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The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

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punk7712
Posts: 25

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#101 » Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:38 am

I will post more tomorrow, but I appreciate your detailed response. I am fine with you shitting on the flighty hype beasts type of casuals. That I get. I am less thrilled about devs shitting on dudes who don't want to spend all night listening to necks beards on the spectrum babble on discord.

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Bozzax
Posts: 2477

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#102 » Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:53 am

Depending on content and management your project either dwindles, steady state or grow.

I actually think the effect new MMOs have is minimal if your population enjoy what you do and align with your goals. (Ie there really is no need to look elsewhere). Even new games fail which pretty much proves my point.

From my POV you are loosing quite a few that enjoyed the game "for what it was". Population trend was kind of obvious long before the release of these new. games as well (jun-sept). Provided Amazon has the right information ofc.

With this said I’m thankful you keep the world alive.

(These new games basically are **** for different reasons :D if you want endless rants about why they suck just tune in to Zarbix)

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Last edited by Bozzax on Sun Oct 17, 2021 9:12 am, edited 11 times in total.
A reasonable RvR system that could make the majority happy http://imgur.com/HL6cgl7

mogt
Posts: 480

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#103 » Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:43 am

wargrimnir wrote: Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:52 am
punk7712 wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 5:52 pm
wargrimnir wrote: Sat Oct 16, 2021 4:35 pm This thread has flailed wildly off topic, you guys keep getting baited by the same troll when he makes new accounts too.

Please stick to why casual players are bad and shouldn't be listened to as the topic title indicates.
I suspect this comment is tongue in cheek, but it's not a good look coming from staff. If you guys want to lean into hardcore only you will be competing with an MMO that does that better than anyone, Shadowbane. These are the kind of population numbers you will be looking at though. That said, and I say this with all sincerity, this is your game and you can do with it what you like. I respect that the developers are doing this for free on their own time.

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Shadowbane has been dead for a long time, they shutdown in 2009. They sold off to another company in 2012 who sat on the game until February this year. The only reason it was re-released on Steam is because old Shadowbane players were getting geared up to start playing Crowfall, which is essentially Shadowbane 2. The current version of Shadowbane on Steam is a blatantly pay-to-win zombie reskin of the original game, only the most desperate nostalgia should draw anyone in. We have slightly higher standards than that. I don't expect it to survive a full year. By most accounts, ChangYou is a pump and dump "developer" who has done essentially nothing for the game. We outpace them in development, features, and updates by a wide margin. The SBemu server was shutdown shortly before the Steam re-launch happened to keep their population one place, which backfired. Can't trust some shady cash shop dev to do what a private server will. Once ChangYou shuts down their live server, fans will bring back the emu again, hopefully.

In short, Shadowbane is really bad, and dying for painfully obvious reasons, as it should.

Crowfall on the other hand, despite it's nosedive post-release, managed to bring over several of RoR guilds because it's a modern re-release of a hardcore guild based open world RvR game. This is more the kind of thing we do around here. That would be a much more apt comparison to what an "unpopular" niche might be able to command as far as active players. Casuals, as in the kind of people who don't want to play a hardcore open world RvR game, played Crowfall anyway because the visuals were nice and it was as shiny new MMO after a long MMO drought. They're the ones leaving, not the people who actually want to play in this niche PvP genre. I have hope that Crowfall knew what they were getting into and were very much expecting a casual pop and bleed post-launch, time will tell. These are the "casuals" I've had criticism over, at least they're the ones I was referring to anyway. Lesser games that panic over the themepark ride ending for an excited casual MMO base can ruin those games as they're unfairly criticized for "losing population" who never had any intention of playing there long term anyway.

The other elephant in the room regarding RoR population is New World, which does have some interesting PvP elements, but if you're a staunch Warhammer fan, it doesn't really scratch that itch. It's not really a high fantasy game, some people really like their elfs and dwarfs and orcs. Otherwise it's a pretty good competitor if you're solely looking for some open world pvp with keep battles. Although on the other hand, I can't imagine we're really expected to compete with either of these games while the populist hype cycle is driving them forward and modern era development is actually being done.

