How to improve code income and promote a healthier and more frequent group play

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CenomX

It is not new that we are having some issues regarding the code income, but its trick to just bump it out without promoting long-term goals to our community, which is already small.
Most just ask to increase the drop of code in Quests, which might sound reasonable, but I kind of disagree with that. I will give you guys some reasons of why I believe some deeper change should be made.
I am part of a Whatsapp group, which was created after the release of this server, there are around 20 members of it.
http://prntscr.com/ipk914
Everybody there played for at least a while and log back from time to time or ask about the game in the group… But mostly are inactive nowdays… Why is that? Their main complains is that we don’t have rooms to just play casually, like in previous iterations, which were mostly symbol, Crystal and Survival rooms.
Almost at any given time of the day if you hop on the server, you won’t see rooms to just pick up and play, you will see 10 rooms of people solo questing with password (which is a symptom of the code issue) and one room of Teamplay. New players or not top-geared folks don’t feel welcome in these Teamplay rooms due to the obvious discrepancy in gear, and the other folks have no incentive to play anything other than quest because without that they will never touch the veterans.
At any given time of any given game, we have 95% casual and 5% hardcore, I played SP for several years and I know people who also played and never touched a triple maxed item, in MSP, hell… Some Folks after a year were still playing 7/8/8 gear and rocking it. The game is what it is, we should have incentives for health group play without sacrificing progress in the meantime. Because people feel like, if they are having fun, they are wasting time, so mostly just won’t do that… What’s the point of having nostalgia back? The veterans we have with BiS gear is just the 5% we had in like every server of Survival Back then, they always wanted to have the best gear, but the casuals are who will really bump the server and pay for stuff, because they are the 95%.
Well, let’s start with some ideas, it was just the reasoning and it turned so freaking big @_@, I am sorry about that.

1st. Questing should be more rewarding for group play.
What you mean? We already have incentive by boosting the rate for 4 or more members. YES, but in reality it does not work very well. Because you only get the code/point from the monsters you kill. So, if you are melee or not well geared, you will see the Quest cleared without hitting a single monster. That is why most people quest alone, because having people in your room doesn’t pay OFF, it hits your code/hour in a negative way. In my opinion, everyone should get rewards from every monster in the quest, does not really matter who killed it, and boosting the amount gained by some percentage by every slot occupied by a new player. With these changes, we might see more people playing together and a good incentive to do so, even if it’s just for being carried… I would also change the limits by rooms, in order to promote more gameplay around Q5 quests… Like Q1 is limited to 2, Q2 to 3, Q4 to 4 and Q5 to 8.
2nd. Mission is one of the coolest game modes in the game, but not played at all.

I really think that the best mode to get code made should be around the Mission 300, because it’s challenging, you need to know how to make the really hard ones and it’s engaging to do so. But we don’t really have incentives to do it in our current iteration, which should be changed in my opinion. I would say to give a really high BUMP past S0 in terms of code and exp. Every tier (S1, S2, S3) you would get even more codes and rewards.

In KSP, one of the main problems of Missions, was that you always needed the same 8 people in order to clear the hardest content, a guild in KSP did S14 290 every Saturday, before the server would close the guild rankings (3x ele for top 1). If one person of said guild did quit the game, they would need to do 4490 Missions with the new member in order for him to catch up.

In this iteration, I really think you guys should create a catch up mechanic, in order to promote more group play around the most rewarding game mode in the game. If I had, lets say... The Mission 200, and a friend or a couple dudes joined me and we completed this boss fight, they could be 200 too, right? Why not? We are a small community, and beyond S1 or S2 we need as much help as possible.
And people that discovered the server late or after a month or two, won’t feel like: Damn, there are only two groups of Mission and I didn’t play when they were formed.

I would like to apologize because English is not my mother tongue and I just wrote way over what I planned. I have some ideas about other game modes, but I will wait to see if it gets good feedback. Most ideas I have next are around PvP.

