Ask not what your game can do for you, ask what you can do for your game

This post is an attempt to draw some suggestions out of the Neocron runners as to what we could do as a community to enhance the game world for ourselves

Events

I did a little escort event and a treasure hunt event while back in an attempt to create some serverwide fun. It was relatively successfull, but there was definitely room for improvement. Better advertizing of events, getting more people in on the organizing side, organizing the attack etc. etc. I still wonder though why there isn´t more clans/people trying to hold events, big or small. There was a certain amount of ill will to us in 17th for arranging the event too, which I find strange. Why just meet up to be negative?

When I get back from holiday in about 2 weeks I want to get more events going, both organized by myself/clan and other people´s events.

So what I am wondering here is:

1. What kind of events do people want? PvP, Chase events, Treasurehunts, Roleplaying, Tournaments, King of the Hill, Mission type events? I´ll take any suggestions as to cool things we could arrange. Would be nice to have some events that could suit LE´d runners as well.

2. How can we best ensure that people will participate? I have no problem supplying gear/cash for awards, but what other ways can we motivate people to join? Ideally I´d like people to join just for the fun of it, of course still with prizes, and for bragging rights.

3. This could probably have been part of 2., but what times and days would suit most people?

4. How can people most effectively aid eachother in arranging these kinds of things? Surely there must others than me that wants to arrange stuff, and have ideas for things we could all do.

5. What kind of support would we need, and what can we expect, from GMs?


Promoting the game

I´m sure we all would wish for a few more players. But how could we get them here? And how do we keep them?

I´ve helped out quite a few people who have been new, and some that have returned. I´ve tried different tactics, starting a new character with them, showing the the processes to get weapons and get missions. Showed them around to a couple of prospective place to lvl, handed out weapons and gear. Let them explore for themselves. The results have been varied, and I am curious as to what other people have experienced. So how do we make people stick? How can we keep them playing with us?

I do have a couple of ideas for keeping people interested.

1. We could set up a community Teamspeak. The game is greatly enhanced in my opinion when you can talk to people, instead of having to type it all out. I don´t really know enough about teamspeak hosting, but a decent number of channels and some specific ones such as trade/lvling groups/looking for team.

2. Not smothering people who come in game. I´ve seen a few instances of so many people wanting to help, that the sheer amount of advice just drowns the poor noob. Now the positive side is alot of people wanting to help, but it would definitely be better if we leave one or 2 people to guide the new ones first steps.

3. Starting a neutral, friendly clan for supporting new players. Now by this I don´t mean we should get all noobs to take their LEs out. Instead the idea is that people who are interested in showing new people the game make a character and put it in this clan. This way people who want to help will have a clear clantag that shows they are willing to help noobs, we could make some noob weapons and store them, have characters that could support new people when lvl etc.

4. People need to pick up players playing alone. Don´t just watch as they run around doing their own thing, talk to them, involve them, get them into some team activities etc. A neutral clan could also be created for this, a lvling clan people could join, so that people who are turning /30,/40,/50 and aren´t ready for opfighting and such, can come together and lvl/get gear together.



As for promoting the game outside, we should really try to make some kind of promotional website. Techhaven is an excellent site, but how about making some sort of webpage that would include the videos people have made, startup advice, features of the game, fanart etc. And just that. Keep it relatively simple, just with good teasers and honest advice.With links of course to TH and neocron for people who want to delve deeper.

As Always,

Some of our guys are working on someting at the moment, Iron. You'll like it... :3

Fight night would be good.


Weekends are best. More people online.


As for higher pops well all of the suggestions there have been made a dozen times. You just have to do what you're doing and hope they stick around.

Hi again Will.

Thanks for the minimal input. Sadly I didn´t make this post to see who could say "It´s all been done, let´s not try something extra".
I was hoping for somewhat more than that.

some nice ideas here Iron Cock, as per usual.

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Originally Posted by Manuel Moonez

Some of our guys are working on someting at the moment, Iron. You'll like it... :3

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any elaboration here? you mystical son of a b***h you.

bah i need to get back to NC asap.

It will all be clear to you once you come back!

One thing you can add to the list: A decent set of tutorial videos explaining small parts of the game, e.g. construction of items, being a research, how to recycle stuff, ...