That being said, I don't think in the long run either of these games matter much to ROR. Until Warhammer Online 2 releases (don't gasp, it's not a thing), most of the people that love Warhammer Fantasy and a fair amount of Old World fans, will come and go as they please. There's a difference in how "casual" is used in threads like this. When it comes to low effort, minimal time available, solo pug playstyle, that's fine for ROR. It's not going away. These "casuals" will lose more than they win, and as long as they can accept that this playstyle means less rewards than people who invest a lot of time into the game and play at a highly coordinated level, they can still enjoy the game for what is put into it. When it comes to casual players that I've apparently spit on recently, the hordes of people that might swarm a game for the first couple months after release, I don't find those people very important for ROR at all. Catering to those people isn't going to bring some renaissance of ex-WOW veterans to the game. They need to enjoy ROR for what it is. A niche, hardcore, RVR-first, Warhammer Fantasy MMO.

It's a good time to be a fan of MMO PvP with a bunch of options newly released. This impacts our numbers, and I really don't think there's much that can be done about it. However, we will be fine in the long run, and will continue development anyway.

nice word you are complety right with all things. many players dont want hear/read the truth, that is the problem

BeautfulToad
Posts: 631

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#104 » Sun Oct 17, 2021 10:20 am

Bozzax wrote: Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:53 am
Graph
The graph is essentially picking Australian TZ. The peak during lockdown was at well over 2k players, they had to expand the server. Even now, most nights EU timezone will hit 800, and is around 800 right now.

Should RoR reach out to casual players? Of course.

However, RoR is a volunteer project, it may seem like a triple AAA mmo for a variety of reasons, but sooner or later an mmo will come and be better than RoR. Do I think that game is New Worlds? No, I don't think their PvP system is as good as RoR, and is a PvE game with PvP elements. Eve Online had a much better design. Nothing seems to be a large-scale PvP battle simulator, with PvE elements. If it was a commercial game the natural expansion would be a new race or faction (Skaven :drool:), but it's a part-time project and completely free.

What does RoR do to improve casual players experience? In my view,
  • Ignoring composition, T4 SCs will always be difficult to balance, you have people in sovereign and people in annihilator, so you will always struggle to do well if you don't have the gear.
  • Supply system could change/scrapped to make it a bit more funner pre-siege. A few people suggested stuff.
  • Making guilds a bit more relevant, I remember someone suggested a whole bunch of stuff a few months back. Stuff like guild HQs that can be fought over, and making notable guilds more visible maybe in Altdorf or IC
  • Reducing the grind. Need to accept conq gear is pretty useless right now and T4 toons need to hit vanq asap
  • Hunters Vale is a solid zone and good release, and not really appreciated by player base for a solid vanq-level gear, and very nice jewellery item. Would be nice to have something that could be farmed there (e.g., pot ingredients)
  • Maybe looking at dynamically closing zones, or not have all 3 zones open at once if server pop not high enough to support 3 open zones.

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Toggle
Posts: 286

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#105 » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:19 pm

Rapzel wrote: Fri Oct 15, 2021 12:01 am
Toggle wrote: Thu Oct 14, 2021 7:41 pm
Rapzel wrote: Thu Oct 14, 2021 5:49 pm

Misconception, you may think you lose because of gear, bit it's the smallest factor in general, RR and skill outperform any gear in this game (from a group setting perspective, not the people that believe that there's any skill in going full regen and afk people to death), that's why the game has managed to be fun for such a long for many even though it's been pretty much the same maps that have been played for the last 12 years.



Whenever the "sweaty tryhards who plays for 14 hrs a day" propose that there should be incentives to actually do things as a group the solo players see red, because they believe they are entitled to stuff, even though they sit AFK 90% of the time and are so incompetent they can't even be used as cannon fodder.
6 man groups got weekend event and ranked, so I am not complaining, but when I look at the rewards people for actually setting up proper WBs for ORvR and that they get the same terrible rewards as the plebs who run around without any spatial awareness or understanding of what is going on, except for whining and proposing bad sieges in RegionRvR chat, it really makes me wonder why these people continue playing the game, I guess it's the social aspect.
If your organized WBs are getting “the same terrible rewards as the plebs”, then you need to find some better organized WBs. There’s a significant difference in medals gained in a zone, zone contribution, fort bags, city wins/bags, etc. in an organized WB when comparing it to a PUG WB. But you already know that…
Is there though?

