Moving Forward with Gangs

[Supaman771]

Originally Posted by Zelot

So when the whole point of the staff team currently is to keep players playing and bring back old ones, you think doing something that's a direct 180 of what players want and decreasing the amount of Graal#s that are playing would bring back older players?
The game would die off even faster.

If it preserves and improve the server in the long run; yes.

Originally Posted by Scoper

I'd be willing to give up my stuff for this. It sounds way more fun than idling all day.

Agreed. It's not even all your stuff it's just a new approach to guns/the economy. People would only lose their weapons, and they could be given credit-points toward unlocking new gun-sets.

I was thinking it could be something like... 10 default sets. Then 5 you can unlock with pk points, 5 you can unlock with money, 2-3 EC sets, an MVP set, maybe even achievement sets.

More and more can be added, but they would all be balanced sets. And you could sell 'custom sets' for gelats... where people can choose 1 for each slot based on all the sets they have unlocked; to make a ultimate PK or Sparring set.

[Demisis_P2P]

Originally Posted by swift

This is to provide something for new/newer players, give them hope into earning a better weapon without having to dig / mine / pick flowers for 3 weeks straight.

Sounds like you've identified a problem and are creating a complicated system to work around it instead of addressing it directly.

Rogue's idea is good, but I think it's a bit too far in the one direction, and would remove every other aspect of the server apart from PKing (not necessarily a bad thing IMO). Without PKing itself being more interesting I can't see that providing a sustained boost though.

[Inari]

So it sounds like the issue is that moneymaking is just tedious instead of being in of itself a fun activity?

[shrimps]

Yes money making is very tedious.

[Inari]

But... what does that have to do with gangs?

[Fiberwyre_P2P]

Originally Posted by Inari

But... what does that have to do with gangs?

It's connected with gangs in that you have to have money to buy guns to compete with other people who have money and guns, which is basically the entirety of gang members.

On topic:
Grinding 3 missions a day for over a month to get a rose, and then getting nothing when you fail? That better be some score should you succeed.
Especially taking into account the exchange rate for MVP coins (which is supposedly going to be "high") and the value of MVP weapons.

[Venom_Fish]

I like the idea, but do not think it is going to have much of an impact with respect to the gang problem right now. The motivation behind it seems to be from a very narrow analysis of the era, or even graal playerbase problem.

In concurrence with Demisis, Era would only move beyond barely surviving by more or less turning into a pick-up shooter. If one recalls the server Sands of Glory, I think something of that nature is in want.

The old playerbase simply does not have the time, or interest to hang around era all day, and the new playerbase simply do not care for what the old playerbase cares for. However, this approach seems to be trying to service both groups by granting incentives for performances that neither appease the new playerbase sufficiently, nor the old playerbase, who for all intentions purposes, cannot be appeased with anything requiring them to over invest in Era.

To appease both parties sufficiently, new playerbase [gaining items and being in the thick of things], and old playerbase [keeping items, being in thick of things, without overcommitting] I think a pick-up shooter is best. In such a setting, you can sort of set the basis for guns to be used, without necessarily requiring labor, and also allow players to venture beyond on a basis of enjoyable activity, rather than tedious labor.

Remember: Era is sufficiently safe from the issue that SoG or Zone faced because, honestly, Era's most attractive feature is built-in to it. The characters, their speeds, the combination of weapons, the competitiveness in pk, etc. In totality, these are not things you necessarily need to change when designing a pick-up shooter scenario. Indeed, gang and other events prove this. The thing to be concerned about though is the gang aspect, since that has traditionally played a large role.

And so, the task here is really to figure out how to design a pick-up shooter while maintaining the gang-like elements that contributed to Era's proliferation for so long.
The solution? Who knows.

Perhaps having a pick-up shooter where people can make gangs/clans and while you can join in on non-gang/clans portions, there can also be gangs/clan portions which are separate, and these gangs/clans are ranked? But also, individuals are ranked separately. The ranking can specifically deal with wins v. losses, win to loss ratio, kills, deaths, etc.?

I don't know, just a shot in the dark. That's my two cents. Forgive the quick brushing over of points, if anyone asks about a specific point, I can elaborate. I did not feel the need just in case there is a wholesale resistance to it.

[Zelot]

@Wil

I was just talking to swift about SoG, that server brings back so many fun memories.

[Godzilla]

I feel like the only way to address our player-base problem is to take a stab in the dark with the ability to actually obtain items and wealth within the game.

