Server population and maintaining players - Suggestion

[LightOracle]

So I have been thinking about this a lot and it's a hard subject to pin down. It seems like a lot of players quit early for various reasons.

1. Someone took their profession and they wanted to be the only one.
2. They were not the first to research the profession.
3. They are poor and can't buy stuff because they can't figure out a good way to make money.
4. They don't feel needed.
5. They got burned out from the grind to get to their goal.
6. Progression is taking to long to get to Tier 4 building materials that you can't play with it the before the server dies.
7. The new stuff and processes/systems like mods or crafting tables are overwhelming. (tutorial could help with this; not everyone will press F1 or have watched the streams because they don't like spoilers)
8. Meteor is destroyed or destroyed the world either way it always wins. lol

Now not all of these issue can be solved nor should be since it's just players being players. But the fact that we are not maintaining players to the end is, in my eyes, an issue. That means somewhere along the way they are not having fun and thus the server dies. Perhaps just having more professions would keep peoples interests or maybe they just need to change their mind set to not be so self dependent. Perhaps maybe if there was another goal?

I think it would be really cool to have something called "seasons" where each season/server cycle of that season if you stay until the end you would get a cosmetic item or something of equal value maybe tokens to spend in a store for cool stuff.

Just a suggestion to try to help with something I see as an issue. I'm sure this would be something down the line and closer to release.

Thanks! Sunlight

[johnkslg]

Its a big goal of post-9 work to get the game to a place where youre more involved in the worlds, your identity and personality are better represented, your achievements are tracked, and there's a deeper connection for you there. We also want to make goals beyond the meteor. Also having easy entry points is something we continue to build, work parties are meant for that, and can be expanded as well. Make the government capable of providing these entry points will go a long way too, ie have a number of contracts for building roads etc that give easy ways to get money for low-skilled players. Good suggestion, thank you. Something on our radar for sure.

[Blanclour]

The issue of players leaving the server early seems to have been around for as long as I have played eco, and with this most recent patch it still seems to be present. Once players get fully established on the server and build their mega workshop, house, ect. they usually start logging on only to check their bank accounts and store stocks, and eventually don't seem to bother logging on at all. (Not seeing other people online also discourages them from logging on, creating an exponential chain reaction for inactivity.)

There seems to be many different reasons why players ultimately lose interest in a server, even when they have vested a lot of time into it. However it all seems to boil down into a lack of a concrete goal for them to pursue after they have mastered their profession or have constructed their dream store/house. (Often before the discovery of modern materials.)

Yes, they could take another profession, but there's likely someone else already established doing it, and selling products for far less than someone just starting a new profession. Yes, there is new technology on the horizon, but with this patch I have observed that the promise of technology doesn't seem to be enough to keep people active.

They log in every once and a while to see if the new technology has been discovered, only to find it has not. The server's economy crumbles from player inactivity before new advancements are made, making the new advancements impossible. (Because it usually requires a functional economy to obtain all the required research papers.)

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It is my hope that the second half of the political updates which implements the concepts of towns and nations, serves to help unify smaller groups of players so that they are more likely to stay.

Perhaps another idea worth considering is creating sub-specializations within a single specialization, so that no two specialists of the same discipline are alike. In this way players may be more optimistic about joining a server even after someone else has taken the specialization they wanted.

I think giving players a reason to log on, even when there is no one else online (or very few people) would be highly beneficial. If players see other people logged onto the server, they are more likely to log on (or stay logged on) themselves.

Ultimately, there needs to be a concrete goal for them to pursue which provides significant entertainment and can be worked on beyond the ideas that they have mastered a profession, destroyed the meteor, obtained all the currency (if they are greedy), ect.

[LightOracle]

https://github.com/StrangeLoopGames/EcoSuggestions/issues/1201 Just my more fleshed out version of seasons if it becomes a thing.