Newbie here. Actually not a complete newbie. About ten years back - yes, TEN! - I took a six month sub to Neocron and levelled a few characters. I've forgotten everything in the meantime, except when I saw some Computer Junk on a dead robot, something instinctively told me to hold onto it. Google informed me it was actually quite worthless, but it closely resembled something that wasn't, heh. Strange how the subconscious works and remembers :)

Anyway, what I've found is zoning can be a problem, but it doesn't hang often enough for me to get frustrated. I've also found that when pressing Escape to drop my drone, sometimes I go into a weird third-person mode and I have to exit the game altogether. That's worse than the zoning thing, because my poor defenceless precious drone is on the floor somewhere and I have to log out and log back in to retrieve it. Anything could happen to it in the half minute it takes! Oh, and Navray, I wanted to go to Plaza 2 but you've taken me to the Outzone Storage?

I'm getting off-topic, as an old newbie I can deal with bugs and not knowing what I'm doing half the time. I like the challenge of learning - the guides are out there, I'm not so lazy that I need to be spoonfed, I like exploring - and I have patience enough to endure the few bugs especially as I know this is a labour of love now, rather than a commercial product. But I do find the game quite ugly. That's the biggest drawback and frustration.

I expect I'm talking out my arse here, but would it not be relatively simple to swap out the current environmental textures with more high resolution ones? Start with surfaces, and work your way up to static object textures then dynamic? Naturally, anything that moves requires a lot more work, but for surfaces I would think it could be done quite quickly. Comments from the devs?

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Originally Posted by Exioce

Google informed me it was actually quite worthless, but it closely resembled something that wasn't, heh. Strange how the subconscious works and remembers :)

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It does resemble something very valuable indeed. Not sure if I should remind you yet though ;).

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I've also found that when pressing Escape to drop my drone, sometimes I go into a weird third-person mode and I have to exit the game altogether.

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Press Alt+E to toggle between first and third person.

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Oh, and Navray, I wanted to go to Plaza 2 but you've taken me to the Outzone Storage?

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Navray generally works, but it's broken in a few zones and will take you in the wrong direction. Plaza 3 is an example.
The Plaza station of the subway has two exits, one in P1 and one in P2. The P1 exit brings you out right next to the P1/P2 zone line. So just get off at the Plaza station and you should be able to find your way there.

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I'm getting off-topic, as an old newbie I can deal with bugs and not knowing what I'm doing half the time. I like the challenge of learning - the guides are out there, I'm not so lazy that I need to be spoonfed, I like exploring - and I have patience enough to endure the few bugs especially as I know this is a labour of love now, rather than a commercial product. But I do find the game quite ugly. That's the biggest drawback and frustration.

I expect I'm talking out my arse here, but would it not be relatively simple to swap out the current environmental textures with more high resolution ones? Start with surfaces, and work your way up to static object textures then dynamic? Naturally, anything that moves requires a lot more work, but for surfaces I would think it could be done quite quickly. Comments from the devs?

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Can't remember/find any teasers, but the Devs have said they have an active art team. Textures are one thing, models are another though.

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Originally Posted by Exioce

I've also found that when pressing Escape to drop my drone, sometimes I go into a weird third-person mode and I have to exit the game altogether.

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Are you looking at your character from the side? Try using ALT+E to flip into first person and back again. This can usually correct the issue without needing to restart. We're happy to receive any bug reports of this nature.

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Originally Posted by Exioce

Oh, and Navray, I wanted to go to Plaza 2 but you've taken me to the Outzone Storage?

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Can you let us know the zone you started in, where in that zone you were, which navray option you used and which OZ Storage you ended up in?

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Originally Posted by Exioce

I expect I'm talking out my arse here, but would it not be relatively simple to swap out the current environmental textures with more high resolution ones?

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While in theory it's straight forward, in practice it's not that simple for a number of tech and tool reasons. We are ticking things off the list to get us there though.

Great thread by the way, I See Blue.

