Integrating new players to the game - incentive system proposal

[leftayparxoun]

Hello everyone.
In this post I will be proposing a relatively complex to design but (hopefully) easy to code in-game mechanic that should incentivize guilds to ''adopt'' new players, with both of them benefiting. For those who don't want to read through the finer details I also have a T.L.D.R. section at the bottom. For those who do end up reading everything, thank you in advance and please let me know your thoughts about the idea. If you find the concept promising, please try to think of any ways it could be abused (so that we can add a method/clause to restrict that). On the side of the Developers, please let us know if implementing something like this is flat out impossible coding-wise, so as to not linger on the idea too much.
Let's begin

The problem:

While I refer to this section as a problem, it is more accurate in my opinion to view this issue as an opportunity. What I’m referring to is the way that knowledge transfer happens for new/returning players.
By taking a quick look in the forums and in the official discord you can will surely notice how recently we’ve had a resurgence of new players returning to the game or trying it out for the first time. The reasons behind this vary from media coverage, The Old World tabletop sparking interest in Warhammer Fantasy games as well as from passionate fans recently spreading the word via social media
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVZhMmPoN5A, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HxTci1o13w)
Considering the current population situation, this is something we need to take advantage of and foster an environment for those newcomers that actually makes them want to stick to the game. Not because they feel obligated to do so, but because they are having fun.


A way to solve it:

While a ton of things can theoretically be done to achieve that, I will focus on the simplest one, which should require little Dev effort and instead incentivize the community to integrate new players organically.
The core of the problem lies in the ways that transfer of knowledge happens in the game. As an officer in a guild that focuses on new players, I have a lot of first hand experience with how that happens and with how it doesn’t. Most veterans will agree that there is a plethora of guides and informative materials online (forums, official discord) that as a whole should be enough for any player to eventually get to know the game sufficiently well, without having to rely on information that exists only in private discords. There are some issues however:

• There is no centralized information hub

• We don’t have a way to point newcomers to those resources efficiently (unless they ask for it themselves)

• Besides advice chat, there is no way for players to find those resources if they just play the game and don’t interact with any other media (official site, discord)

From experience, the way the above issues are being counteracted is by getting people involved in guilds and then pointing them towards the necessary resources for their needs. So, even if the knowledge transfer is being automated by available guides/resources, there is still a big community component that entails:

• Recruiting/reaching out to new players

• Pointing them towards the resources they need

• Filling in the gaps of what they missed, and finally

• Helping them put that knowledge into practice

This process is an arduous one, however. Ideally, guilds prefer that the new members joining them are already done with those steps of the knowledge transfer and thus require little “effort” to get them up to speed. And while there are exceptions, from what I’ve seen, guilds either don’t recruit brand new players or, if they do, it happens one/a few at a time. The later results in players having proportionately a lot of veterans around them which can each pitch in a bit to help them out.
Recently though, this approach cannot keep up with the demand. There are a lot of new players coming back/into the game and the (new player recruiting) guilds that are left are not enough to absorb them with the status quo. As a result:

• New-player friendly guilds are overwhelmed with new members if they recruit freely (and thus cannot give proper attention/help to all of them) or, if they don’t recruit openly…

• new players are stuck in “The Forces of Destruction/Order” guilds for a while and leave the game soon after due to not playing/gearing/grouping up/setting up their UI appropriately and therefore being farmed until they get bored or quit.

So how do we get more guilds to recruit and help integrate more new players?


The (proposed) solution:

The easiest way to do so is to offer incentives. So, what incentives could possibly make most veterans go out of their way to help new players? Simply put, war crests. With each character needing between 20-45k war crests to obtain the best in slot gear required for all their specs, only a tiny minority of the players will be done with their grind on all their active characters. Therefore, war crests or increased war crest gain will always be desirable even for veterans.
So, how do we award war crests to players/guilds that decide to integrate new players? And more importantly, how do we ensure that the system cannot be manipulated? I will be posting my proposal here, but if you can think of any other ideas that could work or are plainly better, by all means, write about them in the comments.

• The buff:
  
  It should ideally be something:
  • active (no passive benefit if you are not playing the game)
  • guild-wide (promoting grouping up and forming long-standing communities)
  • temporary and able to scale (should reward guilds that keep on putting the effort and not for a one-time thing they did)
  The way it scales should also be tied to new/returning players, and to how well they are adjusting in the game. I will be referring to the quantification of this with the metric C.
  
