Growing concern for server population

[Agent L]

Well, team is withholding the mail-a-vet campaign, probably waiting till people who are already here will quit because of low pop.
And then ofc people from mail campaign will come, see the low pop and then quit too.

Typical scenario for anyone not willing to capitalize the success achieved.

[Loopback]

Fair point as well. The only people advertising the game is us the community, either by telling our mates, tweeting and err probably a few other things.

I'm sure a few of us around here have contacts to on-line games sites and magazines, wonder if that's worth giving them a shout. Although we need re-balancing first.

They could always do what Anarchy Online did (still does)... promise a new graphics engine for 8 straight years, and keep people interested with 1 or 2 photoshopped pics while saying it's still being worked on. LOL!

[Ivan Eres]

As soon as Sparta hits us they will all be back.

[RogerRamjet]

Well, team is withholding the mail-a-vet campaign, probably waiting till people who are already here will quit because of low pop.
And then ofc people from mail campaign will come, see the low pop and then quit too.

Typical scenario for anyone not willing to capitalize the success achieved.

NC doesn't need a huge pop though. Towards the end of NC1 Uranus might have had say 100 people active most days, maybe a bit more, but the OP and pvp scene was still very active. We just need a game that works.

I do think an email should have been sent, so people could have atleast witnessed and been involved with the progress the Devs are making.

[Ivan Eres]

It's been said that this will be done when a substantial milestone was reached.

I assume that's gonna be the balancing.

[Agent L]

It's been said that this will be done when a substantial milestone was reached.

Yes, this is called "feature creep" and has killed many projects far bigger and better founded than Neocron.
Just let me remind you that feature named "Doy addon" was delayed several years because of endless postponing for the "next big thing".

People are the heart of this game, not the engine. The game never was balanced, we just learned to work around the issues.

Even if there is a big thing coming, it's counterproductive to call people into a new game they don't know. They need to be called into the old game they love. And eventually THEN throw the new thing at them.

[Ivan Eres]

[...]Even if there is a big thing coming, it's counterproductive to call people into a new game they don't know. They need to be called into the old game they love. And eventually THEN throw the new thing at them.

The balancing is one thing, bro.

Stabilizing the new server infrastructure at the new data center is another.

I think our Volunteers Team would also rather call out tomorrow than in 3 months if they could.

But if it's done wrong it's gonna fuck up more than it will help. It's my belief that if people come back to an unbalanced and instable NC it will hurt a lot more in the long run.

[Dropout]

The balancing is one thing, bro.

Stabilizing the new server infrastructure at the new data center is another.

I think our Volunteers Team would also rather call out tomorrow than in 3 months if they could.

But if it's done wrong it's gonna fuck up more than it will help. It's my belief that if people come back to an unbalanced and instable NC it will hurt a lot more in the long run.

I definitely agree with this. It is only logical that they want to wait before sending out mails.

[Kanedax]

I stopped playing often for one simple reason. I love op fighting; but with my current schedule at work and the timezone (-5:00 GMT) i live in I don't really have the opportunity to do that. The non op PvP is still just zone whoring and the PvE is a boring and glitchy as ever.

With all that being said, I think the dev team has made pretty solid progress, my lack of interest can be attributed to less than optimal circumstances.

[Toast]

Help me get NC running on my new windows 8 computer and I'll come back to play
I have 4 almost capped characters on Titan and I'll be a little pissed if a new server launches and I still cant play.

[Ziu]

You´ve got a PM Toast.

[Trivaldi]

Let me see if I can give you guys some responses. Zoltan or someone else might slap me for this but we'll see...

Lack of information on what is happening, plain and simple. No communication, the same as last time around. This is one of the reasons most of the people I know, have now stopped playing, including myself somewhat.

It saddens me to see this, communication was always something that got to me 'back in the day' on the team or not. I had hoped we had established a pretty good basis for communication through Twitter, Facebook and updates on the forum. Personally I have pushed to ensure we put as much information as we can into the community, I always try to wade into issues on the forum where I can.

Is there a specific area of comms which is suffering? I know the Development Update is MIA for the month of May but I am currently (word is open!) working on a combined update for May and June to get you guys up to speed. I know we have had issues related to policy and rules, if there is information missing regarding those specific issues please PM me your thoughts and concerns (let's not bring those up here, let's not go off topic). It could quite simply be a case of it slipping someones mind, real life has been flogging me hard for the last couple of months so if I've personally let something slip my radar, I can only offer a sincere apology.

Communication is important to me and to us, if there is another way we can communicate or a way we can improve how we currently communicate, I am all ears via private message.