The renown nerf hit premade WBs hard in ORvR.
We went from 30k locks to 10k locks, when a pleb can get 5k for a lock Idk if it's worth try harding for that extra 5k.
And wow the extra 6 vanquisher medallions you get for the lock, amazing.

Best bag is still quite rare and for the majority of players it's just 3 Royal Crests, which means you can spend 4-5 hrs getting the same amount of royal crests as one stage in a city which if you're unlucky takes about 40 mins.

Another issue is that when you queue as a 24 man for city and you get another good 24 man all of the sudden you might spend 2+ hrs in a city alone while solo queue stomps are just over in ~25 mins.

Solo queue city players get the same amount of renown/medals for winning and losing, only difference may be amount of bag rolls, haven't solo queued a city in a long time so idk about that.

Ranked at least yields triumphant and whatever the other currency is called and weekend event gives you some crafting mats and an event item, where do you get them in the "main focus" of the game?

Sure you're not wrong in that the progression is slower for a solo player, but the rewards are equal in open RvR.
Yes, there is.
Shaman - 40/8X
Zealot - 40/8X [Retired]
AM - 40/8X
RP - 40/7X [Retired]

Uncas23
Posts: 4

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#106 » Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:28 am

Caduceus wrote: Tue Oct 12, 2021 2:39 pm

2. Increased Time-to-Kill:


The Changes: over time many changes have affected time-to-kill (TTK), including changes to the M2 Distracting Bellow, changes to morale damage, and processes like power creep and players getting a better understanding of the game.

TTK is now extremely high and nowhere is this better illustrated than Ranked 6v6, where both sides sometimes battle for 10 minutes in wait of a perfect storm that allows for a kill to take place. However, it is clearly visible in fights between warbands too. Both sides are often engaged in an endless circling around where players get resurrected faster than they are killed, and battles are decided by which side gets reinforcements faster.

It is my opinion that these changes have taken important elements of player skill out of the equation. The defensive safety net has grown so out of proportion that even the most aggregious of positional mistakes go unpunished, and the most skillful tactical surprises go unrewarded.

Further, it is my suspicion that this subject has been left unadressed because it protects organized groups from the unwashed masses of pugs and solo players from scoring upset victories from time to time.


The Oversight: most importantly, these changes (and a failure/unwillingness to address these issues) have disrupted the balance between offense and defense in practically all avenues of play. In solo and small-scale regen/high mitigation builds dominate, in 6v6 we have to wait 10 minutes for a single kill, and in organized warbands we are stuck in endless cycles of kill > ress > repeat.

What needs to be pointed out, is that the winners in such engagements often are decided simply by gear and setup, and not by the skill of the participating individuals. In fact, in many cases this is so absolute that whichever is the losing side literally has no chance of winning, not even by a stroke of tactical genius or timing, or by luring the enemy into a positional mistake, etc. It is often a matter of one side winning by default, or both sides being stuck in an endless cycle by default. The dominance of defense over offense leads to predictable fights and stalemates.


The Consequences: when both sides are constantly unable to gain a decisive advantage over each other, the go-to option becomes simply to bring more players to the field. In other words, this current state of affairs heavily promotes zerging, and counterplay to fight against greater numbers has all but been removed.

(Sidenote: the changes to morale-damage, in my opinion, were very hard to understand. The counterplay to morale bombing has always been there, and it involved actual positioning and skill: spreading out. Morale-bombing simply punished blobbing, as it should.)

As said, one consequence of these changes is zerging, but its negative impact is also felt where zerging is impossible: duels, 6v6, 24v24. These fights are becoming an uninteresting procession to a lot of people. A wait for the perfect storm to come about. Often they are either stalemates or foregone conclusions. Instances where both sides have a bid for victory are increasingly rare, even though most players enjoy these types of fights the most.