  With those criteria in mind, the buff I propose would be something along the lines of:

  “Whenever you win a roll for a War Crest you have a 0% to 25% chance depending on C (more on that soon) to gain an additional War Crest.”

• The scaling:
  
  The C metric/score cannot unfortunately distinguish between new players and alts of veterans without going into account identification shenanigans, which could also then be gamed by people making their alts in separate accounts. This means that an account-aware approach should be avoided.
  So how do we separate the two (alts vs new/returning players)?
  • First of all, by setting a time-limit; after a newly added member has been in the guild for (e.g.) 2 months or more, they stop contributing to C. Veterans who’ve also finished their war crest farm completely for a character could also be completely exempted from contributing to C (by adding a “contribute only if renown rank < 87” clause for example).
  Directly linked to that, is the necessity to stop people from just leaving the guild and getting re-invited to manipulate that option. For that, the following must also be enforced.
  • If a member has left a guild during the last 2 months, they will not be affected by the War Crest buff. This clause should not count the “Forces of Destruction/Order” guilds so as not to punish actual new players.
  Then we are finding another issue; what’s stopping veterans from making new alts and quitting the starting guilds to join their and trigger the buff? For that, we go into the third aspect of how the C metric is calculated:
  
  C should only be dependent on time and on the progress new guild members are making.
  • For the time dependence, there should be a rolling average of e.g. the past 30 days with different weights for each time period.
    In the 30 days example we could have:
    • 40% weight to the last week (-1 week to today)
    • 30% weight to the week before that (-2 weeks to -1 week)
    • 20% weight to 3 weeks ago (-3 weeks to -2 weeks)
    • 10% weight to 4 weeks ago (-4 weeks to -3 weeks)
    So, if for the first half of the previous month the newcomers did e.g. 200 progress/week (arbitrary numbers for now) while for the later half (closer to today) they did 300 progress/week, then by weighing them as described above, we get: C = 200*0.10 + 200*0.20 + 300*0.30 + 300*0.40 = 270 progress units
    
    The proposed rolling average method puts emphasis on the present (to incentivize keeping up the effort of helping new players) but also considers the effort put in the past (so that guilds don’t need to have a constant recruitment campaign to keep the buff going)
  Regarding the progress dependence, these are things that should be taken into account:
  • It should be quantified easily, and the easiest way to do that is by having each level and renown rank increase (that’s listed in the guild window) provide some progression units.
  • It should be effort-aware. Getting from lvl 1 to lvl 2 isn’t the same as lvl 39 to lvl 40. The same for renown ranks. Each progression step should be weighed by the points needed to achieve it, so if e.g. rr 9 to rr 10 is set to give 1 progression point (3190 renown points needed), then rr 39 to rr 40 will be 16.2 progression points (51610 renown points needed).
  Finally, C should dictate the actual % of the buff in a bracketed manner with lower cut-off and upper limits.
  • The lower cut-off is there to help separate alts from actual new players. If we assume that on average any guild will have a couple of new veteran alts progressing at any time, then setting a cut-off of e.g. 80 contribution points per week would mean that those alts’ contribution is around that cut-off. Therefore, any actual new players would push the C score above that and then the guild would be eligible for the buff.
  • Similarly, an upper limit is necessary to ensure that people don’t overdo it and just recruit new players en masse, just to boost their progression.
  An example of the C brackets for the buff could be:
  • C <= 80 : 0% to gain an additional War Crest
  • 80 < C <= 120 : 5% to gain an additional War Crest
  • 120 < C <= 160 : 10% to gain an additional War Crest
  • 120 < C <= 160 : 10% to gain an additional War Crest
  • 160 < C <= 200 : 15% to gain an additional War Crest
  • 200 < C <= 240 : 20% to gain an additional War Crest
  • 240 < C : 25% to gain an additional War Crest
  Recruiting at least a couple of new players in the guild every month or so, alongside some newly added alts, should be able to push the time-averaged C score high enough to always have the maximum War Crest Buff active for the guild.
  
  If you can think of something I might have missed that could allow guilds to gain the buff without actually inviting new players in (or having a lot of recent active alts) please also let me know in the comments. Tried to be thorough, but things always slip through the cracks.

