Oblivious Death
Hekatontarch
Don't even bother with this one.
Increasing playerbase
- Thread starter VIRTUALSELF
- Start date
Marcus
Peltast
You are thinking long term and most game devs think short term. They as a group dont seem to realize once the crowds are gone and the servers downgraded to a crawl that the players just wont come back. They will move on totally and the game will go into a permanent loss mode. Or a very minimal profit mode which just about no one can lift it out of even with a huge infusion of cash for advertisements, and upgrades. The public will have such a negative viewpoint that it just cannot be overcome. Stick a fork in it. Grep is reaching that point.
MEGHNI
Lochagos
If you wanna increase player base, beside ads, u have to bring something new to the table.
The few things a would suggest is :
The few things a would suggest is :
- Rework of the UI (v 3.0, the current UI looks sooo old and must be changed)
- Introduce new units to the game to add some diversity
- Prevent new players being wrecked by huge players (by placing new players in a safe zone on the map or just bigh players can only attack big players, same thing goes for small players)
- Add more events with precious rewards frequently
- ............
BLG-CH
Phrourach
1. with the option of using the old ui would be nice.
3. there are special worlds for this, I think.
(https://wiki.en.grepolis.com/wiki/Casual_Worlds, https://en.forum.grepolis.com/index.php?forums/world-nauctratis-en112.553/)
Marcus
Peltast
I like everything except more events. There are already too many events. The events just flood the game with tons of offense and you never play the game at base. I'd honestly like less events not more. The game itself is good but all the events are designed to do is force players to spend more to keep up. So yeah less events not more. I dont think a special zone would work with new players but I do think there are other ways such as zoning levels of accounts. Some games do that fairly successfully. Account level 0-10 cant attack anyone or be attacked, 11-19 can only attack in their own range, 20-29 can attack up to 35. 30 and up can attack everyone 25 and higher. something like that. But then you need to make up a level system for the accounts as well and we currently dont have that. Although it could go right along with number of cities maybe or roughly that. There are several ways to work that out and of course its all the devs to work out those things not us. But it can be done and balanced it just takes a lot of time and dedication.
New units would be great to mess around with maybe some battle elephants or some other flying units that attack from another unit... who knows no limit to what the imagination can come up with there.
John Erin
Hoplite
Major part of Inno business model revolves around events. Events is the new base game - love it or hate it, it won't change. Its not such a bad thing - event troops are burned out pretty fast, you get some much needed BPs for your slots, so its a good thing overall imo. Even with only a little gold spent you can get a lot of important stuff from the events to boost your growth. Yes more gold = more goodies, but its the same without events.
Bottom line, stop crying about gold and everything that revolves around gold and start playing the game. You can be good and top the charts without gold. You`ll just need more time spent in game. Other can choose to work and spend less time in game, while golding to compensate. Every one has a choice. When you choose this game you either marry it or sim around, or spend gold to be somewhere in the middle, its just how it is and how it almost always have been.
Bottom line, stop crying about gold and everything that revolves around gold and start playing the game. You can be good and top the charts without gold. You`ll just need more time spent in game. Other can choose to work and spend less time in game, while golding to compensate. Every one has a choice. When you choose this game you either marry it or sim around, or spend gold to be somewhere in the middle, its just how it is and how it almost always have been.
Kasto
Peltast
From someone who joined this month, and already quitting, some feedback:
1st) The game is completely pay 2 win. I took down 7 nukes today only for the dude to gold everything again.
2nd) Terrible community
3rd) You are getting tired real quickly of this ****. Georgios was a dead world, no action. Hydra is a disaster. The swapping of alliances and everyone jumping ship is insane.
4th) 20bucks guy was farming BP from his alliance, apparently that's illegal? Not sure, rules are useless since they don't mention specifics.
Clown show/game, prefer to spend my time elsewhere. Bye
1st) The game is completely pay 2 win. I took down 7 nukes today only for the dude to gold everything again.
2nd) Terrible community
3rd) You are getting tired real quickly of this ****. Georgios was a dead world, no action. Hydra is a disaster. The swapping of alliances and everyone jumping ship is insane.
4th) 20bucks guy was farming BP from his alliance, apparently that's illegal? Not sure, rules are useless since they don't mention specifics.
Clown show/game, prefer to spend my time elsewhere. Bye
Annabeth Chase122222
Hoplite
Yeah the game has gone downhill dramatically in the past few years, the introduction of the gold market accelerated the decline. Also the playerbase that remains has a far higher proportion of toxic players than in the past.