TheFinalBoss

CenomX 1st. Questing should be more rewarding for group play.
What you mean? We already have incentive by boosting the rate for 4 or more members. YES, but in reality it does not work very well. Because you only get the code/point from the monsters you kill. So, if you are melee or not well geared, you will see the Quest cleared without hitting a single monster. That is why most people quest alone, because having people in your room doesn’t pay OFF, it hits your code/hour in a negative way. In my opinion, everyone should get rewards from every monster in the quest, does not really matter who killed it, and boosting the amount gained by some percentage by every slot occupied by a new player. With these changes, we might see more people playing together and a good incentive to do so, even if it’s just for being carried… I would also change the limits by rooms, in order to promote more gameplay around Q5 quests… Like Q1 is limited to 2, Q2 to 3, Q4 to 4 and Q5 to 8.

i dont know what you mean by changing the limits but I'd say have lowering the threshold that triggers that rate boost should start at 2 just because all the top whales are always busy with pvp where new players can't compete unless they spent $$ to hit end game gear in like 3 days (balanced? thats another can of worms). Let's look at the context: we hit 30 people online and we have 1hr fusion mania to celebrate. thats how small our community is. Weekend at peak hour we have 30 where 8-12 are in survival or team play. That's why i'd say lower the threshold to like 2 so on any day if two people bump into each other they'll be incentivized to quest together. Also like the code "sharing" (assuming no one bothers leeching).

Next problem is the fact that higher level quests dont award as much as it should in comparison to say... flame 1. Flame 1 gives a new player about 300k or so code per run. Flame 5 gives 200-300 per run without going into the dragons den. Killing the whole thing gives 700k but takes approx 4-5x as long as a flame 1 dungeon. Why am I raising this up? This means people are better off soloing f1 five times for 1.5m compared to kill the dragon n everything that spawns which gives 700k if rng allows the dragon to be killed (dragon weak spot is rng based and changes each run or each landing not 100% sure). Plus questing gives barely any cards at all.

Mission 300 I completely agree with cenom

Angeluso

I fully support this

GM-Q

After reading briefly, I wanted to let everyone know that the staff team and I are already looking into the following issues:

Multiplayer (with more than 1 person) rooms not being popular.
Code and element disparity between hardcore players and regular ones
Rebalanced EXP, Code & Element Rates throughout the game, with a stronger focus on multiplayer room activities and proper rewards for those who participate.

It's still a work in progress, but I'm definitely listening to these suggestions to move forward. I'll give an update once we've completely decided what to change and how to do it~

TheFinalBoss

hmm re-thinking this, VIP players with super silver get a ton of code but without those boosters u basically don't get code so thats decent for testing base rates on this server. i'd recommend either everyone gets full amount of code when something dies or receiving code based on damage dealt to dying creature pro rata. I feel like lower level quests are above where they should be in terms of giving code (300k+ per run solo atm base in 1.5min) but quests like flame 5 (end game quests discounting mission 300) need a serious increase think its about 700k code per run if you kill everything but takes like 5-6 minutes solo without dying. I'd say everything before the dragon should be pushed to about 1-1.5m code and then the dragon should be worth like 2m and the rest another 800k or something.

Bez

I suggested to make ele/code/point shared among team mates. So that quests and missions do not become a 'Kill Steal' Festival. You're right, as of now only the person who kills the monsters will get the reward.

If you partied up with someone who had a full stack of SS, whereas you had no rate multipliers whatsoever. It would still make more sense for him to kill the monster rather than you. Because he has all the rate multipliers, he would get 100 and you would get 20.

So I'm fully on board with sharing the rewards with team mates. This way we will start to see cooperation play a huge part in completing rooms quickly and profitably.

Also i disagree with you statement that 'casuals are who will really bump the server and pay for stuff, because they are the 95%.'. The majority of the donations are being given by a few amount of players. 80% of financial support comes from 20% of the population. Look at Pareto's Principle and you'll know what i mean.