• Potential negative points:
  
  • Using the averaged Contribution for the brackets by dividing the sum of C by the total number of members, active members, or new members should be avoided; that would incentivize kicking “ineffective” members to raise the average contribution.
  • Guilds holding members “hostage” by blackmailing them to do stuff with the threat of being kicked and thus getting the 2-month period during which they cannot get the War Crest Buff. This cannot be mitigated completely within the mechanics of the proposal itself, but it can become a weaker point if the overall buff is not too big (up to 25% for example). The same would happen if we lowered both the C-contributing period and the Buff-exclusion period (after leaving a guild) to 1 month for example. But that could also turn out to be excessive and make guilds too focused in recruiting new players. In the end, I still think players will treat guilds as communities and not as environments that facilitate buffs and that this proposal will only be a positive incentive. If certain guilds decide to act maliciously then that should earn them notoriety in the community and drive players away from them (so it’s a bad strategy in the long run).
  • This will increase the average progression rate for players, which might not sound bad at all to most people reading this post (especially since there have been similar proposals on the forums recently), but faster progression might be not what the devs intend for the game. The %s in the actual buff, the rolling-average time weights, the Contribution per renown/character level, as well as the C brackets and their cut-offs can all be adjusted to make sure the system is still enticing, but falls within the acceptable limits of what the dev team intends for progression.

Outro:

People might question the need for a dev-implemented incentive system such as the one I propose above. They could argue that the community itself should integrate the incoming new players as they have done so in the past, and that they will manage to do so once again. But in my eyes that is a complacent view of the situation. With the current player exodus from the game over the last few months and with a lot of big guilds testing the waters in other newly released MMOs, we cannot afford to waste any ''second chances''. Even if such a proposal only manages to make just a small number of players who try out the game stay with us for longer, it will have been worth it.
The new player influx that we are experiencing at the moment is one such opportunity which, for the future of this game, I hope we don't collectively waste. I would like to close this with a request to everyone that reads this post; please consider ''adopting'' at least a couple of newcomers into your guild. Raise the discussion for it and try to help newcomers out even if no changes come from above.


T.L.D.R:

• A lot of new/returning players are joining the game and it's hard to get them up to date with the info they need.

• We should incentivise all guilds to ''adopt'' new players and help them become knowledgeable.

• That can be done by adding a guild-wide buff that gives you X% chance to get an additional War Crest whenever you win a roll for one.

• X can range between 0 and 25% for example (and the devs can decide on the upper bound)

• X updates every day/week and is dictated only by how much the players who lately (last 2 months) joined each guild have recently progressed their level and renown

• Various other restrictions (see main post) are in place to ensure people can't game the system

• Nothing changes for guilds who don't want to go through the trouble of recruiting new players

• The guilds that choose to do so should be able to get this guild-wide buff at maximum potency by recruiting a couple of people per month

• Win-win for new players, in-game communities and every veteran who participates

• Even if nothing changes, please discuss with your guild the possibility of recruiting at least a couple brand new players.

Thanks for reading,

[Narmahar]

I admire you for the time you put into putting this together, as do others who are trying to come up with some suggestions to improve/save the game.

I'm just wondering what the point is. It seems to me that the developers and enough people here do not realize what year it is, how people are used to playing games now.

Honestly, it takes so much time to get a high enough rank and reasonable gear on ROR that few people can do it. And with such a small number of players, where most of the people you meet along the way to T4 are just alts.
But you can't give gear to a new players and send them to T4. They won't understand the game and the local "elite" will eat them because they had to suffer for BiS gear.

In the glory days of WO, where there were enough people on the servers from T1 to T4 and
and you went entertainingly through all the content (PVE, PQ, RVR, SCs...) with people with the same experience, gear........that's just gone now and it won't come back.

ROR is a playground for a few nostalgic people and I doubt that will change.

[kleinbuchstabe]

Well, im not sure if thats a necessary thing to do. Its a nice idea, but i think that could be done more easy.
I agree that there is some lack of information, that new players need to have a good start and get catched by the game. Maybe it would be enough to implement an NPC Herold in the capitols, with a big marker above. You can make him be a tutorial, every advice or chapter could be a repeatable quest, wich is filled with general informations of what to do here.

I dont think that we need a complex system for helpers. If you look in advice channel, there are enough people helping for free, if there are questions.
Basic suggestions and explenations could be given by an NPC, wich also leads playes to the advice channel, for furhter questions.

