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Strategic New Player Growth and Retention Plan


Alex
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While I'm still not super confident about whether growth is a key factor with retention, this will help to dig the newer players out of the "hole" they start in and be at least reasonably more self sufficient.

Growth for the really new players has been a pretty large issue for awhile now, as it takes a huge investment on the part of  the alliance to make them decently profitable, at a high risk, and that player is unlikely to be able to sustain themselves without that aid. This should help mitigate that issue.

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Decreasing the timer is good. The revenue boost is a better alternative to decreasing city costs.

 

 However I still doesn't see how this helps with retention. The retention issue is because people don't join alliances or if they do, they don't join established ones with programs and institutions in place to help them grow. Increase the cost to make an alliance and/or suggest they join established alliances upon joining the game. By established, I mean ones that aren't micros and have established governments.

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Just now, Justin076 said:

Decreasing the timer is good. However I still doesn't see how this helps with retention. The retention issue is because people don't join alliances or if they do, they don't join established ones with programs and institutions in place to help them grow. Increase the cost to make an alliance and/or suggest they join established alliances upon joining the game. By established, I mean ones that aren't micros and have established governments.

Theoretically it'd help with retention by allowing players to feel like they're contributing more early on, and it would reduce the risk alliances take into growing nations early on.

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2 minutes ago, Justin076 said:

Decreasing the timer is good. The revenue boost is a better alternative to decreasing city costs.

 

 However I still doesn't see how this helps with retention. The retention issue is because people don't join alliances or if they do, they don't join established ones with programs and institutions in place to help them grow. Increase the cost to make an alliance and/or suggest they join established alliances upon joining the game. By established, I mean ones that aren't micros and have established governments.

Obviously you are correct, a huge part of player retention is that people just quit right away, and that won't change with this suggestion.

However, for those that do decide they'd like to play a game like this, I think slow/impossible growth can be a barrier to retention, and I think that any lowering of that barrier should improve retention, even if it's only a subset of player retention as a whole.

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This should help new player growth and mitigate the current high risk/low returns of investing into them. Of people already staying, that is.

However, in order for new players to better capitalize on this, there must be something that will improve retention more directly. For example, a stronger "campaign" in tutorial and ads stressing the importance of joining an established alliance in general, thus increasing the chance of players connecting with the community and in turn actually staying to play.

 

9 minutes ago, Buorhann said:

I posted my thoughts in the other thread, but another option I could see helping new players would be to separate the Project and City Timer, that way friends/alliances can help establish new players quickly, and get them involved into the community of the game ASAP.

x2

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Just now, Theodosius said:

This should help new player growth and mitigate the current high risk/low returns of investing into them. Of people already staying, that is.

However, in order for new players to better capitalize on this, there must be something that will improve retention more directly. For example, a stronger "campaign" in tutorial and ads stressing the importance of joining an established alliance in general, thus increasing the chance of players connecting with the community and in turn actually staying to play.

 

x2

I do agree, and someone made the suggestion in the city cost discussion about offering Credits as payment for new game tutorial videos, which I think is a great idea. I think I will pursue efforts to have players build guides and tutorial videos for the game, but I figure if I'm going to change the new player mechanics anyway I might as well wait to do it so that any new player tutorials factor in the New Player Bonus, change in city timers, etc.

But yes, as a whole I do agree with your sentiment and that is definitely something to be improved upon. I think we've made a lot of progress over the years as-is, but there's always more to be done, and if you have any specific great suggestions for this, feel free to shoot me a PM.

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What about increased raw production bonus, alongside or instead income? Income is reliant on pop, which is directly related to infra, and at those levels they won't be having that much infra, thus reducing the effect of the income coefficient.

Plus, raws would require them to sell it on the marketplace for the cash, adding a step of interactivity that would give them a(nother) reason to log in daily.

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39 minutes ago, Justin076 said:

By established, I mean ones that aren't micros and have established governments.

Doesn't the tutorial send you to the alliance recruitment tab? There could be a ranking limit there to encourage new players to join established alliances as opposed to all these disbanded/micros when I looked. 

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32 minutes ago, Darth Revan said:

I feel like another important solution to improve player retention would be to overhaul the tutorial like people said in the other thread. 

Sheepy, if you need any help writing text/objectives for the tutorial, I'm sure the community would help. (At least I would.) 

5 minutes ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

What about increased raw bonus, alongside or instead income? Income is reliant to pop, which is directly related to infra, and at those levels they won't be having that much infra, thus reducing the effect of the coefficient.

 Plus, raws would require them to sell it on the marketplace for the cash, adding a step of interactivity that would give them a(nother) reason to log in daily.

And this would also help Sheepy's design of young nations producing raw resources, mid-tier nations making manufactured resources, and whales doing commerce. 

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3 minutes ago, Who Me said:

You might want to think about changing the protection against being raided. Extend the period they can't be raided, make it apply regardless of color as many new people change their color before they read any of the tutorial and open themselves up to being raided, get raided to death and say screw it and leave. Make it so you don't lose the protection before the timer runs out unless you declare a war but have a very strong warning that by declaring a war they will lose the protection and be open to being raided. All making it easier to get cities will do is open them up to bigger better raiders and drive them out of the game faster.

A lot of people do quit after the first time they've been hit. I can get behind this suggestion.