Yes and the current server population seems stable since two month. That the population doesn't grow up could be a problem of missed advertising (which is only possible by the players through erm..buzz marketing(?))

I think this is the reason why things have quieted down a little, people are waiting for Sparta to go live, as they're tired of stale issues.

The game just needs to start progressing again. Lots of players waiting in the wings.

Myself and others have simply quit due to boredom. You can only replay the exact same game over and over so many times.

The above points are all closely related, let's see if this can address them.

Other than recent issues with down time, migration and server performance population had leveled out as expected. We knew that not everyone who came back for the Titan launch would stay in game long term. As correctly stated above there is a few reasons for that. Although we've significantly improved the stability of the client and fixed many, many long term bugs and exploits the core experience of the game is relatively unchanged since the F6 patch. While this was a big shake up even that was more a return to a previous status quo than a significant leap forward in things to do. We need to add more things to do. That's my department and I am more than aware I need to deliver more. There is stuff in development but this takes time, a lot of time.

As I said in my interview with NeoCast there is tonnes of potential in the Neocron game world and I have hundreds of ideas floating around in my head to enrich the experience. Putting them into scripts, npcs, missions and tangible in game experiences is the hard part.

Balance is another big part of that puzzle, we need to make the game more enjoyable from a PvP perspective too which we hope to deliver with the balancing project. There will be more information on that in the May/June Dev Update.

Well, team is withholding the mail-a-vet campaign, probably waiting till people who are already here will quit because of low pop.
And then ofc people from mail campaign will come, see the low pop and then quit too.

Typical scenario for anyone not willing to capitalize the success achieved.

It's been said that this will be done when a substantial milestone was reached.

I assume that's gonna be the balancing.

The balancing is one thing, bro.

Stabilizing the new server infrastructure at the new data center is another.

I think our Volunteers Team would also rather call out tomorrow than in 3 months if they could.

But if it's done wrong it's gonna fuck up more than it will help. It's my belief that if people come back to an unbalanced and instable NC it will hurt a lot more in the long run.

We've talked about this before. We do have the means to contact a large number of past players and we want to do that sooner rather than later. However we wanted to do two things before we do that. 1) Improve client stability and remove a lot of old, experience breaking bugs. 2) Fix the glaring issues with balance and the broken classes in game with a significant balancing effort.

We've done a lot of work to get close to the first one and work is underway to address the second. Again, this takes a lot of time to achieve. A clear indicator that the game is not ready for such a call to action is our Facebook page. We have close to 800 folks on there who have chosen to take a peak at the evolution of Neocron, if we were in a position to shout about how everyone needs to come back and play, far more of those 800 folks would be in game right now.

We have been watching the stats very closely and monitored changes in population. Our aim is always to ensure people still enjoy the game we all love. We have a lot of work to do.

I'm aware this is quite a candid response but I do hope it eases your concerns.

All the best,
Triv

[William Antrim]

800 people in game would be awesome tbh. So basically everyone just needs to be more patient I guess from Triv's post.

Personally I think the May/June Dev update coming out soonish would quell a lot of our issues with frustration at lack of perceived progress. I think everyone here knows that progress is a lumbering beast but the perception of it is something that frustrates all of us. We just do not know what is going on behind the scenes. As much as we do not have the right to bitch and moan because we are NOT paying customers at the same time I think we DO have a right to ask questions as we are still technically stakeholders in this game. By virtue of the fact that we own accounts and do our best to support the game where we can I think we need to see some form of update as and when that is possible.

I am all for putting down the pitchforks and torches personally but a timely dev update would really go down a treat right now.

[Kane Gregory]

Thanks for your detailed answer Triv.

I think there was much more news and information as in the time of KK BUT
I miss the why and wherefore!

As example the server move, why was the server move important and what does you
hope/think do it for you?


Why do u not furnish detailed information to the community (really detailed)?

I will not denounce you. I only want to say: Maybe you worked since years as professionals in
the IT but this is a new projects with problems u maybe never come in contact with and we as community
know that you sacrifies your free time (whole respect for that).

As you said (somewhere) it's Neocron² - Community Edition. So why you doesn't tells the community the
details...the why and wherefores?

Thanks K.G.

PS: Maybe you don't tell us an ETA but why not give us a fixed interval of information (every 3-6hours?) I raped my f5-button really hard in the past ;-)

[nabbl]

Well... I don't experience lack of communication.
However why could a Server-Move be more important than developing the game further?

There could be tons of problems regarding the servers. From financial problems up to stability problems it could be anything.

They shouldn't talk "loud" about such things.