6 public gold dupes in just 2 month leads into 80% playerloss
There are a number of reasons why the game is not doing well. And most of them have to do with the player community, unfortunately. Add to that the logistical problems the game provides, and it becomes very hard to turn this game around.
Part of the problem is that someone new playing the game has to find a reason to invest time in playing the game going forward. Right now, there are a bunch of limitations that keep that from happening.
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Bots. The amount of bots in the game is ridiculous to the point of a few times where I just signed out of the game because I couldn’t get anything done. And the devs just don’t seem to do anything about them (that we can see). There are no less than four bots that run the hemp fields between Windsward and Everfall nonstop. You feel quite lucky if you get a smidgen of the fiber that exists in those fields after hours of trying to get any spawns. The other day, I watched as some guy with a gibberish name was running the fields, stopping at every spawn point (and picking up nothing) while running his circuit. Later that night, he was running the same path and grabbing everything, which told me I was actually seeing a botter who was in the process of setting his route (in a route that was being used by about three other botters). Imagine that on a larger scale, and you start to see one of the first things a new player is going to see.
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Until you hit 60, you have no purpose in this game but to grind for levels. None. Even closing lower level portals does nothing but just give you some loot to help you prepare to get stronger as you keep having to move towards 60. If someone came to this game for pvp, then that person is either going to get stomped all the way to 60, or quit in frustration long before ever reaching 60 to be able to compete with people who have been gear scoring themselves for weeks before a new person ever reaches 60.
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The populations. That’s the biggest problem because as long as populations are low, cities are basically vulnerable to complete destruction by the sheer number of invasions. And too few people participate in pvp, so even that end game process becomes more of a fantasy. And if the populations are high, like on Valhalla, you’re competing with dozens of other people in EVERY spawn spot in the game.
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The player base. My theory is that because this is a pvp (in theory) game, the population is massively toxic to each other. Every time I have decided to go on a low level hunting expedition (for wolves or boars), there’s some guy running around instantly stealing every kill I made, following me around to try to skin the creature before I can. The player base treats these spawn points as theirs, and if you don’t like it, your only option is to steal it before they do, which leaves any player thinking, perhaps I should find another game or see what’s on television instead of deal with this crap.
The sad thing is that they’re fixing things, but just not the big things. Little things like not falling down the stairs was a huge improvement, but when much larger issues remain, that’s what we’re competing with in hopes of gaining new players.
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800-900k in such a short amount of time HAS to be some kind of record, right?
Nope, I don’t want anything free. I was just informing someone that the government doesn’t protect their right to post on video game forums and sub reddits. Not sure where you got free stuff from.
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Yes, or if not toxic, indifferent to each other. Regarding bots, it’s unbelievable to me that with all the money and technology Amazon put into this game they didn’t prepare for people taking advantage of it. On my server, a single group has taken over which is clearly the same people running bots to support RMT scams and they’ve done nothing about it. As a matter of fact, if you look at the benefits of owning all the areas, it’s obvious someone would do this due to the amount of money they can save/make from their bot activities with the claim discounts. All Amazon would need to do is follow the money trail and it would be easy to clean this up.
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Working as intended. One time purchase. Thanks for being part of the paid beta!
It’s still dead. Jim.
Nope. Level 60 players are just delusional. They think the game lost it’s population because thousands of them got banned due to exploiting and duping. But in reality the vast majority of the community is not even level 60 yet. Data can prove that. Ask AGS officially and they will tell you. I see it with my own eyes… I see hundreds and hundreds of playing every day who are in all kind of different range… lvl 15, lvl 25, lvl 35, lvl 45 etc. From the Steam’s achievement table only 22% of all users have reached level 50. Do you still think what level 60’s think about the game ? They are probably not more than 10% of the entire playerbase, if not less after the termination of that many abusers. Think again… the game is just time consuming, vast majority of gamers are not playing 12 hours a day, on top of the fact it takes well over 100 hours to get to level 40-45 if you for example are new player ( not alpha,beta experience ) no group trying hard to progress faster with the experience we have in beta versions etc.
I think Amazon (and many younger gamers in general) really underestimated how much the combo of region locked trading posts and storage + burdensome travel was a huge turn-off to lots of people who may only have 1-2 hours most nights to log in and do things. Some has been resolved, like the trading post not being region locked, but of the 3 IRL friends I got to start playing NW with me, all three left for that exact reason. None of us 4 are even 30 yet but we are home-owning adults with jobs and lives - if a couple of us have 60-90 minutes to game, it’s not even worth opening NW - 1/3 of the time will be spent running place to place or doing inventory management for weight, and then, what, wanna run some faction quests together? Good luck, since you can’t sync quests with group members, which is like… Day One type crap in modern MMOs. Additionally, the organized PVP events were basically inaccessible - OPR and invasions were level locked away from us, and there were already so many 50-60s within the first 10-14 days on our servers that getting selected for a war for our faction under level 50 was basically an impossibility.