With the way Era is now, you're essentially throwing a puppy into a dog fight and expecting it to survive.

I met a kid with 250 hours last night "Bandoo", within his 250 hours he managed to work himself up to 70k, a Gatling Gun and a few random items he has gotten from the mystery coin box from questing.

Essentially, he has nothing and can't defend himself against those who do.

I feel like the pay rate of jobs need to go up by 300% at the least.

I think once the game becomes more noob-friendly with pick up to play and how easy it is to obtain weapons of value through a solid days work will bring in new players and will encourage people to invite friends to play.

Now imagine this; You start a new game, within a day of playing you already have a gun that you see multiple people use, you are able to work and get a lot of money for a decent time exchange and you're also having fun; would you not want to continue to play?

Now look at Era.

I watch people from iEra log on and log off within 5 minutes of me showing them where to dig, pick flowers, mine, pick trash almost all of the ways to make money. The game isn't noob-friendly and without it being noob-friendly the only real good you're going to do with this gang system is let the 50 players who already play and compete in gangs have something else to do, which will only die out eventually for those remaining players.

This idea will create a lot of change, meaning; Guns worth $700,000+ in store will no longer be purchasable from store for cash, only MVP/EC coins.

and a lot of other brainstorming will have to be done for the idea to even become a viable idea but I feel like it's the change we need to take in order to have any hope of stealing away some of the iEra kids and interesting any other new ones we can get to log on.

[Supaman771]

Originally Posted by Godzilla

I feel like the pay rate of jobs need to go up by 300% at the least.

This seemed like the core of your suggestion focused on helping newbies; so I will focus on this.
I feel a better approach would be to just halve/quarter the prices of items, and here's why.

There's already too much money in the economy. So much so that there is hundreds of millions 'unspent' and sitting in banks of the players who already have these items (which is why I frequently say money is worthless). The economy is already monitored and flushing more cash into it wouldn't solve anything; however making the items easier/cheaper to obtain would help those players in the same fashion without inflating the server more-so.

This is the problem past regimes had; they would buff jobs and add kill-money and such which just inflates the players who already have the items (which is why $ goes up, and not down). But they never really changed the scope of it; new players still see the gun they want and go 'wow this costs a million dollars' before they ever have a chance to master the ways of making money (bouquet levels, mining levels, good pker, etc.)

Overall, increasing the money would benefit us more than them. The oldbie with 100 mining who knows the best cave and has worker potions would make the max money 300% faster; while the newb would make exponentially less 300% faster.

[Godzilla]

The whole idea is based off of the influx of players that could potentially join us, although I like the idea of halving gun prices I feel like a money increase for jobs would still be needed.

Now, heres how I see it; the economy is already in the **** and will always be since there won't be a reset, so why don't we say **** the economy, **** trying to make it better and start saying; hey new fella, heres a gun, heres a shovel, heres 5 hours of your life to get a Desert Raven then you can learn to play and understand later down the track just how amazing of a time you started to play.

You're right about the older players who will have better outcome of increasing pay etc but who the **** cares? I don't, I don't think Wil would, I don't think any of the top-tier players or even mid tier or ANYONE would care that you could make ex amount of money per hour because simply put; more players > no players.

[Supaman771]

Originally Posted by Godzilla

who the **** cares?

If this is the mindset Era takes then why not just Zone it up like my idea or Wil's idea where we make it pick-up and play from the beginning; and add extras you can get as you progress.

I thought this wasn't going to be the stance of Era, given the response to our ideas being less than stellar.

[Tim_Rocks]

I agree with the cat in the hat.

[swift]

Originally Posted by Tim_Rocks

I agree with the cat in the hat.

Second.


Like Tim told me: we could make Era more arcade style to where you can hop right into the action, earn rewards / upgrades and the next day they're gone and you start over.

What if events had pre-set guns you could use? Just so new players can actually win events to earn the better items. Ishmael already released a few decent guns in the EC shop and I think that's the right idea.

If we had some free hand out guns for anyone to use in events that were mid-tier at least, they'd have a chance or at least would log on to participate in Events. These guns would obviously only be usable in events.

We also took away free gang guns for anyone who joins a gang which is kind of a disadvantage for the new players, especially since we don't have Era Police anymore.

[Zongui]

gang points have been up the last two weeks. the top gang is close to 2k or over it now (haven't checked yet). second place is over 1k too i think. gang activity has been high it seems. new stuff always draws a lot of people though. we will see how long this can last.