VIRTUALSELF
Phrourach
Goldmarket is probably the best addition INNO has given the game the past 5 years lol, it's the free2play players' chance to get huge amount of gold where as on the old system it was hard to get gold unless you already had good connections. (Ofc it requires investing time, but time spent = reward)
Yossarian234
Strategos
Honestly I think Inno should implement a stream with str1ppers to play for about minute n half after every battle you win
destroxxi
Phrourach
Convert the game back to what it was. Remove instant buy units, Enforce rules, remove the gold market it forces players to buy gold, and merge regions. Inno made their money from people paying gold repeatedly to cut the cost of recruiting times on units versus instantly paying a one time charge on them. The only addition to game that was viable was the events they lessened the amount of units you got per token and doubled the cost of buying every time you did by them in most events the downside is yes they added to many events.
I said it back months ago I will say it again Grepo does not have the player base to release a world every 2 months. New players do not have a chance to grow and play the game in any world sides a speed 1 or 2 world. Speed 3 is over within a month with only 2000 players in it with the one premade that uses the most gold. Also I need to talk to baudy or hydna to confirm but I am 90% sure they have been told to no longer perma ban players or can't because of EU law, (the one where you cannot deny service to a paid for product) so there is that also.
Poopstan and I talked in length about this yesterday what inno would need to do to bring a lot of old players back but they refuse to do any of it. Seems they are trying to milk the last cow before closing it down at this point either that or their hands are tied.
I said it back months ago I will say it again Grepo does not have the player base to release a world every 2 months. New players do not have a chance to grow and play the game in any world sides a speed 1 or 2 world. Speed 3 is over within a month with only 2000 players in it with the one premade that uses the most gold. Also I need to talk to baudy or hydna to confirm but I am 90% sure they have been told to no longer perma ban players or can't because of EU law, (the one where you cannot deny service to a paid for product) so there is that also.
Poopstan and I talked in length about this yesterday what inno would need to do to bring a lot of old players back but they refuse to do any of it. Seems they are trying to milk the last cow before closing it down at this point either that or their hands are tied.
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destroxxi
Phrourach
Goldmarket helped killed the game it made it easy for players to trade each other gold and eliminated the need for them to buy gold which in turn lost inno revenue which required them to seek it in other forms ie instant buying and more events.
Before this was put in Inno made majority of there money at the start of the servers still by people paying for gold rather then farming it. How you ask again read previous post people paid for times to be cut on buildings and troops so building a city took longer and costed more because everytime you cut a time you had to pay it double for the next cut.
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Oblivious Death
Hekatontarch
This is just wrong lol
destroxxi
Phrourach
Really players paid for gold at the start and made inno money. Instant buy was not a thing you had to pay to cut times on buildings, troops, and research. You paid probably 20000 gold if not more at the start of a world WITHOUT the gold market or a place to buy resources with gold to get a city up and running via cutting. They made the game into instant gratification because they tried to cater to the newer player base who wants that they want action now versus using strategy. The game's mechanics for building and setting up a city heck even attacking and defending has changed since the 1st and 2nd gen worlds dramatically because it is what the player base wanted and people left because they realized it ruined the game.
Now people are trying to get them to revert things they put in place to bring those said players back after the players are the ones who asked for the changes in the first place.
The inventory and all the spells were not a thing, You had the god's spells and that was it to speed up your troop building. You didn't have quests or the bandit camp to get bp from you have farms that you had to buy with resources and then you used the resources to level the said farms up not BP. You didn't have heroes and all these quest/event spells to boost the hell out of your attacks you again had god spells the game was a lot simpler yes but it worked and it made more profit then if you look at inno's earning calls of grepo then versus now. Hell EN alone made as much as grepo does as a whole now back then as well why? because they had anywhere from 6 to 20 oceans worth of players playing and fighting it out not this 4 ocean core crap new world every 2 months bs they have now.
Last bit from me again I will say that I think Inno has been caught up with the new EU laws in terms of not being allowed to perma ban players anymore because they cannot ban players that pay for a service I could 100% be wrong but hey someone a lot of people know just got banned twice in two different worlds for cheating and is still playing after being caught red-handed.