Further, it has disincentivized players from fighting from the underdog position, because victory cannot be attained through tactical means. In fact, in a lot of cases the underdog side cannot even fight for a SINGLE KILL. The result is that people do not find creative ways of achieving victory, if those are even available, and sooner switch sides or give up.
This part about time to kill resonated with me a lot. However I don't see it exactly as a problem that turns off new/casual players. In fact it may turn off more invested players more since they are the ones participating in ranked and city mostly. And these are the environments where TTK can be very high. Also if the problem is the extensive safety net as you mentioned shouldn't it be actually beneficial for casual players?

But I'm going in an argument which is not my goal. I wanted to add my thoughts about time to kill. So it's clear that TTK is not too high in orvr situations. Why?
I see two factors:
1. Simply the number of possible dps on a single target is very high because of the big player count.
2. Team composition is very different from ranked and city. There are usually not 8 healers and 8 tanks per warband. They are also not distributed perfectly.

Considering the 2nd factor I think the high time to kill is partly a "problem" of the meta. The meta that "every group needs 2-2-2". Even 1 more dps instead of a tank or a healer massively reduces time to kill for both sides. I even doubt that 2-2-2 is the most effective strategy. It is the safest for sure.

To conclude I think the high time to kill is the symptom of the modern mindset. The mindset that " I read a guide to play the game and any deviaton from this guide is a heresy and trolling". It is clearly very boring to smash buttons for half an hour with barely any effect in cities. Yet people continue to bring 2-2-2.

As for solution it's a very convenient problem. It can be solved by players changing their ways and over time the meta. No developer involvement is needed.

Caduceus
Posts: 653

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#107 » Mon Oct 18, 2021 7:47 am

Uncas23 wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:28 am
This part about time to kill resonated with me a lot. However I don't see it exactly as a problem that turns off new/casual players. In fact it may turn off more invested players more since they are the ones participating in ranked and city mostly. And these are the environments where TTK can be very high. Also if the problem is the extensive safety net as you mentioned shouldn't it be actually beneficial for casual players?

Thanks for your reaction.


The reason I think TTK affects new players is because they are most likely to be in groups with unoptimized class setups, tend to have unoptimized class builds and lower gear. However, it's an issue that impacts players of all skill/experience levels.

The defensive safety net requires a lot of effort to overcome, even for relatively experienced players. New players simply cannot, and whenever they are faced with it, the result is 500-0 scenarios, or city instances where they cannot take a single kill off the opposing team. These things are not uncommon and happen every day, not just to new players. In RvR it is also a problem, however less pronounced because the option to bring more players than the enemy is always there as a solution.


A lot of the time when these situations take place, there's no way to fight back, and there's isn't really any incentive to do so. It's either surrender or get farmed. It would be different if players were at least able to punish mistakes and get the odd kill off the enemy.


I look at this from the point of view of an experienced player, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for new players.

Uncas23 wrote: Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:28 am
But I'm going in an argument which is not my goal. I wanted to add my thoughts about time to kill. So it's clear that TTK is not too high in orvr situations. Why?
I see two factors:
1. Simply the number of possible dps on a single target is very high because of the big player count.
2. Team composition is very different from ranked and city. There are usually not 8 healers and 8 tanks per warband. They are also not distributed perfectly.

Considering the 2nd factor I think the high time to kill is partly a "problem" of the meta. The meta that "every group needs 2-2-2". Even 1 more dps instead of a tank or a healer massively reduces time to kill for both sides. I even doubt that 2-2-2 is the most effective strategy. It is the safest for sure.

To conclude I think the high time to kill is the symptom of the modern mindset. The mindset that " I read a guide to play the game and any deviaton from this guide is a heresy and trolling". It is clearly very boring to smash buttons for half an hour with barely any effect in cities. Yet people continue to bring 2-2-2.

As for solution it's a very convenient problem. It can be solved by players changing their ways and over time the meta. No developer involvement is needed.

I see your point, and I've always been interested in trying unorthodox setups. The 1 tank, 3 dps, 2 healer setup has been quite successful in 6v6 Group Ranked Season 2, so there's something to be said for it, though the sample size is quite small (I think only one team played like that) and it remains to be seen whether it can be effectively countered or not.


As for using such setups to build 24-man warbands, I'm not sure if it's ever been tried, but I can see a ranged ST group with 3 dps perform well and use their range to offset the lack of defenses.


