Discussion about the long term prospects on PL

[WhoIsThis]

To begin with, this isn't a thread that I wanted to make, but I feel it had to be made by someone.

I think that at this point, we need to discuss (as an entire forum community), the long term prospects for PL.

Current Issues
There are several easy to fix issues:
1. PvP is unbalanced at end game (easy to fix - I've already made some simple recommendations) - http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...lance-the-game

2. PvE is totally dependent on elixirs (could make a pay per run without elixirs with a 100% chance of pinks)

3. Existing players will have advantages - 3 piece ring, and for some black dragon/founders


The hard to fix issues though are another matter:
1. Declining community, both in numbers and quality of player (total reliance on elixirs in PvE and excessive focus on PvP K/D, along with the increase in foul play/language)

2. Rich-poor gap means that new players will have a hard time catching up (need a money sink, but only one that targets the very wealthy)

3. The forum itself seems to have declined - by that I mean the percentage of posts that could be described as well, insightful versus trollish

4. There's a general boredom over the existing content (I could argue this is easy to fix, just release another cap or something like what the Shadow Caves was to Alien Oasis 3)



What will happen if nothing is fixed?
At this point, we haven't received much communication from STS about their long term plans, which in turn means that we are forced to assume that they have none. It would be one thing if they said for example, we're getting an update in say, H2 of 2014, or that they intend to re-balance the game once again. It's another to be greeted with well, silence.

If nothing is fixed, then the current trends will continue their logical progression. That is to say, more and more people will go str at endgame. A lot of things have become lost knowledge, like how to tank properly, which fewer and fewer people know now. There will also be a steady stream of people who leave (or stop spending plat). At some point, the amount of people that leave will inevitably increase. It's important to recognize that when a person who was prominent leaves, they don't just leave their revenues, they also give the existing players less of a reason to stay.

What happens on autopilot? Eventually I think we will reach a critical mass where, the cost of maintaining the servers for 1 game exceeds the possible revenue collection. At that point, I think we could reach a situation where the game is simply shut down. EA has become notorious for shutting down games. Star Wars Galaxies shut down about 2 years ago after 8 years in operation.


What if my suggestions are carried out for a modest re-balancing?
It will take some time to adjust. It may require a second re-balancing, but I think it will be relatively well received, save among those who are focused purely on K/D and who want one class to be OP on purpose.

But it will lead classes to become more lore-centric, more balanced, and it should encourage better cooperation too in PvE.

That said, without new content, the inevitable loss of players can only be somewhat slowed (although it may attract many of the higher platinum spending oldies again).


What if new content is released?
It will heavily depend on the quality of the new content, the balance in the case of PvP, and the ability to maintain long term player interest. We'll see a spike of our old friends. Whether they choose to stay or not depends on what is offered and whether it remains competitive to the alternatives (other MMOs, other games, and what else can be bought with money).

I made my long thread to be scalable and in line with what future PvE and PvP requirements would hold:
http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...-class-balance


If it's good content, it may generate interest, comparable to what a new game would generate, at only a percentage of the development costs to make an entirely new game.



Concluding Remarks
It concerns me a bit that things have turned out this way. PL more or less had a 2.5 year lifespan (the last update BSM was in late 2012 and PL launched in 2010). MMOs have historically had long lives, measured in at least 5 year spans, and often more (WoW is 9 and Eve is 10 for example). I'm a bit concerned about this type of business model of leaving games in under 3 years. It also has implications for titles like AL.

The reason why those MMOs succeeded, I think was because they were able to offer engaging content and build a community. That's what set them apart. That's why so many WoW killers failed. They failed to cultivate a good community and offer engaging content better than the competition. Also, it's important to remember that the top end players always have a disproportionate effect on the community, not only because in a F2P/P2W type of game they're the few that pay, but also because they set the standard and tone.

There's no sugar-coating it, PL in it's current form is in slow decline. I think that barring changes, this trend will continue until that critical mass is reached, at which point, it may very well be the end. At this point, what we really need is a roadmap of what will happen to PL. If we continue to get silence, I think that we should probably assume that there really are no future plans for PL.

[Chopper]

Pretty much sums it up, except it's not a slow decline, it's already lost a lot over the last 6 months. Can it be saved? yes, but there's no indication that STG wants to try at this point.

[dudetus]

Great and insightful post, didn't jump in to ur 'older' threads as I didn't have any significant to add as I discovered them quite late.

