by Riurik » Tue Dec 06, 2016 2:24 pm
OK so let’s talk realistically:
a) We made a philosophical decision to promote group play over solo play. I am still in contact with many of the older players, and this is the number 1 reason people won’t come back and new people don’t join. Period. I’m back right now, at some point I will leave, and this will be the reason why. Unless you encourage soloing, you will never grow the base. Make certain areas better solo areas, other better group areas.
b) The trend seems to have been to flatten out differentiation between classo, bring it back. Make prime skills stronger, make prime only spells and skills stronger.
c) Bring back some of the danger. That may sound conterintuitive, but being killed by the sundew and the man on the north road are part of the game.
d) The game does not stand alone, the game and the website/s are a combined experience, and frankly the website needs a lot of work. The EQ List looks like it was designed by a developer, the functionality is very cool but highly arcane and unusable. The wiki is not really a wiki in that none updates it. Try to find the ingredients for any of the thief spells, or the potions easily.
Registration on the site is a nightmare. It has tighter registration security than a bank website. Unless you are an Avatar you have no idea what spells are Avatar spells but that is the Gotcha, so the message is we don’t want new players registering comment. In addition, the mechanism calls you for to drag the spells, but lowlighted text infers you have to leave the correct spells on the left, not drag them to the right. Again, an unusable UI.
If you lose your password you have the remember both your username (that you may have registered years ago,) and password, so it tells you the username password combo is not valid, but if you try register a user with that email it tells you it is in use. The new registration feature never sent an email confirmation, so I had to dig back through my secondary email for the username.
There is no mobile website and most users want a mobile website. Trying to navigate the website on a phone just plain sucks.
So, numbers 1 and 2, sort out the website and create a mobile version. Yes I know of players we have lost because of this.
e) Remove the algorithms that penalize you for killing the same areas over until you hit 1x40. Again if I want to solo play levelling up below 40 is hard.
f) Make tri tokens able to roll better stats, guarantee a range, cap the top higher than they are now with some chance of going over the range, not as high as hexes. Believe or not lots of people like rolling for stats, triangular tokens are useless now as anything other than a safety net.
g) Simplify the game structure, it is simply confusing. If you are going to have a newbie graveyard, just have them come back with all their EQ and go up to go to the gate they died on, the whole grab your corpse and follow the beckoning figure thing is simply annoying.