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1 hour ago, Shiho Nishizumi said:

What about increased raw production bonus, alongside or instead income? Income is reliant on pop, which is directly related to infra, and at those levels they won't be having that much infra, thus reducing the effect of the income coefficient.

Plus, raws would require them to sell it on the marketplace for the cash, adding a step of interactivity that would give them a(nother) reason to log in daily.

That's a good point. The bonus could be extended to resource production as well.

1 hour ago, WISD0MTREE said:

Doesn't the tutorial send you to the alliance recruitment tab? There could be a ranking limit there to encourage new players to join established alliances as opposed to all these disbanded/micros when I looked. 

rOXGTo6.png?1

Sheepy, if you need any help writing text/objectives for the tutorial, I'm sure the community would help. (At least I would.) 

And this would also help Sheepy's design of young nations producing raw resources, mid-tier nations making manufactured resources, and whales doing commerce. 

It probably would be a better idea to have a stronger qualifier to show up on that page; the trouble is I created it with the considerations of those smaller alliances in mind, many of whom hate the idea that all the new members go to big, established alliances. But I do agree that realistically that is a better outcome for new players than joining the average micro-alliance.

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1 hour ago, Who Me said:

You might want to think about changing the protection against being raided. Extend the period they can't be raided, make it apply regardless of color as many new people change their color before they read any of the tutorial and open themselves up to being raided, get raided to death and say screw it and leave. Make it so you don't lose the protection before the timer runs out unless you declare a war but have a very strong warning that by declaring a war they will lose the protection and be open to being raided. All making it easier to get cities will do is open them up to bigger better raiders and drive them out of the game faster.

I think that's a really good idea too. One thing I ought to do is remove "Beige" as a concept, and just add a "protected status" instead. It would be more intuitive.

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26 minutes ago, CandyShi said:

It'd have to be balanced so that increasing city cost won't decrease your revenue though..

12 coal mines per city (600 infra min) produces quite a bit of income for lower tier cities, and if adding 12 extra mines isn't going to add more coal revenue with the bonuses... well then that'd be kind of dumb..

How is that different than the income bonus though? If you have 5 cities with 12 mines each, adding another city (and 12 mines) increases your coal output by 20%, whereas your loss in production bonus is only 10%. Going from 9 cities to 10 cities would be 108 mines to 120 mines, an 11% increase, more than the 10% loss of an additional city, etc.

It's exactly the same as the increase increase/decrease trade-off of adding a new city.

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16 hours ago, Alex said:

Step 1: Eliminate New City Timers to City 10 (From Current City 5)

This is pretty straightforward. Right now, you don't need to wait for your city timer for buying cities 2-5. I'm proposing to expand that to cities 2-10. This should make new players' growth faster, so that they can catch up to a point where they are relevant in the game, which should improve player retention by reducing feelings of impossibly slow progress.

I've had a bit more time to look at this proposal at think it through.  While this change would allow people to build more cities and theoretically catch up to every else at a quicker pace in terms of city count, I do not think it will happen in the way I think people are assuming and people will still be waiting substantial time to get to city 10 although it may be shorter than what it is currently.  

Cities 2-10 cost about  $72,250,000 (without the manifest destiny bonus and assuming my math is right) and the costs balloons even more if you begin to factor in infra, land, and even resource stockpile requirements that most alliances have and this number easily gets above 100 million. Alliances aren't going to hand players 100 million right away because new players have some risk tied to them, and if those players leave or go inactive that is 100~ million down the drain.  That total number can easily add up quickly if its more than 1 failed member.  I don't think we'll see most alliances buying every member their first 10 cities instantly unless they know for a fact that they won't go inactive.  We won't be seeing fast growth for new players, at least not in the way it was prob envisioned with this particular change. 

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38 minutes ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

The downside to this is the resource cost to train new members on how to fight.  Its significantly cheaper to learn to fight with 5-6 cities than 10.  Then again I dont deal with new members so whatever you guys want to do, knock yourselves out!

AA's won't be funding people 10 cities right away due to risk factor. Lifting the timer simply means that AA's have more freedom on setting their own timetables for city grants, and can exercise flexibility with it.

We'll still see them boosting u to 5 cities and have the member stay at that range for a bit, whilst he gets accustomed to the overall feel of the game and it's mechanics. Once he is likely (or guaranteed) not to quit, they will fund the remainign 5 at whichever pace they decide to go with.

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I think this is another bandage rather than treating the infected wound.

The game isn’t setup to help or encourage new players, while these suggestions hell, it still hurts and doesn’t fix the problem.

1. I think we should remove city timers altogether. If a nation wants to build a bunch of cities, why should the game stop them, even in war that’s a ton of money.

 

2. Decrease city costs for cities 10 and under. Make it easy to rank up to 10 without an alliance. 

 

3. Emphasis the importance of joining an alliance and contributing to the game.

 

4. Have events(plagues, earthquakes, etc) which is something to do day-to-day.

5. Add an in-game world assembly, similar to Nationstates, that allows member nations to vote on issues. Also give them a 5% nation boost to joining. You could comdemn nations, provide aid to other nations, etc. This is an idea that could really be fleshed out and used by the community.

 

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I know this was touched on further up but i'd like to suggest it again so it has definitely been seen. 

Split the project and city timers into 2 different timers, Perhaps even extend the project timer to something like 15 days. 

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This is directly aimed at new nations, so I think it is a good addition to the game.

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