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MartinusV
Hekatontarch
100% mate. Back in the day even with 100 cap alliances you could be at war with several other similar sized alliances but because it covered 12 oceans you may fight an alliance but never meet the other half because they are fighting a totally different war. Everything back then was around strategy and even more so during those days with no apps/phones/alarms. Imagine this generation going to work for 8-10 hours with no access at all lol
0ZZZ
Phrourach
You are right about some things, but you are wrong about the why.
INO changes game features to preserve and acquire more WHALES.
WHALES are 80% of their revenue.
They dont care much about your 20 to 80 bucks a month you pony up. They care about the guy at game start that blows a few thousand in a day.
The constant power balance being shifted to make the WHALES and their friends happy is why servers are starting to look like ghost towns.
The changes dis empowering the masses is why they leave.
Who on earth plays a game to play the role of food?
INO is simply riding this horse till it dies.
Game death to them means the WHALES leave. They dont give two bent coppers about you or me other than they surely want me gone because I dare to make their WHALES and accompanying leaches uncomfortable.
If you want to hope for some thing? Hope the current manger of grepo gets ran over by an apple cart and his/her replacement hates corruption and can see the potential grepo has for earning much larger sums of money by becoming a well balanced great game again.
This is incorrect. The purchasing of resources with gold greatly increased their WHALE revenue. Its one more thing to blow hundreds of dollars on in just a few min. Further it gave leaches another reason to cozy up to the WHALES making them even more powerful.
The mini games aint ever been about getting more revenue from you. It was about another thing for the WHALES to spend their money on.
I have personally been on skype voice with a whale as they blew over a thousand dollars feeding the Aries mini game in under 20 min.
And if you are thinking the diminishing of flyers tokens in the minni rewards had any thing to do with restoring some game balance for the gold poor? NO! They discovered the WHALES would simply buy more tokens (spend more money) for the same result if they made myth tokens weaker.
I think you need to do some research on the internal motivations of game companies.
Games are not ran by gamers building games for gamers any more.
They are ran by CEOs that want the almighty WHALE.
Want a prime example? See BLIZARD and the new Diablo. Watch a few Youtubes on it.
Their target is the WHALE and billions not subscribers and their millions.
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destroxxi
Phrourach
Your logic of hey lets find whales is a great business model. Blizzard and Diablo Immortal is the worst example lol Blizzard themselves did not make the game another dev team did but they have already stated it's not the pay model they would of gone with and that they would of not done the lootboxes the way the dev team did because it's equal to gambling and limits which markets it can be in. They expected that game to make 500 mil+ as a mobile game in the first month and it only hit 201 mil because of the gems people STOPPED playing because of it.
Any game that wants to survive has to retain a player base not WHALES as you put it.
Golden Horn
Lochagos
Yup, I joined Grepolis when I saw a TV ad in Romania many years ago
but not seen one since
Packages
I would buy some if they were cheaper
- since I retired on my UK pension, they have become unaffordable
(weekly Pension 150 versus Grepolis package 160 just does not work)
I just rely on getting my Gold from the marketplace now
<sob>
but not seen one since
Packages
I would buy some if they were cheaper
- since I retired on my UK pension, they have become unaffordable
(weekly Pension 150 versus Grepolis package 160 just does not work)
I just rely on getting my Gold from the marketplace now
<sob>
0ZZZ
Phrourach
No Blizzard is not the stereotypical example of a "whaling company." You are correct.
They had some serious player trust capitol built up over decades other companies would kill for.
But they are a great example to give if you are trying to communicate how gaming companies see you and what happens when a player base stands up and says NO!
A quick sloppy retelling of the DI story.
Blizzard announced their next big thing would be a shitty p2w phone game instead of the greatly anticipated D4 PC game.
Fans were pissed! So much so one asked "Is this an April fools joke."
Blizzards first response "What? You guys dont own phones?" This is how clueless these fools were.
Fans were concerned about predatory monetization that is the phone game standard.
In between this and actual launch Blizzard reps insisted there will be no P2W options for the best equipment.
Reality at launch... true no P2W equipment. Instead P2W "augments" to the equipment. (Lie by structure)
Blizzards initial response to the angry player base...
Pay "influencers" to claim how great the F2P parts of the game were. (ignore that $100K Whale trouncing through 50 players in PVP please)
"Look at how many people down loaded our game!"
"Look at the millions we have made in the first week!" Implying see we were right people love this game.
Blizzards response after their quick 200 million+ cash grab of burning years of hard earned player trust.
Oh were sorry. It wast us. It was those guys. please keep buying our crap. "Wed never do that to you." <<< there is the Lie.