For RvR I don't think it looks that realistic at first glance however. The value of ST is reduced in large RvR fights, and since close-range AoE builds would be very risky with only 1 tank, the question that remains is whether ranged AoE builds can be useful enough to justify bringing such a group setup. Pushing keeps and fortresses seems an inherent problem, and also the lack of guard will make the warband vulnerable to tactical surprises.


All in all, I think there may be some potential here, but it's not enough to start speaking of a clear solution to the problem as described in the OP.


(On an unrelated note, the more I talk about this, the more I think "time-to-kill" was not an accurate term to use for the issue I tried to address, and it's actually turning out to be more about the defensive safety net.)
"I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and surviving." - Colonel Walter E. Kurtz

Sulorie
Posts: 7219

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#108 » Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:09 am

Afaik TTK only feels long in engagements of equally strong opponents, where all come down to a lucky CC chain or small mistake to secure a kill - granted that not one setup is inherently weaker from the get go.

Don't you think, that less defensive tools will make the undergeared team wipe faster, especially with assist working more reliably with more coordinated groups.
The city warbands, who lose with 0 kills, never had a realistic chance, no matter how much defensive safety nets you have.
Dying is no option.

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mynban
Posts: 204

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#109 » Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:43 am

I feel non-stop resource free healing, combined with the amount of healing without needing to invest in willpower; on a guarded target too strong.

Today I watched a 6man eventually give up beating on a tank+healer duo after hitting them 5mins without getting anywhere; and just hit flee+get on mounts and look for a new target elsewhere. There was massive gear/rr difference of course; but if that was a dps duo instead, 2-3 of 6man would die, but they would probably kill at least one of that duo. It doesn't help that most new players start playing with a dps class either.

There is simply a dps/cc coordination treshold for getting any kills vs targets under guard & heal. If you dont hit that treshold, you may as well afk since nothing will change regardless. And from a pug perspective, there is massive difference between losing without being able even bring a single enemy close to death, vs losing while being able to kill a few from other side.

I used to play WoW arena on shaman and rogue. Having heal in your skillset didnt mean being able to use it infinitely, you had to balance cd/casttime/mana. Here in RoR you can heal 7/24 without running out of resource. It is kind of weird that dps actually runs out of ap after a short time, but healers can go on forever.

Stahn123
Banned
Posts: 87

Re: The alienation of solo/pug/casual players and it's unintended side-effects

Post#110 » Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:25 am

Agreed. For a very long time it's just been Order basically pve in the lakes while destro watches hopelessly as they are so outnumbered. They can't even run boxes in groups in empty zones without having minimum of double their number come and kill them then try to farm them at their war camp. When you're side is THAT outnumbered, this game has virtually NOTHING to do if your dungeons are on lockdown. You obviously can't fight a 3 group zerg with your 6 man, if you even have that many. There is NOTHING TO DO, so people quit and swap sides to the one winning so they can actually play the game. This system is drastically broken.

Skill trees need to make BOTH sides attractive to play. Not just 1. They need to be cleaned up. Given abilities that make them relevant instead of just filler. Order has plenty of this. Destro has very little of this. Each class on Order has abilities that are clearly defined, you can see what the purpose of the class and tree should be and it's playstyle is mostly clear. Destro it's a mix bag and things are all over all 3 trees for every class. There is no clear style of play and no real idea of how it's meant to be played. Zealot has heals all over the place in their trees, Black Orc abilities are so meh that nobody really knows what to do with it anymore, chosen has virtually no way to increase their block...as a tank. How does that even make sense? Population is a big problem, and only by making the classes more clean and clearly defined will fix it as people find the class they feel is right for them.

More ways for small groups to build up their own renown when they are drastically underpopulated need to be available and shouldn't be a punishment. Let them have ways to assist in the war, but not be what MAKES the war. Boxes suck already, being farmed by a warband because it literally has nothing else to do but pve on rvr keeps is even worse and it's just ridiculous. Serious changes need to be made, this sort of thing will absolutely get new players to quit. Hell, even long time players have swapped sides to get away from it because it's so bad.

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