"
The same reason all the other failed projects proceeded. They didn't have the wherewithal to understand what is necessary to attract a player base that is populous enough to sustain their game. They were either too stubborn, too inept, or too delusional. (or a combination of the three)
But you were right about one thing and that is server capacity. The game can not support more then 2k players in the world reliably and with stability. Performance and stability issues are apparent even at 1700 players in game. There's no way to implements EVE node balance(dilation) solution either because the nodes are directly connected to each other in MO2 where as in EVE each solar system is an instance in it's own right. So even if we start today implementing population increasing focused changes the game cannot house them unless alternate servers are released or instances (sarducca) are implemented.
If you want to be playing Mortal 2 in 5 years then I strongly suggest you consider some compromises. A low population environment is already here and a low population environment in an MMO is only one step away from what we call "The death spiral" in which the population craters to inactivity. A new game, a content patch from a competitor, a myriad of threats are present to a low population MMO. I've seen first-hand at least a dozen examples of this in games just like Mortal 2. The last thing you want is for your MMO to be a low population environment, especially when it is as young as MO2.
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Well, your solution, then, is to turn MO2 a clone of the other easy-mode games out there, so that it has enough money to survive.
If thats the only way it works, they should never have done this game with these rules.
You seem to be someone without the guts to try something new.
To you, only things that are established are the ones that will work...
No bold...
I think MO2 started well, and that they were brave for trying something different... and it worked in the beginning, noone can deny.
Those hardcore rules were exactly what lured people to try this game.
I hope they wont turn this game into easy mode.
If thats the only way it works, they should never have done this game with these rules.
You seem to be someone without the guts to try something new.
To you, only things that are established are the ones that will work...
No bold...
I think MO2 started well, and that they were brave for trying something different... and it worked in the beginning, noone can deny.
Those hardcore rules were exactly what lured people to try this game.
I hope they wont turn this game into easy mode.
What MO2 is right now is not new at all. It's following in DFUW, DF1 and shadowbane footsteps and thats just the full-loot clones, if we start talking about standard open-world pvp or partial-loot systems we have a dozen dead titles to go over. You act like there are not countless examples of dead open-world pvp games.
It's not about making the game easier, it's about making the game financially viable which is necessary for its survival.
If the high skill ceiling from Mordhau is the reason the game died, then Chivalry 2 would be a huge success after they dumbed down their combat to the lowest denominator. But go compare their steam charts lol. Maybe first person melee games are just not that popular with casuals? Just like full loot open pvp sandbox mmorpgs...
Dumbing the game down with 1 button hard counters like pets while requiring even more grind from casuals who will need them to compete is a sure way to alienate the only intended target playerbase that would actually play the game.
Sorry to say, but MO2 will never be a popular game outside of this niche, the game is too grindy for pvp casuals and the pvers will never be happy unless theres a pvp toggle. They dont even have regional servers ffs and their only server is hard capped at 2k players. So if you overinvested in Starvault shares with your parents allowance then maybe this is the best time to sell before subs come in...
MO1 survived plenty of years with 200 concurrent players, Henrik will probably end up firing all devs except Seb that works for peanuts and use his trustfund money to keep the lights on. But if it dies then so what, some games arent meant to last forever, just enjoy it while it lasts if you find it fun.
Henrik said it's "his life's work", I don't buy your story at all. He wants a big game, he wants the reputation, the accolades, the notoriety, i'm sure of it now. I get that you seem pretty nonchalant about it but if you enjoy the game so much you should probably have the games best interest in mind...you clearly don't however. Just like DFUW; veterans like you will run the game into the ground if Henrik lets them. But Henrik has an advantage here, surely he was watching DFUW unfold, it was his primary competitor at the time. Did he learn anything? Let's hope so. Many DF1 veterans in the DFUW community had the same reaction and response that you did today when I made my suggestions there. Where are they now? They're here, they're not in Rise of Agon, they're not in Darkfall New dawn. Those games are dead now. But why? The DF1 vets got exactly what they asked for? Shouldn't those loyal veterans be playing?
The game could quintuple its concurrent population with a few minor changes even without changing the combat mechanics at all as it currently stands. Either avoidance mechanics or RNG mechanics around blue cities would immediately increase the player count. These are tried and true methods that have worked for other open-world pvp games, in fact every "Hardcore" game that lacked either avoidance mechanics or RNG mechanics eventually died.
Avoidance mechanics: Cloaks in EVE, Invisibility in Albion, Teleportation in OSRS. Each of these have in-game counters and are not useable everywhere.
RNG Mechanics: Patrolling guards of intermediate strength (risar commander) that only aggro Reds and do so from very far ranges. Also abilities with wide damage ranges and high burst potential can be RNG mechanics. OSRS implements both in this case with a combat system that relys heavily on KO's that rely heavily on RNG as well as teleportation.
The casual needs to either be provided a way to win the fight occasionally or avoid the fight occasionally(high success rate). Failure to do one of these results in low player adoption rates. Risk in the world should scale with reward and naturally areas closer to cities should be considered lower risk areas. OR potentially a higher risk area's if you are a red, depending on your looking at it with the implementation of roaming guards. Things like standing penalties or stat-loss to criminals don't matter to casuals, they are simple creatures., either give them a way to potentially(high success rates) avoid the fight or to potentially win it, it's really that simple.
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@fartbox
While catering to a pve crowd will certainly bring the masses, its goes against everything MO stands for. Henriks main purpose for making this game was to recreate UO as it was before Trammel. Hes said this many times. He hated the pve cop out of UO. This is why it will never happen here.
The other single most beneficial change for a larger population would be regional servers. Mainly because ping is a huge problem in the enjoyment and competitiveness of the pvp, as well as the obvious reason that you can simply fit more people on more servers.
However, this also goes against one of the main principles of Henrik, as hes said many times. He wants only one single server where everyone plays ogether. The only hope for this is that he has finally relented and agreed that additional continents ( like Sarducca, etc) could possibly be hosted in different world regions. Lets friken hope so.
So as you see, its not only the community you are arguing against. These are core principles of the man in charge. The community is simply a by product of his vision.
While catering to a pve crowd will certainly bring the masses, its goes against everything MO stands for. Henriks main purpose for making this game was to recreate UO as it was before Trammel. Hes said this many times. He hated the pve cop out of UO. This is why it will never happen here.
The other single most beneficial change for a larger population would be regional servers. Mainly because ping is a huge problem in the enjoyment and competitiveness of the pvp, as well as the obvious reason that you can simply fit more people on more servers.
However, this also goes against one of the main principles of Henrik, as hes said many times. He wants only one single server where everyone plays ogether. The only hope for this is that he has finally relented and agreed that additional continents ( like Sarducca, etc) could possibly be hosted in different world regions. Lets friken hope so.
So as you see, its not only the community you are arguing against. These are core principles of the man in charge. The community is simply a by product of his vision.