This was planned all along. I will agree they did not figure the player back lash would be so solid. But the quick cash grab and either
Just pretend this is the new normal if you get away with it or quickly apologize, take the quick money up front promise real changes to appease the angry rabble then deliver as few meaningful changes as they can get away with... That chit was baked right into the cake before they even started Alpha testing.
Ill admit Ive payed a lot less attention to the details of this towards current date. They burnt their bridge with me at the..
"What? You guys dont have phones?"
Better to play "Path of exile" It is what Diablo 3 should have been and the company "gets it." Gamers building games they love for other gamers.
Grepolis has no POE. If you find one let me know.
DIs meta critic score. Just LOLZ
Fans were pissed! So much so one asked "Is this an April fools joke."
Blizzards first response "What? You guys dont own phones?" This is how clueless these fools were.
Fans were concerned about predatory monetization that is the phone game standard.
In between this and actual launch Blizzard reps insisted there will be no P2W options for the best equipment.
Reality at launch... true no P2W equipment. Instead P2W "augments" to the equipment. (Lie by structure)
Blizzards initial response to the angry player base...
Pay "influencers" to claim how great the F2P parts of the game were. (ignore that $100K Whale trouncing through 50 players in PVP please)
"Look at how many people down loaded our game!"
"Look at the millions we have made in the first week!" Implying see we were right people love this game.
Blizzards response after their quick 200 million+ cash grab of burning years of hard earned player trust.
Oh were sorry. It wast us. It was those guys. please keep buying our crap. "Wed never do that to you." <<< there is the Lie.
This was planned all along. I will agree they did not figure the player back lash would be so solid. But the quick cash grab and either
Just pretend this is the new normal if you get away with it or quickly apologize, take the quick money up front promise real changes to appease the angry rabble then deliver as few meaningful changes as they can get away with... That chit was baked right into the cake before they even started Alpha testing.
Ill admit Ive payed a lot less attention to the details of this towards current date. They burnt their bridge with me at the..
"What? You guys dont have phones?"
Better to play "Path of exile" It is what Diablo 3 should have been and the company "gets it." Gamers building games they love for other gamers.
Grepolis has no POE. If you find one let me know.
DIs meta critic score. Just LOLZ
Here. I dug this up for you. This guy does a pretty good job of explaining the whale.
Why INO does not really care about your money.
Your true value is scenery for the whale.
Your true value is some one for him to whop over the head with his big bag of gold so he can feel hes better than you.
My opinion is grepo has over played its hand in favor of the whales and their school of leaches.
Now we have ghost town servers exactly as I predicted.
Instead of admitting they made wrong choices creating this problem and reversing them.
We will get the BS line that this was just the games natural life span and please dont hate us.
Or we might just get if we are really luck yes we made a few mistakes but no one could have possibly know this would be the result.
***EYE ROLL***
I still have hope "super project manager" will fly in with his big red cape and smash the evil ___ clowns running the show here with his big fat "your fired hammer," and undo the damage.
If not id of dumped this game the first time I got a warning for attacking to hard...... in a competitive PVP war game
Im pretty sure thats just my inner 8 year old being stupid though.
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Jeadly
Peltast
Agreed... to the majority above.
I remember when there were no heroes, 4 gods, HUUGE alliances with 150 players (even more of I remember right), when the harbor had to be level 20 for CS large worlds slower speeds, farming villages you could loot and piss off but lay down the law against the rebellion... I played back from 2012-2012 as a high schooler. I came back for the memories because there were no other games like grepolis with the catchy (at the time) interface, the realness and genuine interactions with other players mixed with city building and war. A decade later here I am typing on this damn forum, viewing the same graphics exact same pictures, same interface and a dying game... its kind of disheartening and I wish Inno had chosen this game to technologically develop, conceptually develop, and promote instead of some of their other ones
I remember when there were no heroes, 4 gods, HUUGE alliances with 150 players (even more of I remember right), when the harbor had to be level 20 for CS large worlds slower speeds, farming villages you could loot and piss off but lay down the law against the rebellion... I played back from 2012-2012 as a high schooler. I came back for the memories because there were no other games like grepolis with the catchy (at the time) interface, the realness and genuine interactions with other players mixed with city building and war. A decade later here I am typing on this damn forum, viewing the same graphics exact same pictures, same interface and a dying game... its kind of disheartening and I wish Inno had chosen this game to technologically develop, conceptually develop, and promote instead of some of their other ones