I dont think that drove a majority of the player loss or anything, as I would imagine the majority of players don’t fall into that demo (though, how uncommon is the “24-29y/o fulltime worker” demo in a video game? probably not the smallest) but its an example of at least two players who pretty directly gave up on the game around level 30 largely due to the travel and other little quality of life failures. I know a lot of HARDCORE SWEATY GAMERS hate the idea of a game “catering” to “filthy casuals” but if we want to be brutally honest about the reality of the economics here, the only way this makes sense for AGS from a $$ perspective is when people like my friends actually stay and play, and have disposable income and few qualms about spending real money on shit like cosmetics in the store. One of these three dudes spent over 2k USD on Apex and OW lootboxes last year - and hes not even good at FPS games! - All AGS got from him was the $40 for the base game of NW. The folks and kids who can and do put in 200-300 hours a month into the game are the backbone of the population, but from a “keeping the lights on” perspective, a player that plays for 800 hours and paid $40 is definitely not more valuable to AGS than a player that only plays 20-40 hours per month, but also impulsively drops $40-$80+ every month in the shop on weird cosmetics. I don’t think microtransactions should be a big part of the game (though I fear AGS is intentionally headed towards selling QoL boosts in the store to “fix” the problems in the game) as i generally hate P2W systems in their entirety, but the way the game is designed combined with endless bugs, feature shut offs, changes, etc make it basically an actively hostile environment to people who are not willing to put in “additional part-time job” hours into a game meant for escapism. The sweaty-folk are incredibly important, but no game that aims to be as big as NW wants to be survives by only appealing to the 15-25% most dedicated players in the game - eventually you end up with only those players left. In some games that can at least be workable, but NW cannot function without healthy and consistent population levels on their servers, and they seem to be doing everything possible to destroy those population levels right now. It’s baffling, honestly.
The game has a great foundation, and, importantly everything wrong or broken about NW is entirely within AGS power to remedy, which is the main thing that still gives me a small amount of hope - as of yet I don’t believe they’ve managed to break anything so badly it cannot be repaired or improved upon to a level that would bring players back. They’ll never come close to the big numbers again, as anyone who has worked in any sort of customer facing job can tell you that for many folks bad first impressions will outweigh anything AGS ever does to improve NW, and they’ll never forget the bad taste in their mouth and give NW another shot. I hope that there are not as many people in that group, but thats not really possible for us to know for now, until things are better and we see if anyone comes back.
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After all the resource nerfs, I’m not so sure anymore about the benefits of being in a high pop server. AGS recently set limitations on server transfers for new accounts, because they were muling resources into high pop servers from lower ones. And this existed even before the resource nerfs.
I mean, if people like the thrill of competing for resources, then sure, power to them, but casuals who can only log in for 3 hours a day just to see a landscape devoid of key resources…? Idk.
Considering 500+ people posted the exact same question in the last month or so, my opinion is you don’t give a crap about this game enough to know that 500+ people already asked the same question on this same forum in the last month or so, or you’re too lazy to read the forums and know what everyone thinks already.
actually, it is getting better in Hellheim, more players day after day. it is kinda busy server with decent economy.
My opinion? Dead game by the end of 2021. That’s what I predicted months before release because I knew how bad this game was (beta access).
Seems like I’ve been right. We’ll drop down to 50k primetime players by Dec 31.
No idea how Hellheim turned out, but it was by far the biggest and most sought after server until a few weeks ago. I played on this server and it never dropped below 1000 players at any time of the day. It also had the largest queues for the longest time.
actually even hellheim got quiet for some period of time, the patches the fixes are bringing ppl back, the only minority who are complaining are the top 0.1% that rushed to 600gs and there is no more content to go with. When I was young I did the same with Tera, Literally finished the game in 5 days and took a break, but I came back later and stayed for there for quite a time, enjoyed the new content, pvp arenas as well as open world pvp.
This game is young, the mechanics are cool, being pvp with such kind of mechanics will surely bring tons of bugs, look at Elyon, new game with kinda similar mechanics, bugs are there, same set of complaints and whining, everybody complaining about slayers being op like the GA here, those things in MMOs do not get fixed in a day they take months.
What I learned from playing MMOs for 22 years, just enjoy the journey, have multiple activities and most of all have a life :).
Everybody criticizing the devs, the same thing happened in Archeage launch, for not having enough servers and the queue was so long, they pressed the devs, then what happened? the hype was over, majority went to their previous MMOs, and we ended up with empty servers were you cannot really merge due to housing. The devs here are good enough, IMO, the only real pressing matters are server merges and company earnings on settlements, everything else is just some minor issue.
Also, mass pvp will always lean towards defensive classes, GA WH S&S Healers. Just like majority of the games, take GW2, RF Online as an example, Aion too.
Opinion? Stop looking at steam charts. You only need 1500-2k in one place. No other server impacts your server. Popularity contests don’t equate to much. They already got the money.
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“Shield stat removal on unsheated weapons” is something good. Otherwise everyone would run around with a shield on their back even if they are dps,healer etc. Which looks stupid for both visuals and rp/lore when combined with other type of weapons on their back if you are not a tank. You shouldn’t care about it much if you are tank even. Losing few stats while switching weapons as a tank is not a huge problem. But visual/rp is. Atleast for me.
I disagree. The driving force behind the game losing players is the bugs/dupes/exploits and general developer ineptitude and the balance changes are just the final straw for many.
For me hugest problems are dupes and bugs that can be abused. Those two causes most big impacts, rest can be easier to fix.