EDIT: Damn it Dribble Joy! :p

Thanks, gents. Yes, I was looking at my character from the side and the Alt + E thing will make my game experience that little bit better. I will be sure to note and report whenever the Nav-Ray messes up. It was actually something of a nice little detour I was taken on yesterday, as I eventually found myself outside the main city gates, tagged the Genrep just inside, and went for a short spin in my Jones quad. There was some red Crazy Ivan dude nearby, but that subconscious whispered again and told me I needn't fear nor attack him.

Would love to see some shots or videos of the art team's new textures, Trivaldi, and I very much admire you guys keeping Neocron alive after all this time!

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Originally Posted by Alduin

One thing you can add to the list: A decent set of tutorial videos explaining small parts of the game, e.g. construction of items, being a research, how to recycle stuff, ...

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Actually I was planning on doing something like this. It's just finding the time. I could probably do it some time in April, and I love making videos.

I'm sure members of the community could help me :)

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Originally Posted by Hell-demon

I'm sure members of the community could help me :)

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I´d be more than happy to help out making some videos, I´m sure I could convince a few guys in clan to contribute too.

So what should we be doing them on? Off the top of my head I´m thinking:

1. Character Creation, and the first steps into Neocron, moving your stuff into quickslots, the GR, Navray etc

2. Researching and constructing. Could be done as separate ones I guess, but researching would seem quite simplistic, just getting blueprints and IDíng rares.

3. Recycling and salvaging, how to make ammo, how to merge armorparts and weaponparts, how to create items from recycling

4. Showcasing some weapon types, pistol/rifles/drones/cannons/PSI, how to use AoE and single target weapons

5. Tours of the different Cities, showing where to get weapons and gear, some usefull GRs.

6. Could also do a wasteland tour, with some speeded up footage/editing to cut the time it would take.

7. Some prime lvling spots and how to get there.

8. Vehicles, how to get them and how to use them.

Suggestions 1 through to 4 and suggestion 8 get my vote.

Doing a tour of the wastelands and the popular levelling spots is a bad idea in my mind as you take away the fun of exploring. Possibly a montage (because even Rocky had a montage) of Regants, Chaos Caves, Swamp Caves, Graves, MC5 even as a rapid fire sort of thing might work to give people a teaser of what they can expect to see later on. But showing them the game as a movie without their interaction and experiencing it all slow time might put people off a little.

Immersing people in the world is what draws them in, showing them it might not acheive that same effect however.

The one thing you didnt mention however is Op fighting. There needs to be a video about pvp. Advertising this should definitely be in there somewhere. Even if it is just a short (a minute long?) ending to the tutorial videos. Like hey this is how you start the game blah blah and then this is what you have to look forward to at end game - boom, whoosh, smash etc. :)

Possibly a quick video on rare parts might be good - to go with the pvp stuff, or at least an explanation on them would be needed.

I think there will be a natural yearning to explore the world when people see the size of it. If there is to be a "tour" of the city so to speak then sticking to NC would be good. Hinting at a second bombed out city would wet some appetites hopefully and then contrasting the city with a shot of the map (and its various colours turned on indicating clan wars) would be good.

I remember thinking "fuck" when I pulled my map out of my boxed set all those years ago and saw all of those different sectors to explore. I dont think anyone needs any encouragement with that.

Aye, I can see where you are coming from, leave something to be explored.

Maybe in a teaser form, showing off some of the bigger and meaner mobs, I mean end game hunting and farming would be better. Not much, just showing a group of warbots/copbots attacking, grims spawning maulers, the clusters of hovers.
Both Solo and group hunting

As for opfighting, yeah, there probably should be some, but there are people with better material than me, I´ve been away for ages and have just set up the recording programs. I´ll ask around and see what kind of material I can gather. Gotta keep it as neutral as possible though, I don´t want it to be clan specific, since that generally makes people more negative. Maybe arranging some mock opfights, some fights in PP, possibly a wasteland attack, showing off Neofrag.

I´d also like to showcase teaming in some form, maybe in one of the tutorials. Showing how it´s done etc. Could do it the first steps into neocron I guess.

One possibility is doing the fighting and the end game hunting video as one, sort of showing bits of the end game people can expect.

About the rares, I was thinking of showing that in the research/construct demo. First showing normal constructing and researching, and then showing the process from unidentified tech part to full weapon.

Nice contribution Will