But like i said in another thread allready: I dont think that the main problem is that people dont understand the game. I think the biggest reason to quit is the unrewarding gameplay, the eternal grind for crests and renown, wich is just not contemporary anymore. When you realize the time factor, that you have to invest for reaching endgear... bye bye. Me myself am not motivated to grind up another twink, because im exhausted allready when i think about all these crests i would have to farm. So i think this is the biggest gamebreaker, wich have to get a change. Seriously.

[SJHarrison4115]

Well, im not sure if thats a necessary thing to do. Its a nice idea, but i think that could be done more easy.
I agree that there is some lack of information, that new players need to have a good start and get catched by the game. Maybe it would be enough to implement an NPC Herold in the capitols, with a big marker above. You can make him be a tutorial, every advice or chapter could be a repeatable quest, wich is filled with general informations of what to do here.

I dont think that we need a complex system for helpers. If you look in advice channel, there are enough people helping for free, if there are questions.
Basic suggestions and explenations could be given by an NPC, wich also leads playes to the advice channel, for furhter questions.

But like i said in another thread allready: I dont think that the main problem is that people dont understand the game. I think the biggest reason to quit is the unrewarding gameplay, the eternal grind for crests and renown, wich is just not contemporary anymore. When you realize the time factor, that you have to invest for reaching endgear... bye bye. Me myself am not motivated to grind up another twink, because im exhausted allready when i think about all these crests i would have to farm. So i think this is the biggest gamebreaker, wich have to get a change. Seriously.

This here is the truth for sure. It's been discussed countless times, especially in recent history. The grind for gear is simply ridiculous. We're by and large a mature-aged community that frankly doesn't have the time to commit endless hours grinding for gear.

The introduction of PVE gear sets for Wards was a postive change- though- as always, still an issue as it only addresses early game concerns and leaves the mid-to-late game empty. Furthermore, it incentivises PVE in a game where we've all pretty well abandonned PVE as we well should- we play for RvR.

Something does absolutely need to change with the generation of crests, I think prices should be halved on all but Sov and Sov should be reduced by 25%. However, I sincerely doubt the Devs will go for that- they appear to love the grind thinking that will keep people around- it won't.

Weekly RVR quests are good, but why no dailies? T1 has quests that provide a pittance of crests, but still provide crests that are different to the "Scout x" repeatables. Why doesn't T2-4 have these? Or again, why no dailies?

This game by modern standards is ancient, the people playing want to get involved in end-game RvR... it is simply so miserably disheartening to look at how far you have to go grinding crests, especially when Bolster only does so much and the reality is, regardless of how good you are as a player, you will absolutely get romped by people who outgear you (whom are now the majority.)

Gear beats skill everyday of the week, which is why you'll notice all the YouTube kill montages 90% of the victims are bolstered CR 20-30s. It's quite literally seal clubbing and we seemingly celebrate the idea.

Anyways... Rant over.

[SJHarrison4115]

Oh, and terribly sorry @leftayparxoun, I forgot to actually address your original post in my rant.

For the sake of brevity- we could achieve the same with the inclusion of Player Guides which have been present in most similar MMOs for ages. Just give the PG/Mentor a currency that allows them to purchase cosmetic skins after a certain amount of "This helped me" ratings.

Easy peasy.

[storm]

Starting to see Big Guild Names again.. looking to farm the new generation in their BIS gear. Is quite sad. When people see the names they often switch and ride the wave. Also sad. If they would play to even aao.. that would be awesome.. But often is just an ego trip.

[leftayparxoun]

Oh, and terribly sorry @leftayparxoun, I forgot to actually address your original post in my rant.

For the sake of brevity- we could achieve the same with the inclusion of Player Guides which have been present in most similar MMOs for ages. Just give the PG/Mentor a currency that allows them to purchase cosmetic skins after a certain amount of "This helped me" ratings.

Easy peasy.

No worries at all. It's useful to keep different approaches in mind. The problem remains the same however, and it's urgent.
Names might blend together when reading advice chat but spend some time in mid tier scenarios, take a look at T1 numbers daily, check individual posts on discord/forums and you will see the clear picture; we are in the middle of a big new player wave while simultaneously having the lowest amount of proper organized active guilds in recent memory to take them in. In my eyes something needs to be done fast, whatever that may be.