Josh strife Hays latest “nail in the coffin” of this game video needs to be directly addressed.
There are allegations of bots and that the forums are doctored to give a positive look for the game.
Player retention is at 10 percent and that is not normal.
If you are to turn the future of the game around you need to acknowledge, address issues and take decisive action to show your good will to current, previous and future players.
Many suspect Amazon will do what it does best, that being take the money and close down this game at some point in the bear future when it’s poor performance clearly indicated no further profit can be made.
It needs something monumental to get it’d heart beating and that needs to come from the top.
Id suggest some kind of reward for players, a sorry letter, a plan and schedule for fixes and substantial new content and a promise to rebirth this game that you adhere to.
Noone will ever play any future Amazon gaming service games unless you do this. Gamers are a forgiving lot so long as you are decent and honest.
I don’t even think it needs something monumental. Lip service from execs with an addressed letter would take a one time burst of fifteen minutes and be immensely better than where we’re at. In fact, I bet your ass I can write that letter right now. Might take my unqualified ass about an hour tops if I refine it to a grain.
The problem is that we get nothing. For not cheating, we get to grind more; for obeying rules, we get no transparency from CS; for playing the game modestly and not hyperconsuming the content, we get to spend more time doing the same content for slightly different reasons. They added a new weapon, and it was really cool I’ll fully grant… but all we can do with it is the same flawed content.
And we get constant harebrained explanations, always killing one bird with two stones; they dislike that people sped through content, so the system they add A) doesn’t affect people who did so, B) makes the grind slower for those who did, and C) encourages power grinding before it implements to bypass it… how even.
They just have nothing that looks good on them right now. We get Mugsy, champion that they are, frantically flying across the forums and trying to assuage concerns and defuse flamewars. Meanwhile, CS operates what seems autonomously-- they do not answer to anyone-- we have no idea what the vision is, why a lot of choices are made, why certain things aren’t on the pipeline. The dev corner ebbs and flows, we recently benefitted from seeing them take feedback but then it was awfully quiet before that.
Even their cash shop feels flat. I can’t believe one of the best things they could think to sell was company icons…
AGS I would also put into perspective that Josh Strife is experienced with MMORPGs and makes valid points. There are a lot of opinionated biases, but that aside I do believe that the game does need work, which we are actively seeing. In comparison to a lot of other games, this game has seen more updates per month. I do stream and express the rampant problems we have been seeing.
Report abuse (this has been occurring since day one. Remove the repercussions until viewed and validated by a moderator.)
For false reports, the punishment should be reflected based on situation. IE: two people arguing, but one decides to report after even though they initiated hostility shouldn’t reward them with temp-ban on the other person. However, a group of people spam reporting and bashing 1 person means the group should be banned for a lengthy part of time. It doesn’t matter if it’s your friends you think you’re defending, what is wrong is wrong.
Toxic Community, this game has the worst community I have seen yet. Gang mentality is a thing, while streamers are bringing their toxic fanbase into the game. Honestly, not all streamers, but a lot of them are the root to the toxic community. The solution would be repeat offenders get much harsher punishments (if THE REPORTS ARE VALIDATED)
As far as in-game, most major exploits have been addressed, and I believe mitigation is being addressed. All in all, most of the complaints towards glitches/exploits have been addressed or getting fixed.
this is something that i do not agree with josh in his video. or rather that i think that statement needs a little bit more evaluation.
While PLayer retention is an important number i think the surrounding numbers are important aswell.
New World was hyped so hard, that they had almost 1 million players at release. That is actually an insane number and it was clear from the start that they will lose at least 50% of that players after 1 month. Why? simple because a lot of players that don’t play mmos tried new world, a lot of players also just played because their favorite streamer played that game. Streamers and there communities are not good for an mmo or actually for any multiplayer title. They come play that game until the next big thing hits and boom they are all gone maybe 1% stays but its not much. Add to that the usual mmo crowd that jumps on the usual “this is the wow killer wagon” until they realise they can’t play that game like their favorite (most of the time the first or second mmo they ever played) for an endlessa mount of time and boom another 30% are gone.
I think that an 80-90% lose of playerbase had to be expected. especially playerbases will always take a dip when new big updates from different mmos are coming. Most mmos nowadays are B2P meaning you pay once and you are done. This allows hardcore mmo players to play multiple mmos because whats happening is that mmo1 gets a new update they play that until they saw all of the content (2months sometimes less) or most of it, then mmo2 gets a new update so they switch in time from mmo1 to mmo2 ect. this is an endless cycle.
That said, this doesn’t make the shit AGS has done so far ok or that they did a good job but what they need to do now is merge those server ASAP to fill up the servers again, get a grip fix the damn game and start with actual changes that people want to see