CenomX

Bez Yo Bez... I was more like being generalist towards the nature of multiplayer games, that's what happens in most recent MMO's I played, at least. Our SP server is more appealing to our most hardcore players from previous servers, the ones that don't really care for solo questing for long sessions to get some code or not interacting at all if that’s the more profitable way.
This kind of players did represent probably around 5% of the player base in our community it probably translates to 50-70%, that's why I understand your disagreement as these are they are the ones that invest the most.
The suggestions I tried to give was mainly to retain more of the 95% players that would play more the game if it was more friendly to casuals and had more rooms to pick up and play. But that's just my reasoning to think this way, I might be wrong about SP, since it's vastly different compared to actual games, since they tend to always monetize towards fashion and Quality of Life stuff. I will read this Pareto's Principle in the future to fully understand what you mean.

EricRoxz

I strongly agree with the first suggestion, I recommend that whoever it is that kills the monster, the reward is shared equally, making it way more fun to play together. I once have 2 new members in my Q1 room and they end up hitting hogs while I clear all 3 stones and the final orb. I ended up getting 1m codes and 300+ eles w/o any multipliers; certainly, they left immediately.
And also the suggestion that the multipliers start at 2 and above instead of 3 because of the lack of players.
I really hope that Cenom's first suggestion will see the light at the end of the tunnel and become a reality!

TheFinalBoss

Maybe if you complete dungeon by a certain time you get additional rewards? idk if Qwa can code that in though. We'll probs need to re-adjust the time/reward if implemented since quests like Q5, F5 have bosses that are invulnerable for a while.

Bez

CenomX Cenom. Hey man. In no way am i saying that we should make it an ethic to listen and pander towards only the minority of people who hold all the $$$$ and are supporting the server. The problems and concerns of the majority are also taken into an account.

E.g. Coming rates changes and shared eles/code/point in quests will probably be implemented in next patch (in a few weeks). Which will benefit all players not just pay2win players.

@TheFinalBoss FinalBoss. Again let me say again, if this were a business and you're concerned with your bottom line then it makes sense to focus most of your energy on the 20% of the clients that are making you 80% of your revenue. Still my position is that this doesn't need to be an ethic.

The fact is, there is a discrepancy between the amount of people who will shell out money support the server/pay2win. 50-70% (or whatever number you put in here) do not give the most to the server, it's always a minority that gives the most financial support.

It's a fact that we don't need to discuss too heavily about. It's simply one that occurs naturally. E.g. Spkiller123 who contributes the most to the pool of code/point. (Well he donates a lot too, just saying)

It's not an ethic where we must keep our focus on those paying players (although it is important).

But we must never forget about the others, it's important we bridge the gap between F2P and P2W players.

TheFinalBoss

the Parento principle is the 80 20 rule which sets a standard for efficiency. Most firms make 80% of their revenue through their top 20% clients/customers. Idk if 80 20 should be our current focus considering we just set up the youtube channel in an attempt to recruit more players though. If anything newbie packages might just be the thing we need most

TheFinalBoss

Bez Sorry for the confusion, my point was that we should focus efforts on recruiting more people and retaining them into playing instead of looking at how to increase activity of current players. It'll be great if we can do both simultaneously but considering the server has a focus on group content and we only have like 11 ppl online on weekends we should look to expand the player base via different channels.

Bez

TheFinalBoss Qwahs is running ads on facebook right now so that should be getting us a good amount of traffic. Lets just hope we don't catch the eye of hanbitsoft

I think any efforts to retain players would affect new and veteran players. Most players coming back are returning players, which means they're already sold on the whole concept of SP. They like this game style and what it has to offers.

For new ones who have no experience with SP, i can only hope that the game itself makes them stay. Moreso i think it's the community that makes them stay. So anything that helps us bring the community together is a win for me.

What other ideas do you have to retain players?