The thing is though that IMO PL had an amazing community and PL itself was a groundbreaking game. And yet the regular playerbase was never anything compared to semi-popular MMOs. Mobile MMOs are treated by most players as a way to kill some time, because in tradition, mobile games are just for that - to pass a little time like waiting in doctor's office etc. This has lead to that, that these games aren't taken as seriously as PC MMOs. Ofc there are hardcore players in mobile MMOs as well but still very few compared to those PC MMOs. All of the 'hardcore' MMOers play a PC MMO traditionally as PC MMOs offer stuff which current mobile MMOs could only dream of. As the PC MMOs attract the main MMO players, there aren't enough many 'hardcore' mobile MMO players to begin with. Even the design of levels are made for 5-10 minutes, the devs have acknowledged this fact from the very beginning.

I think this traditon will begin to crumble only when mobiles gain up on PCs. Ubuntu Edge was the beginning of combining a mobile and PC and I do believe this is happening in next 5 years or so. But until then, in my opinion, we mobile MMOers are a vast minority.

[WhoIsThis]

The thing is though that IMO PL had an amazing community and PL itself was a groundbreaking game. And yet the regular playerbase was never anything compared to semi-popular MMOs.

The keyword here is "had an amazing community", not "has one today".

Here's another one of my old threads:
http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...-for-this-year

This was made back in late 2011, when well, things began to turn towards a downward trend.

Mobile MMOs are treated by most players as a way to kill some time, because in tradition, mobile games are just for that - to pass a little time like waiting in doctor's office etc. This has lead to that, that these games aren't taken as seriously as PC MMOs. Ofc there are hardcore players in mobile MMOs as well but still very few compared to those PC MMOs. All of the 'hardcore' MMOers play a PC MMO traditionally as PC MMOs offer stuff which current mobile MMOs could only dream of. As the PC MMOs attract the main MMO players, there aren't enough many 'hardcore' mobile MMO players to begin with. Even the design of levels are made for 5-10 minutes, the devs have acknowledged this fact from the very beginning.

I think this traditon will begin to crumble only when mobiles gain up on PCs. Ubuntu Edge was the beginning of combining a mobile and PC and I do believe this is happening in next 5 years or so. But until then, in my opinion, we mobile MMOers are a vast minority.

It's interesting that you point that out. Right now, the typical phone is more powerful than a Pentium era CPU. I'm not sure CPU power is the real bottleneck here, nor is GPU power. The Spacetime Engine for it's part is arguably already outdated.

But there's no denying that PC games do enjoy a more hardcore mentality and I would say, a better player base overall. In WoW for example, a dungeon usually takes 15-30 minutes, with 20 minutes being the official Blizzard target. Plus the endgame content has no rivals. In that regard, I agree there is a better endgame progression. I think it's because of the interface. In this regard, mobile may never catch up. A keyboard and mouse (and game pad) are just superior.

That said, the current decline of PL I think was entirely preventable, regardless of how more hardcore PC gaming is. The loss of a large portion of the community, many of whom did not leave because they had to or their real life conflicted, but because of the direction that things went.

[Mothwing]

I just realized that last post wast a complete rant. I'll edit this one in relation to your OP

I found this article very interesting:

http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/articles...d-others-dont/

Especially the last topic, where it gave examples as to what some communities do to solve problems.

Surprisingly (not), the communities attitude is very dependent on the developers involvement in the game, and I think in PL's case, it's pretty obvious. Many have said this before, but really think back to when the community started to decline in it's behavior towards other players. It all started when STS started to focus on other games and lose the respect of PL's community. Of course there were other reasons but I consider this to be the main one.

When STS lost focus on PL, many players quit, and great role models were lost, some, if not most, fell for the newly introduced trolling side of PL, which only snowballed as it became "cool" to troll others, because the oldies were doing it too. I believe this was briefly mentioned in the article.

One thing that caught my eye, although mentioned shortly in the page, was the player controlled "court" if you will. The way I interpreted that, and I may be wrong as I've never played LoL (I think it was LoL - don't quote me), was a person that is reported is sent to a public court and players decide weather to ban the player or not. If this was implemented, which it most likely won't, I think players would try to act a lot better around public, not only to prevent themselves from being banned, but trying to become a "judge" in the court, almost like a GoA. Of course there are flaws in the system, just like the Guardian program had, but it's a good example at how other games control offensive players.

I just threw some thoughts around, please reply if you have any feedback.

