Originally posted by Corndog
I mean, there's a lot of issues with new user retention, pick up players were created to help that issue a little bit, but it's still a pretty far cry from being that great at retention.
Even with pickup players, you spend your points, then the game is like "cool, come back in 30 minutes to an hour". Which, in comparison to most games nowadays, is pretty much met with a "no thanks". Freemium mobile games, for instance, tend to give you a few solid hours of steady interaction before being like "come back later, or pay money". The nature of this game, however, doesn't lend itself to on-demand play, sims take a long time and a lot of processing to finish, so you're inevitably going to be sat twiddling your thumbs.
The other, and really probably insurmountable issue that would require a complete rework of the foundation of the game...is that players aren't particularly interesting to build. It takes months to see them make progress, and people can make few decisions or interact with the sim in any meaningful way. Ownership is where most of the meat is. The problem with that, though, is that more teams means more sims, and with most of the income so loaded into players with teams being cheap, giving new players a team instead isn't a practical and sustainable solution.
I've pitched and discussed ideas with Bort to make the game potentially more team centric and have income more linked to that, with less focus on player building, but really at that point we're talking about a completely different game.
Cool! Build it and add robots and wizards
I mean, there's a lot of issues with new user retention, pick up players were created to help that issue a little bit, but it's still a pretty far cry from being that great at retention.
Even with pickup players, you spend your points, then the game is like "cool, come back in 30 minutes to an hour". Which, in comparison to most games nowadays, is pretty much met with a "no thanks". Freemium mobile games, for instance, tend to give you a few solid hours of steady interaction before being like "come back later, or pay money". The nature of this game, however, doesn't lend itself to on-demand play, sims take a long time and a lot of processing to finish, so you're inevitably going to be sat twiddling your thumbs.
The other, and really probably insurmountable issue that would require a complete rework of the foundation of the game...is that players aren't particularly interesting to build. It takes months to see them make progress, and people can make few decisions or interact with the sim in any meaningful way. Ownership is where most of the meat is. The problem with that, though, is that more teams means more sims, and with most of the income so loaded into players with teams being cheap, giving new players a team instead isn't a practical and sustainable solution.
I've pitched and discussed ideas with Bort to make the game potentially more team centric and have income more linked to that, with less focus on player building, but really at that point we're talking about a completely different game.
Cool! Build it and add robots and wizards
on the pitch