[Oldcoot]

Christmas will be a big teller of the future of pl. I personally think(tho it pains me to say) that the death of our beloved pl is closer than we think.

Edit: please prove me wrong devs,please.

[Reunegade]

We can only hope and pray, lol. Hopefully something big happens in Christmas, as they said it should in the insider's section. But IMO, I think it's a bit too late. If they make a big Christmas, maybe some old folks would come back, but afterwards? They still have PvP, PvE, and re-balancing to fix. IIrc, the only major updates we had this year were:

-An attempt to re-balance (which did not even completely rebalance endgame, but threw off twink levels and mainly low level)
-A nerf in forgotten bows

The nerf in forgotten bows came very late. Had they had done it earlier, most of the old experienced low level twinks would not have left, resulting in a larger community and thus more revenue in the company. But I applaud them for the effort. Albeit little, it still had a great impact, just not as much as it would have been if they had done it some time sooner. The attempt to re-balance is nothing more than it states: an attempt. They put in a lot of effort in it, but in the end, it created demand for savage (which was and is quite overpowered) thus raising the price, and it practically ruined twink levels and low level. In lower twink levels, the nerf demolished the bird class because it could not compete to the other classes. Mages became super overpowered, because they did not nerf their heal, thus being able to heal off all the skills from all other classes with a tap on the screen. In higher twink levels, mages, once again, become overpowered because of the same thing: heal. This may not look like a big problem, but when you nerf all classes' damage by 10% and you leave heal as is, you will see that it creates an enormous problem. This creates a demand in glyph 56 wand sets, lilith 61 wand sets, and islander's 66 wand sets. Now you may think, why not the wand sets for 71 and 76? Because of how incredibly overpowered the strength sets are in BSM. Beastly scythe and savage scythe sets got an increase in demand after the 10% damage nerf, because it kept it's high armor and dodge. This soaks up all attempted nukes from birds, mages and foxes. Bears are overpowered at this level because rhinos do nothing to them, and if they were having a tank war than the bear would win, because the bear has better offensive skills than the rhino does, along with higher health as to the rhino's lower-than-bird's health.

[Justg]

Hi, thanks for the well-thought-out post and responses.

I've told you numerous times why our development priorities are what they are. As a reminder, here is a quote from an old thread:

Very nice thread, we love to communicate when opinions are presented like this. A couple of things to consider:

We built PL, it has our hearts and souls in it. Many of the NPCs are named after our family (my kids are in there too). We love this game as much, if not more than you do. It is, quite literally, our baby.

When you generalize your discontent by saying: "Everyone feel this way" it loses some impact. We get that you may feel this way, and that several people may feel this way, but there is a concept known as the "vocal minority". We hear and respect you, but you don't speak for everyone.

When you demand answers, and get an answer that you don't like, please don't be angry at us for our honesty. I told you there is no cap on PL's horizon because I don't want to lead you on. This is not disrespectful towards you. This is not a unique situation for Spacetime. Every game has its fans, and those fans want THEIR games to be expanded. But we have 10x the number of players in AL that we do in PL. And we hope to have more in our Battle games.

When you threaten to leave if we don't do something, or if we announce a new game, your feedback loses impact as well. We are a company trying to survive in an extremely unstable and challenging environment. We will continue to announce new games. We will also look for ways to continue to support the games we have out now.

All companies need to grow to survive, especially in Mobile. If we did NOT take the path we are on, than you would not have ANY of these games to play, because we would surely be out of business.

So we will continue to run these games that we all love so much, and we will continue to try and fix things you don't like and expand on the things that you do. And we will continue to bring you new things so that we can continue running the older things.

I know that many of you consider PL your baby (and home) as well, and I also understand that is is frustrating to not get the updates and support that you would like.

It is a very tough balance for us, and as I have said before this is a VERY tough business to survive in.

We're still here because of the choices we have made, no matter how difficult they have been. And this means that you still have a game to call home, even if it has not been updated in awhile.

Keep on giving us feedback (and thank you for keeping it level). We'll keep on listening, and we'll do everything in our power to balance out the deployment of resources so that we can continue to bring you countless hours of entertainment.

Best,

- g

We did do some siginificant changes to PL based on your feedback recently: http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...Fixin%92-in-PL

Here is a reminder: http://www.spacetimestudios.com/show...t-Nerf-of-2013

So that's it. Still no PL cap on the horizon. We'll do our best to get some Holiday content in for ya. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me.

Thanks,

- g